CHAPTER XXXVI
Art in the Age of Holbein
1517–64

I. ART, THE REFORMATION, AND THE RENAISSANCE

ART had to suffer from the Reformation, if only because Protestantism believed in the Ten Commandments. Had not the Lord God said, “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth”? (Exodus 20:4) How was representative art possible after that sweeping prohibition? The Jews had obeyed, and had passed by art. The Moslems had almost obeyed, had kept their art decorative, largely abstract, often representing things, rarely persons, never God. Protestantism, rediscovering the Old Testament, followed the Semitic line. Catholicism, whose Greco-Roman heritage had overshadowed its Judaic origin, had more and more ignored the veto: Gothic sculpture had fashioned saints and gods in stone; Italian painting had pictured the Bible story, and the Renaissance had quite forgotten the Second Commandment in a blooming riot of representative art. Perhaps that old interdict had been meant to ban representation for magical ends; and the patrons of art, in Renaissance Italy, had the good sense to override a primitive and now meaningless taboo.

The Church, greatest patron of all, had employed the arts to form the letterless in the dogmas and legends of the faith. To the ecclesiastical statesman who felt that myths were vital to morality, this use of art seemed reasonable. But when the myths, like purgatory, were manipulated to finance the extravagances and abuses of the Church, reformers forgivably rebelled against the painting and sculpture that inculcated the myths. In this matter Luther was moderate, even if he had to revise the Commandments. “I do not hold that the Gospel should destroy all the arts, as certain superstitious folk believe. On the contrary, I would fain see all arts .... serving Him Who hath created them and given them to us. The law of Moses forbade only the image of God.”¹ In 1526 he called upon his adherents to “assail the... idolaters of the Roman Antichrist by means of painting.”² Even Calvin, whose followers were the most enthusiastic iconoclasts, gave a limited approval to images. “I am not so scrupulous as to judge that no images should be endured... but seeing that the art of painting and carving .... cometh from God, I require that the practice of art should be kept pure and lawful. Therefore men should not paint nor carve anything but such as can be seen with the eye.”³ Reformers less human than Luther, less cautious than Calvin, preferred to outlaw religious painting and sculpture altogether, and to clear their churches of all ornament; “truth” banished beauty as an infidel. In England, Scotland, Switzerland, and northern Germany the destruction was wholesale and indiscriminate; in France the Huguenots melted down the reliquaries, shrines, and other vessels found in the churches that came into their power. We should have to recapture the ardor of men risking their lives to reform religion before we could understand the angry passion that in moments of victory destroyed the images that had contributed to their subjection. The demolition was brutal and barbarous, but the guilt of it must be shared by the institution that had for centuries obstructed its own reform.

Gothic art ended in this period, but the Reformation was only one cause of its demise. The reaction against the medieval Church brought with it a distaste for the styles of architecture and ornament long associated with her. And yet Gothic was dying even before Luther spoke. It ailed in Catholic France as well as in rebellious Germany and England; it was consumed in its own flamboyance. And the Renaissance, as well as the Reformation, was fatal to Gothic. For the Renaissance came from Italy, which had never loved Gothic and had travestied it even in adopting it; and the Renaissance spread chiefly among educated people whose polite skepticism could not understand the enthusiastic faith of crusading and Gothic days. As the Reformation progressed, the Church herself, which had found in Gothic architecture her supreme artistic expression, was too impoverished by the loss of Britain, Germany, and Scandinavia, and the inroads made upon her revenues by Catholic kings, to finance art as lavishly as before, or to determine taste and style. Day by day a secularizing, paganizing Renaissance asserted its classical predilections over the sacred traditions of medieval faith and form. Men impiously reached over pious and fearful centuries to grasp again the earthloving, pleasure-loving passions of antiquity. War was declared against Gothic as the art of the barbarians who had destroyed Imperial Rome. The conquered Romans came back to life, rebuilt their temples, exhumed the statues of their gods, and bade first Italy, then France and England to resume the art that had embodied the glory of Greece and the grandeur of Rome. The Renaissance conquered Gothic, and in France it conquered the Reformation.

II. THE ART OF THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE

1. “A Malady of Building”

In French ecclesiastical architecture Gothic fought successfully for a reprieve. Some old cathedrals added fresh elements, necessarily Gothic; so Caen’s St.-Pierre completed its famous choir; Beauvais built its south transept; and Gothic made almost its expiring effort when Jean Vast raised above that transept crossing a spire 500 feet high (1553). When, on Ascension Day, 1573, that towering audacity collapsed into the ruined choir, the disaster symbolized the end of the noblest style in architectural history.

Lesser Gothic splendors rose in this period at Pontoise, Coutances, and a dozen other cities of France. In Paris, where every glance reveals some marvel from a believing past, two handsome Gothic churches took form: St.-Étienne-du-Mont (1492–1626) and St.-Eustache (1532–1654). But Renaissance features stole into them: in St.-Étienne the magnificent stone screen overarching the choir; in St.-Eustache the compound pilasters and quasi-Corinthian capitals.

The replacement of ecclesiastical Gothic with secular Renaissance architecture reflected the taste of Francis I, and the humanistic emphasis on terrestrial pleasure rather than celestial hope. All the economic fruition, the aristocratic patronage, the pagan hedonism, that had fed the fires of art in Renaissance Italy now nourished the devotion of architects, painters, sculptors, potters, and goldsmiths in France. Italian artists were brought in to mingle their skills and decorative motives with surviving Gothic forms. Not only in Paris, but at Fontainebleau, Moulins, Tours, Bourges, Angers, Lyons, Dijon, Avignon, and Aix-en-Provence the brilliance of Italian design, the realism of Flemish painting, and the taste and bisexual grace of the French aristocracy combined to produce in France an art that challenged and inherited the Italian supremacy.

At the head of the movement was a king who loved art with abandon and yet with discrimination. The lighthearted, smiling spirit of Francis I wrote itself into the architecture of the reign. Osez! he told his artists—“Dare!”⁴—and he let them experiment as even Italy had not allowed. He recognized the Flemish power in portraiture, kept Jean Clouet as his court painter, commissioned portraits of himself and his entourage by Joos van Cleve. But in all the arts of refinement and decoration it was Italy that inspired him. After his victory at Marignano (1515) he visited Milan, Pavia, Bologna, and other Italian cities, and enviously studied their architecture, painting, and minor arts. Cellini quotes him as saying: “I well remember to have inspected all the best works, and by the greatest masters, of all Italy”;⁵ probably the exaggeration is the ebullient Cellini’s. Vasari notes in a dozen instances the purchase of Italian art by Francis I through agents in Rome, Florence, Venice, Milan. Through these efforts Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, Michelangelo’s Leda, Bronzino’s Venus and Cupid, Titian’s Magdalen, and a thousand vases, medals, drawings, statuettes, paintings, and tapestries crossed the Alps to end their travels in the Louvre.

The enthusiastic monarch, if he could have had his way, would have imported all the best artists of Italy. Money was to be lavished temptingly. “I will choke you with gold,” he promised Cellini. Benvenuto came, and stayed intermittently (1541–45), long enough to confirm French goldsmithry in a tradition of exquisite design and technique. Domenico Bernabei “Boccadoro” had come to France under Charles VIII; Francis employed him to design a new Hôtel de Ville for Paris (1532); nearly a century passed before it was finished; the Commune of 1871 burned it down; it was rebuilt to Boccadoro’s plan. Leonardo came in his old age (1516); all the world of French art and pedigree worshiped him, but we know of no work done by him in France. Andrea del Sarto came (1518), and soon fled. Giovanni Battista “II Rosso” was lured from Florence (1530), and stayed in France till his suicide. Giulio Romano received urgent invitations, but was charmed by Mantua; however, he sent his most brilliant assistant, Francesco Primaticcio (1532). Francesco Pellegrino came, and Giacomo da Vignola, and Niccolo dell’Abbate, and Sebastiano Serlio, and perhaps a dozen more. At the same time French artists were encouraged to go to Italy and study the palaces of Florence, Ferrara, and Milan, and the new St. Peter’s rising in Rome. Not since the conquest of ancient Rome by Greek art and thought had there been so rich a transfusion of cultural blood.

Native and Flemish artists resented the Italian seduction; and for half a century (1498–1545) the history of French architecture was a royal battle between a Gothic style affectionately rooted in the soil, and Italian modes seeping into France in the wake of conquered conquerors. The struggle pictured itself in stone in the châteaux of the Loire. There Gothic still had the upper hand, and Gallic master-masons dominated the design: a feudal castle within a protective moat, with fortresslike towers rising at the corners in majestic verticality; spacious mullioned windows to invite the sun, and sloping roofs to shed the snow, and dormer windows peering out like monocles from the roofs. But the Italian invaders were allowed to depress the pointed arch back into the older rounded form; to arrange the façades in tiers of rectangular windows buttressed with pilasters and crowned with pediments; and to decorate the interiors with classic columns, capitals, friezes, moldings, roundels, arabesques, and sculptured cornucopias of plants, flowers, fruits animals, imperial busts, and mythical divinities. Theoretically the two styles, Gothic and classical, were incongruous; their fusion by French discrimination and taste into a harmonious beauty shared in making France the Hellas of the modern world.

A fever of building—une maladie de batir, a wondering general called it⁶—now seized upon France, or Francis. To the old château at Blois he added (1515–19) for Queen Claude a north wing whose architect was a Frenchman, Jacques Sourdeau, but whose style was quite Renaissance. Finding it inconvenient to build a stairway within the addition, Sourdeau designed one of the architectural cynosures of the age—an external spiral staircase rising in an octagonal tower through three stages to an elegant gallery projecting from the roof, each stage richly adorned with a sculptured balcony.

After the death of his burdened Queen, Francis turned his architectural passion to Chambord—three miles south of the Loire, ten northeast of Blois. There the dukes of Orléans had built a hunting lodge; Francis replaced this (1526–44) with a predominantly Gothic chateau, so vast—with its 440 rooms, and stables for 1,200 horses—that it required the labor of 1,800 workmen through twelve years. Its French designers made the north façade fascinating but confused with a maze of towers, “lanterns,” pinnacles, and sculptural ornament; and they distinguished the interior with a spiral staircase of great splendor, unique for a double passage that divided ascent from descent. Francis favored Chambord as a happy hunting ground; here his court loved to gather with all its trappings; and here he spent the declining years of his life. Most of the interior ornament was destroyed by revolutionists in 1793, in belated revenge on royal extravagance. Another Francis-can palace—the château of Madrid in the Bois de Boulogne, was adorned with a majolica façade by Girolamo della Robbia, and was completely demolished in the Revolution.

The extravagance was not confined to the King. Many of his aides treated themselves to palaces that still seem like importations from some fairy realm. One of the most perfect is Azay-le-Rideau, on an island in the Indre; Gilles Berthelot, who built it (1521), was not for nothing treasurer of France. Thomas Bohier, receiver-general of taxes in Normandy, built Chenonceaux (1513 f.); Jean Cottereau, finance minister, rebuilt the chateau of Maintenon; Guillaume de Montmorency raised a lordly palace at Chantilly (1530)—another casualty of the Revolution. His son Anne de Montmorency, Constable of France, erected the chateau of Ecouen (1531–40) near Saint-Denis. The chateau of Villandry was restored by Jean le Breton, secretary of state; Ussé was completed by Charles d’Espinay. Add to these the hôtels or palaces of Valençay, of Semblançay at Tours, of Escoville at Caen, of Bernuys at Toulouse, of Lallemont at Bourges, of Bourg-theroulde at Rouen, and a hundred others, all products of this reckless reign, and we may judge the prosperity of the lords and the poverty of the people.

Feeling inadequately housed, Francis decided to rebuild the chateau that Louis VII and Louis IX had erected at Fontainebleau, for this, said Cellini, was the spot In his kingdom that the King loved best.” The donjon and the chapel were restored, the rest was torn down; and on the site Gilles de Breton and Pierre Chambiges raised in Renaissance style a congeries of palaces connected by a graceful Galerie de François Premier. The exterior was not attractive; perhaps the King, like the merchant princes of Florence, thought a pretentious façade, so near the city, might draw an evil eye from the populace. He kept his esthetic flair for the interior; and there he relied upon Italians raised in the decorative tradition of Raphael and Giulio Romano.

For ten years (1531–41) II Rosso—so named from his ruddy face—worked on the adornment of the Gallery of Francis I. Vasari describes the artist, then thirty-seven, as a man “of fine presence, grave and gracious speech, an accomplished musician, a well-versed philosopher,” and “an excellent architect” as well as a sculptor and painter;⁷ such were the undivided men of that expansive age. Rosso arranged the walls into fifteen panels, each adorned in High Renaissance style: a base of carved and inlaid walnut wainscoting; a fresco of scenes from classical mythology or history; a rich surrounding of stucco decorations in statuary, shells, weapons, medallions, animal or human figures, garlands of fruit or flowers; and a ceiling of deeply coffered wood completed the effect of warm color, sensuous beauty, and careless delight. All this was quite to the King’s taste. He gave Rosso a house in Paris, and a pension of 1,400 livres ($35,000?) a year. The artist, says Vasari, “lived like a lord, with his servants and horses, giving banquets to his friends.” ⁸ He gathered to his service half a dozen Italian, and several French, painters and sculptors, who formed the origin and nucleus of the “School of Fontainebleau.” At the height of his success and splendor his Italian temper ended his career. He accused one of his aides, Francesco Pellegrino, of robbing him; Pellegrino, after suffering much torture, was found to be innocent; Rosso, in shame and remorse, swallowed poison and died in agony at the age of forty-six (1541).

Francis mourned him, but he had already found in Primaticcio an artist capable of continuing Rosso’s work in the same style of voluptuous imagination. Primaticcio was a handsome youth of twenty-seven when he reached France in 1532. The King soon recognized his versatile ability as architect, sculptor, and painter; he gave him a staff of assistants, a good salary, and, later, the revenues of an abbey; so the contributions of the faithful were transformed into art that would possibly have shocked the monks. Primaticcio made designs for the royal tapestry works; carved a masterly chimney piece for Queen Eleonora’s room at Fontainebleau, and repaid the Duchesse d’Etampes’ patronage and protection by adorning her room in the château with paintings and stucco statuary. The paintings have died repeated deaths under restorations, but the statues remain in their glory; one stucco lady, raising her hands to a cornice, is among the fairest figures in French art. How could a king enamored of such demure shamelessness accept stern Calvinism in place of a Church that smiled tolerantly upon these charming nudes?

The demise of the royal satyr, and the accession of the stern Henry II, did not injure Primaticcio’s status or bowdlerize his style. Now (1551–56), aided by Philibert Delorme and Niccolo dell’ Abbate, he designed, painted, carved, and otherwise decorated the Gallery of Henry II at Fontainebleau. Here too the paintings have been ruined, but the grace of the female statues is alluring, and the end wall is a stately splendor of classic elements. Still finer, we are told (for it was destroyed in 1738), was the Gallery of Ulysses, which Primaticcio and his company adorned with 161 subjects from the Odyssey.

The château of Fontainebleau marked the triumph of the classic style in France. Francis filled its halls with sculptures and objects of art bought for him in Italy and reinforcing the classic message by their excellence. Meanwhile Sebastiano Serlio, who worked for a while at Fontainebleau, published his Opere di architettura (1548), which preached the Vitruvian classicism of his master Baldassare Petruzzi; it was at once translated into French by Jean Martin, who also translated Vitruvius (1547). From the School of Fontainebleau French artists trained under Rosso or Primaticcio scattered the classic norms and ideals through France; and these remained dominant there for centuries, along with the corresponding classic literary forms inaugurated by the Pléiade. Excited by Serlio and Vitruvius, French artists like Jacques A. du Cerceau, Jean Bullant, and Delorme went to Italy to study the remains of Roman architecture, and, returning, wrote treatises formulating classic ideas. Like Ronsard and Du Bellay, they condemned medieval styles as barbarous, and resolved to chasten matter into form. Through these men, their work, and their books, the architect emerged as an artist distinct from the master-mason, and standing high in the social scale. Italian artists were no longer needed in French building, for France now went beyond Italy to ancient Rome itself for architectural inspiration, and effected a superb synthesis of the classic orders with the traditions and climate of France.

In this milieu of thought and art the noblest civic building in France took form. Viewing the Louvre today from the left bank of the Seine, or standing in its majestic courts, or wandering day after day through this treasure house of the world, the spirit shrinks with awe at the immensity of the monument. If, in some universal devastation, only one building might be spared, we should choose this. Philip Augustus had raised its first form about 1191 as a fortress castle to guard Paris against invasion along the Seine. Charles V had added two new wings (1357), an external staircase that may have suggested the gem at Blois. Finding this medieval structure, half palace and half prison, inadequate for his residence and entertaining, Francis had it torn down, and commissioned Pierre Lescot (1546) to raise in its place a chateau fit for a French Renaissance king. When, a year later, Francis died, Henry II bade the enterprise go on.

Lescot was a noble and a priest, Sieur de Clagny, Abbé of Clermont, canon of Notre Dame, painter, sculptor, architect. He it was who designed the rood loft in the church of St.-Germain l’Auxerrois (destroyed in 1745), and the palace that is now the Hôtel Carnavalet. In both of these tasks he enlisted the aid of his friend Jean Goujon for decorative sculpture; and when work on the new Louvre had made some progress he called upon Goujon to come and adorn it. In 1548 Lescot raised the western wing of the palaces that now enclose the Cour Carrée or Square Court of the Louvre. The style of the Italian Renaissance dictated the façade from ground to roof—exclusively, as Rabelais might say: three tiers of rectangular windows, the tiers separated by marble cornices, the windows separated by classic columns; three porches sustained by elegant classic pillars; only the sloping roof was French, and there too the moldings were of classic grace. The general aspect would have been too severe had not Goujon inserted statues in the niches of the porticoes, and carved exquisite reliefs in the pediments and beneath the cornices, and crowned the central projection with the emblem of Henry and Diana. Within this Lescot wing Goujon built the Salle des Cariatides—four stately females upholding a gallery for musicians; and it was again Goujon who decorated the vault of the great staircase that led to the royal chamber where slept the kings of France from Henry IV to Louis XIV. The work on the Louvre continued under Charles IX, Henry IV, Louis XIII and XIV, Napoleon I and III, always faithful to the style set by Lescot and Goujon, until today the spreading edifice is the congealed essence of 350 years of a civilization that ground the toil of the people into the splendors of art. Would the Louvre have been possible if the aristocracy had been just?

For Henry II and Diane de Poitiers Philibert Delorme created architectural Edens. As a youth Philibert studied and measured the remains of classic Rome; he loved them, but, back in France, he announced that henceforth French architecture must be French. His spirit of classic idolatry and French patriotism was precisely the program of the Pléiade. He designed the horseshoe stairway in the Cour des Adieux at Fontainebleau, and the fireplace and coffered ceiling in the Gallery of Henry II. For Diane he built at Anet (1548–53) a veritable city of palaces and formal gardens; there Cellini placed in a pediment his Nymph of Fontainebleau, and Goujon surpassed the Florentine with his group of Diana and her stag. Most of this costly paradise has gone to ruin; an unimpressive gateway remains in the court of the École des Beaux Arts in Paris. For the same triumphant mistress Delorme completed Chenonceaux—a little gift from her enamored King; it was Philip who conceived the idea of extending the palace across the Cher. When Catherine de Médicis took the chateau from Diane, Delorme continued to labor there till the masterpiece was complete. For a time his too-mathematical style fell from favor, and he retired to write an encyclopedic Treatise on Architecture. In his old age he was called back to work by Catherine, and designed for her a new palace, the Tuileries (1564–70), which the Commune of 1871 destroyed. From all his patrons he received rich rewards. He became a priest, and held several fruitful benefices. He died (1570) as a canon of Notre Dame, and provided in his will for two illegitimate children.⁹

Jean Bullant completed the brilliant trio of architects who adorned France in the reigns of Catherine’s husband and sons. In his thirties, at Ecouen, he made his reputation by designing for Anne de Montmorency a chateau quite perfect in its classic lines. In his sixties he succeeded Delorme in building the Tuileries, and continued working till his death—de jour en jour en apprenant mourant, as he said—“From day to day, while learning dying.”

It is the fashion to regret the importation of Italian styles into French building, and to suggest that the native Gothic, left undeflected by that influence, might have evolved into a civic architecture more congenial to French grace than the relatively rigorous lines of the classic orders. But Gothic was dying of old age, perhaps of senile excess and Flamboyant old lace; it had run its course. The Greek emphasis on restraint, simplicity, stability, and clear structural lines was well suited to temper French exuberance into disciplined maturity. Some medieval quaintness was sacrificed, but that too had had its day, and seems picturesque precisely because it died. As French Renaissance architecture developed its own national character, mingling dormer windows and sloping roofs with columns, capitals, and pediments, it gave France for three centuries a style of building that was the envy of Western Europe; and now that it too is passing away we perceive that it was beautiful.

2. The Ancillary Arts

A thousand artist-artisans adorned French life in this vivacious age of François Premier and Henri Deux. Woodworkers carved the choir stalls of Beauvais, Amiens, Auch, and Brou, and dared to decorate Gothic structures with a Renaissance play of fauns, sibyls, bacchants, satyrs, even, now and then, a Venus, a Cupid, a Ganymede. Or they made—for our mad pursuit—tables, chairs, frames, prie-dieu, bedsteads, and cabinets, carving them with perhaps a plethora of ornament, and sometimes inlaying them with metal, ivory, or precious stones. The metalworkers, now at the crest of their excellence, glorified utensils and weapons with damascening or engraving, and designed grilles—poems in iron tracery—for chapels, sanctuaries, gardens, and tombs, or made such hinges as those on the west doors of Notre Dame, so beautiful that piety ascribed them to angelic hands. Cellini, who had little praise left for others after meeting his own needs, confessed that in making church plate—or such domestic plate as Jean Duret engraved for Henry II the French goldsmiths had “attained a degree of perfection nowhere else to be found.”¹⁰ The stained glass in Margaret of Austria’s chapel at Brou, or in St.-Étienne’s at Beauvais, or in St.-Étienne-du-Mont at Paris, proclaimed a glory not yet departed. At Fontainebleau Francis established a factory in which tapestries were woven in one piece, instead of being made, as before, in separate sections, then sewn together; and gold and silver threads were mingled opulently with dyed silk and wool. After 1530 the patterns and subjects of French tapestry ceased to be Gothic and chivalric, and followed Renaissance designs and themes from Italy.

Renaissance motives dominated ceramics in the majolica of Lyons, the faïence of southern France, the enamels of Limoges. Léonard Limousin and others painted, with brilliant fused enamel colors, elegant forms of plants and animals, gods and men, on copper basins, vases, ewers, cups, saltcellars, and other lowly utensils raised to works of art. Here too Francis took a hand, made Léonard head of the royal manufactory of enamels at Limoges, and crowned him with the title of valet de chambre du roi. Léonard specialized in painting portraits in enamel on copper plates; an excellent sample—portraying Francis himself—is in the Metropolitan Museum at New York; many more are in the Apollo Gallery of the Louvre, quietly attesting a golden day.

Portraiture was a fully developed art in France before the Italians came. Which of the Italians in France could have bettered the portrait of Guillaume de Montmorency painted by an anonymous master about 1520, and now in the Lyons Museum? Voilà un homme!—this is no pictorial compliment, it is a man. Rosso, Primaticcio, dell’Abbate, and others in the School of Fontainebleau brought to France what they had learned from Raphael, Perino del Vaga, Giovanni da Udine, or Giulio Romano, in decorating pilasters, cornices, ceilings... with “grotesques” or playful figures of cherubs, children, spirals, arabesques, and plants. An unnamed member of the school painted the Diane de Poitiers now in the Worcester, Massachusetts, Museum—sitting at her toilette, dressed in a diadem. After 1545 many Flemish painters, including Brueghel the Elder, came to France to study the work at Fontainebleau. But their own style was too deeply rooted to yield to the Italian influence; the realistic vigor of their portraiture prevailed over the feminine grace of the heirs of Raphael.

One Flemish family in France almost constituted a school by itself. Jean (Jehan, Jehannet, Janet) Clouet was attached to the court of Francis at Tours and Paris; all the world knows the portrait he painted of the King about 1525, now in the Louvre: proud, conceited, happy royalty just before a fall. Jean’s son François Clouet succeeded him as court painter, and recorded the dignitaries of four reigns in chalk or oil. His Henry II surpasses his father’s Francis I: we are astonished to see the chasm between the gay gallant and the somber son; we can understand how this man could sanction the chambre ardente for the persecution of heresy, though we do not see in the almost Borgian face any hint of his lasting devotion to Diane. For a time Corneille de Lyon, operating a rival atelier, challenged the Clouets in such portraits as that of Maréchal Bonnivet, lover of Marguerite. But no contemporary in France could equal the gallery of portraits that François Clouet made of Catherine de Médicis, Francis II, Mary Queen of Scots, Elizabeth of Valois, Philip II, Marguerite, future wife of Henry IV, and Charles IX as a youth—too lovely to forecast the frightened King of the Massacre. Flemish realism and veracity are in these portraits tempered with French delicacy, precision, and vivacity; the tone is subdued, the line is accurate and confident, the elements of a complex character are caught and unified; only Holbein’s England would enjoy such a colorful historian.

Sculpture was a handmaiden to architecture, and yet it was the sculptors who made the architecture brilliant. Now, indeed, French sculpture poured forth masterpieces only second to those that Michelangelo and others were then cutting out of Carrara. Lordly tombs were modeled: of Louis XII and Anne of Brittany by Giovanni di Giusto Betti (Saint-Denis); of two Cardinals of Amboise by Roland Leroux and Jean Goujon (Rouen); and of Louis de Brézé, Diane’s husband, in the same cathedral, of uncertain authorship. The Rouen tombs seem too ornate to befit mortality, but the cardinals are almost revived as unidealized strong administrators to whom religion was an incident in statesmanship. Francis I, his wife Claude, and his daughter Charlotte were buried in Saint-Denis in a tomb of Renaissance style designed by Delorme, with superb sculptures by Pierre Bontemps. Near by is a little chef-d’oeuvre by Bontemps—a funerary urn for the heart of the King. French sculptors no longer needed Italian tutelage to inherit the classic art of Rome.

Jean Goujon inherited at least the classic grace. We hear of him first in 1540, listed as a “stonecutter and mason” in Rouen. There he cut the columns supporting the organ in the church of St.-Maclou, and carved statues for the tombs of the Cardinals, and perhaps for that of Brézé. He adorned the rood screen in the church of St.-Germain l’Auxerrois with sculptures now partially preserved in the Louvre, and recalling Hellenistic reliefs in the rhythmic elegance of their lines. Goujon’s characteristic quality of feminine grace approached perfection in the Nymphs that he contributed to the “Fountain of the Innocents” designed by Lescot (1547); Bernini thought these figures the most beautiful works of art in Paris. We have noted Goujon’s Diana and the Stag at Anet, and his sculptures on the Louvre. His pagan deities and his idealization of the female form suggest, for France, the triumph of the Renaissance over the Reformation, of classical over Gothic ideas, of woman over her medieval detractors. However, tradition describes Goujon as a Huguenot. About 1542, as penance for attending a Lutheran sermon, he was condemned to walk through the streets of Paris in his shirt, and to witness the burning of a Protestant preacher.¹¹ Toward 1562 he left France for Italy. He died at Bologna before 1568, in obscurity hardly merited by the man who had brought to its culmination the art of the Renaissance in France.

III. PIETER BRUEGHEL: 1520–69

Except for Brueghel and tapestry this was a fallow age in Lowland art. Painting fluctuated between emulation of the Italians—in refined technique, rich coloring, classic mythology, nude women, and Roman architectural backgrounds—and the native flair for realistic portrayal of eminent persons and ordinary things. Patronage came not only from the court, the Church, and the aristocracy, but increasingly from rich merchants who offered their stout forms and overflowing jowls to the admiration of posterity, and liked to see reflected in painting the domestic scenes and rural landscapes of their actual life. A sense of humor, sometimes of the grotesque, replaced the lofty mood of the Italian masters. Michelangelo criticized what seemed to him a lack of discrimination and nobility in Flemish art: “They paint in Flanders only to deceive the external eye, things that gladden you... the grass of the fields, the shadows of the trees, and bridges and rivers .... and little objects here and there .... without care in selecting and rejecting/’¹² To Michelangelo art was the selection of significance for the illustration of nobility, not the indiscriminate representation of reality; his solemn nature, encased in his irremovable boots and his misanthropic isolation, was immune to the glory of green fields and the affections of the hearth.

For our part we make a grateful bow to Joachim Patinir, if only for the Leonardesque landscape in his St. Jerome; to Joos van Cleve for his lovely portrait of Eleanor of Portugal; to Bernaert van Orley for his Holy Family in the Prado, his tapestry designs, and his stained glass in Brussels’ St.-Gudule; to Lucas van Leyden for crowding so many masterly engravings and woodcuts into his thirty-nine years; to Jan van Scorel for the Magdalen cherishing the vase of ointments from which she had bathed the feet of Christ; and to Anthonis Mor for his forceful portraits of Alva, Cardinal Granvelle, Philip II, Mary Tudor, and, not least, himself.

Note how the painting craft in the Netherlands ran in families. Joos van Cleve handed down some of his skill to his son Cornelis, who painted some fine portraits before going mad. Jan Massys, inheriting the studio of his father Quentin, painted by preference nudes like Judith and Suzanna and the Elders; his son Quentin Massys II carried on the trade, while his brother Cornells took his art to England and painted Henry VIII in old age, bloated and hideous. Pieter Pourbus and his son Frans painted portraits and pieties at Bruges, and Frans’s son Frans Pourbus II painted portraits at Paris and Mantua. And there were Pieter “Droll” Brueghel, his painter wife, his painter mother-in-law, his sons Pieter “Hell” Brueghel and Jan “Velvet” Brueghel, his painter grandsons, his painter great-grandsons.....

Pieter Brueghel the Elder, whose fame is among the inescapable fashions of our time, may have derived his name from either of two villages named Brueghel in Brabant; one of them was near Hertogenbosch, where Hieronymus Bosch had been born, and in whose churches Pieter might have seen several paintings of the man who influenced his work only less than nature itself. At twenty-five (c. 1545) he migrated to Antwerp, and was apprenticed to Pieter Coecke, whose landscape woodcuts may have helped to form the young painter’s interest in fields, woods, waters, and sky. This lesser Pieter had begotten a daughter, Maria, whom Brueghel toddled in his arms as a child, and whom he later made his wife. In 1552 he followed the current custom of his craft and went to study painting in Italy. He returned to Antwerp with a sketchbook thick with Italian landscapes, but with no visible Italian influence on his technique; to the end he practically ignored the subtle modeling, chiaroscuro, and coloratura of the southern masters. Back in Antwerp, he lived with a housekeeper-concubine, whom he promised to marry when she stopped lying; he recorded her lies with notches cut into a stick; and having no stick for his own sins, he renounced her when the notches overflowed. In his middle forties (1563) he married Maria Coecke, now seventeen, and obeyed her summons to move to Brussels. He had only six years of life left to him.

Though his paintings led to his being dubbed “Peasant Brueghel,” he was a man of culture, who read Homer, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Rabelais, probably Erasmus.¹³ Karel Mander, the Dutch Vasari, described him as “tranquil and orderly, speaking little, yet amusing in company, delighting to horrify people .... with tales of ghosts and banshees”;¹⁴ hence, perhaps, his other sobriquet, “Droll Brueghel.” His sense of humor leaned to satire, but he tempered this with sympathy. A contemporary engraving shows him heavily bearded, with a face bearing lines of serious thought.¹⁵ At times he followed Bosch in seeing life as a heedless hurrying of most souls to hell. In the Dulle Griet he pictured hell as hideously and confusedly as Bosch himself; and in The Triumph of Death he visioned death not as a natural sleep of exhausted forms, but as a ghastly cutting off of limbs and life—skeletons attacking kings, cardinals, knights, and peasants with arrows, hatchets, stones, and scythes—criminals beheaded or hanged or bound to a wheel—skulls and corpses riding in a cart; here is one more variant of that: “Dance of Death” which flits through the art of this somber age.

Brueghel’s religious pictures carry on the serious mood. They have neither the grandeur nor the light grace of Italian pictures; they merely reinterpret the Biblical story in terms of Flemish climate, physiognomy, and dress. They rarely reveal religious feeling; most of them are excuses for painting crowds. Even the faces in them carry no feeling; the people who jostle one another to see Christ carry His cross seem heedless of His suffering, but only anxious to get a good view. Some of the pictures are Biblical parables, like The Sower; some others, following Bosch, take proverbs for their themes. The Blind Leading the Blind shows a succession of dull-eyed peasants, cruelly ugly, following one another into a ditch; and Netherlandish Proverbs illustrates, in one teeming picture, nearly a hundred old saws, including some of Rabelaisian fragrance.

Brueghel’s major interest was in peasant crowds, and landscapes covering with their indifferent beneficence or maleficence the futile, forgivable activities of men. Perhaps he thought there was safety in crowds; there he need not individualize the faces or model the flesh. He refused to picture a person posing for art or history; he preferred to show men, women, and children walking, running, jumping, dancing, playing games, in all the varied animation and naturalness of life. He harked back to the scenes of his childhood, and delighted to contemplate, to join, the fun and feasting, music and mating, of the peasantry. He and a friend, on several occasions, disguised themselves as farmers, attended village fairs and weddings, and—pretending to be relatives—brought presents to bridegroom and bride.¹⁶ Doubtless on these outings Pieter took his sketchbook, for among his extant drawings are many of rustic figures and events. He had no taste for, nor commissions from, the aristocrats that Mor and Titian found it so profitable to portray; he painted only simple people, and even his dogs were mongrel curs that could be found in any city alley or rural hut. He knew the bitter side of peasant life, and sometimes visioned it as a multitudinous confusion of fools. But he loved to paint the games of country children, the dances of their elders, the riot of their weddings. In The Land of Cockayne peasants exhausted with toil or love or drink sprawl out on the grass dreaming of Utopia. It is the peasant, Brueghel seems to say, who knows how to play and sleep as well as how to work and mate and die.

Against death he saw but one consolation—that it is an integral part of that Nature which he accepted in all its forms of beauty and terror, growth and decay and renewal. The landscape redeems the man; the absurdity of the part is pardoned in the majesty of the whole. Heretofore—excepting Altdorfer—landscapes had been painted as backgrounds and appendages to human figures and events: Brueghel made the landscape itself the picture, the men in it mere incidents. In The Fall of Icarus the sky, the ocean, the mountains, and the sun have absorbed the attention of the painter, and of the participants; Icarus is two unnoticed legs ridiculously sinking into the sea; and in The Storm man is hardly visible, lost and helpless in the war and power of the elements.

The art and philosophy of Brueghel culminate in the five paintings that remain of a series planned to illustrate the moods of the year. The Wheat Harvest schematically pictures the cutting and stacking of the sheaves, the workers lunching or napping beneath the visible heat and stillness of the summer air. In The Hay Harvest girls and boys bear the autumn fruit of the fields in baskets on their heads, a farmer sharpens his scythe, sturdy women rake the hay, men pitch it to the top of the wagon load, the horses champ their meal in a resting interval. The Return of the Herd heralds winter—the skies darkling, the cattle guided back to their stalls. Finest of the series is The Hunters in the Snow: roofs and ground are white; dwellings range in an amazing perspective along the plains and hills; men skate, play hockey, fall on the ice; hunters and their dogs start out to capture food; the trees are bare, but birds in the branches promise spring. The Gloomy Day is winter scowling its farewell. In these paintings Brueghel reached his peak, and set a precedent for the snowy landscapes of future Lowland art.

Only a painter or a connoisseur can judge these pictures in their artistic quality and technique. Brueghel seems content to give his figures two dimensions, does not bother to mingle shadow with their substance; he lets our imagination, if it must, add a third dimension to his two. He is too interested in crowds to care about individuals; he makes nearly all his peasants alike, ungainly lumps of flesh. He does not pretend to be a realist, except in gross. He puts so many people or episodes into one painting that unity seems sacrificed; but he catches the unconscious unity of a village, a crowd, a wave of life.

What does he mean to say? Is he merely jesting, laughing at man as a grotesque “forked radish,” and at life as a silly strutting to decay? He enjoyed the lusty swing of the peasants’ dance, sympathized with their toil, and looked with indulgent humor on their drunken sleep. But he never recovered from Bosch. Like that unsaintly Jerome, he took sardonic pleasure in depicting the bitter side of the human comedy—the cripples and criminals, the defeated or obscene, the inexorable victory of death. He seems to have searched for ugly peasants; he caricatures them, never lets them smile or laugh; if he gives their crude faces any expression it is one of dull indifference, of sensitivity beaten out by the blows of life.¹⁷ He was impressed and hurt by the apathy with which the fortunate bear the misery of the unfortunate, the haste and relief with which the living forget the dead. He was oppressed by the vast perspective of nature—that immensity of sky under which all human events seem drowned in insignificance, and virtue and vice, growth and decay, nobility and ignominy alike seem lost in a vast and indiscriminate futility, and man is swallowed up in the landscape of the world.

We do not know if this was Brueghel’s real philosophy, or merely the playfulness of his art. Nor do we know why he gave up the battle so soon, dying at forty-nine (1569); perhaps more years would have softened his wrath. He bequeathed to his wife an ambiguous picture, The Merry Way to the Gallows, a masterly composition in fresh greens and distant blues, peasants dancing near the village gibbet, and, perched on this, a magpie, emblem of a chattering tongue.

IV. CRANACH AND THE GERMANS

German ecclesiastical architecture went in hiding during the Reformation. No new churches were raised to art as well as piety; many churches were left unfinished; many were pulled down, and princely castles were put together with their stones. Protestant churches dedicated themselves to a stern simplicity; Catholic churches, as if in defiance, ran to excessive ornament while the Renaissance moved into the baroque.

Civic and palace architecture replaced cathedrals as dukes replaced bishops and the state enveloped the Church. Some picturesque civic structures of this period were casualties of the second World War: the Althaus in Brunswick, the House of the Butchers’ Guild at Hildesheim, the Renaissance-style Rathaus or Town Hall of Nymegen. The most pretentious architecture of this and the next age took the form of immense castles for the territorial princes: Dresden Castle, which cost the people 100,000 florins ($2,500,000?); the palace of Duke Christopher at Stuttgart, so lavish in fixtures and furniture that the city magistrates warned the Duke that the luxury of his court was scandalously in contrast with the poverty of his people; and the vast Heidelberg Castle, begun in the thirteenth century, rebuilt in Renaissance fashion in 1556–63, and partly destroyed in the second World War.

The art crafts retained their excellence in the service of princes, nobles, merchants, and financiers. Cabinetmakers, woodcutters, ivory-cutters, engravers, miniaturists, textile workers, ironworkers, potters, goldsmiths, armorers, jewelers—all had the old medieval skills, though they tended to sacrifice taste and form to complexity of ornament. Many painters drew designs for woodcuts as carefully as if they were making portraits of kings; and woodcutters like Hans Lützeburger of Basel labored with the devotion of a Dürer. The goldsmiths of Nuremberg, Munich, and Vienna were at the top of their line; Wenzel Jamnitzer might have challenged Cellini. About 1547 German artists began to paint glass with enamel colors; in this way vessels and windows took on crude but rich designs, and the prosperous bourgeois could have his likeness fused into the windowpanes of his home.

German sculptors kept their preference for metal statuary and reliefs. The sons of Peter Vise her carried on his craft: Peter the Younger cast a bronze plaque of Orpheus and Eurydice; Hans designed a handsome Apollo Fountain for the court of the Nuremberg town hall; Paul is usually credited with a pretty figure in wood, known as The Nuremberg Madonna. Peter Flötner of Nuremberg cast excellent reliefs of Envy, Justice, Saturn, and the Muse of Dance. One of the most delightful objects in the Louvre is a bust, by Joachim Deschler, of Otto Heinrich, Count Palatine, six and a half inches high, and nearly as wide in its corpulence, with a face formed by years of bon appétit; this is German humor at its broadest.

The glory of German art continued to be in painting. Holbein equaled Dürer, Cranach followed on their heels, and Baldung Grien, Altdorfer, and Amberger formed a creditable second line. Hans Baldung Grien made his fame with an altarpiece for the cathedral of Freiburg-im-Breisgau; but more attractive is The Madonna with the Parrot—a buxom Teuton with golden hair, and a parrot pecking at her cheeks. Christopher Amberger painted some elegant portraits; the Lille Museum has his Charles V, sincere, intelligent, incipiently fanatical; the Chicago Art Institute’s Portrait of a Man is a finely chiseled, gentle face. Albrecht Altdorfer stands out in this minor group by the richness of his landscapes. In his St. George the knight and the dragon are almost unseen in an entourage of crowding trees; even The Battle of Arbela loses the warring hosts in an abundance of towers, mountains, waters, clouds, and sun. These, and the Rest on the Flight to Egypt, are among the first true landscapes in modern painting.

Lucas Cranach the Elder took his name from his native town, Kronach, in Upper Franconia. We know almost nothing further of him till his appointment, at the age of thirty-two, as court painter to Elector Frederick the Wise at Wittenberg (1504). He kept his position at the Saxon court, there or a Weimar, for nearly fifty years. He met Luther, liked him, pictured him again and again, and illustrated some of the Reformer’s writings with caricatures of the popes; however, he made portraits also of Catholic notables like the Duke of Alva and Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz. He had a good business head, turned his studio into a factory of portraits and religious paintings, sold books and drugs on the side, became burgomaster of Wittenberg in 1565, and died full of money and years.

The Italian influence had by this time reached Wittenberg. It appears in the grace of Cranach’s religious pictures, more visibly in his mythologies, most in his nudes. Now, as in Italy, the pagan pantheon competes with Mary, Christ, and the saints, but German humor enlivens the traditional by making fun of safely dead gods. In Cranach’s Judgment of Paris the Trojan seducer goes to sleep while the shivering beauties wait for him to wake and judge. In Venus and Cupid the goddess of love is shown in her usual nudity, except for an enormous hat—as if Cranach were slyly suggesting that desire is so formed by custom that it can be stilled by an unwonted accessory. Nevertheless Venus proved popular, and Cranach, with help, issued her in a dozen forms to shine in Frankfurt, Leningrad, the Borghese Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum of Art.... In Frankfurt she hides her charms revealingly behind a dozen gossamer threads; these serve again for the Lucretia in Berlin, who cheerfully prepares to redeem her honor with a bare bodkin. The same lady posed for The Nymph of the Spring (New York), lying on a bed of green leaves beside a pool. In the Geneva Museum she becomes Judith, no longer nude, but dressed to kill, holding her sword over Holofernes’ severed head, which winks humorously at its mischance. Finally the lady, re-bared, becomes Eve in Das Paradies at Vienna, in Adam and Eve at Dresden, in Eve and the Serpent in Chicago, where a handsome stag joins and names her party. Nearly all these nudes have some quality that saves them from eroticism—an impish humor, a warmth of color, an Italian finesse of line, or an unpatriotic slenderness in the female figures; here was a brave attempt to reduce the Frau.

The portraits that poured from Cranach’s hand or aides are more interesting than his stereotyped nudes, and some rival Holbein’s. Anna Cuspinian is realism tempered with delicacy, gorgeous robes, and a balloon hat; the husband, Johannes Cuspinian, sat for a still finer portrait—all the idealism of a young humanist reflected in the meditative eyes and symbolized in the book fondly clasped. A hundred dignitaries were preserved in paint or chalk in this popular atelier, but none so well deserves survival as the child Prince of Saxony (Washington), all innocence and gentleness and golden curls. At the other side of life is the portrait of Dr. Johannes Schöner, terrible in features, noble in artistry. And here and there, in Cranach’s work, are magnificent animals, all pedigreed, and stags so natural that—claimed a friend—“dogs barked when they saw them.”¹⁸

Cranach might have been greater had he not succeeded so soon and well. The multiplication of his patrons divided his genius; he had no time to give all of it to any one task. Inevitably, as his eighty-one years rolled by, he tired and slacked down; the drawing, once as fine as Dürer’s, became careless, details were shirked, the same faces, nudes, and trees were repeated to lifelessness. In the end we have to agree with the judgment passed on the early Cranach by the aging Dürer—that Lucas could depict the features but not the soul.¹⁹

In 1550, when he was seventy-eight, he painted his own portrait: a stout councilor and merchant rather than painter and engraver, with powerful square head, stately white beard, expansive nose, eyes full of pride and character. Three years later he surrendered his flesh to time. He left behind him three sons, all artists: John Lucas, Hans, and Lucas the Younger, whose Sleeping Hercules transmitted a theme from Rabelais to Swift by showing the giant peacefully ignoring the darts with which the pigmies around him barely pierce his ectoderm. Perhaps Lucas the Elder ignored as serenely the pricks of those who condemned him for bourgeois ideals and unconscientious haste; and under the tombstone that bears the ambiguous compliment Celerrimus pictor—fastest painter—he sleeps well.

With him the great age of German painting passed. The basic cause of the decline was more probably the intensity of religious dispute than the Protestant repudiation of religious imagery. Possibly a moral letdown coarsened German painting after 1520; nudes began to play a leading role; and even in Biblical pictures painters ran to themes like Suzanna and the Elders, Potiphar’s wife tempting Joseph, or Bathsheba in her bath. For two centuries after the death of Cranach German art receded in the backwash of theology and war.

V. THE TUDOR STYLE: 1517–58

The reign of Henry VIII began with a Gothic masterpiece in the chapel of Henry VII, and closed with the Renaissance architecture of royal palaces; the change of style aptly reflected the conquest of the Church by the state. The attack of the government on the bishops, the monasteries, and ecclesiastical revenues put an end to English ecclesiastical architecture for almost a hundred years.

Henry VII, anticipating death, had allotted £140,000 ($14,000,000?) to build in Westminster Abbey a Lady Chapel to contain his tomb. It is a masterpiece not of construction but of decoration, from the cenotaph itself to the intricate stone skein of the fan vault, which has been called “the most wonderful work of masonry ever put together by the hand of man.” ²⁰ As the chapel is Gothic in plan and Renaissance in adornment, we have here the beginning of the Tudor or Florid Style. Henry VIII, as a young humanist, was readily won to classical architectural forms. He and Wolsey brought several Italian artists into England. One of them, Pietro Torrigiano, was commissioned to design the paternal tomb. Upon the sarcophagus of white marble and black stone the Florentine sculptor laid lavish decoration in carvings or gilt bronze: plump putti, floral wreaths of airy grace, reliefs of the Virgin and divers saints, angels sitting atop the tomb and extending pretty feet into space, and, over the whole, the recumbent figures of Henry VII and his Queen Elizabeth. This was such sculpture as England had never seen before, and in England it has never been surpassed. Here, said Francis Bacon, the parsimonious King, who had pinched pennies to spend pounds, ‘dwelleth more richly dead than he did alive in any of his palaces.”²¹

Henry VIII was not the man to allow anyone to be more sumptuously buried than himself. In 1518 he contracted to pay Torrigiano £2,000 for a tomb “more greater by the fourth part” than his father’s.²² This was never finished, for the artist as well as the King had a royal temper; Torrigiano left England in a huff (1519), and when he returned he did no more work on the second tomb. Instead he designed for Henry VII’s chapel a high altar, reredos, and baldachin, which Cromwell’s men destroyed in 1643. In 1521 Torrigiano departed for Spain.

The mortal comedy was resumed in 1524 when Wolsey commissioned another Florentine, Benedetto da Rovezzano, to build him a tomb in St. George’s Chapel at Windsor, “the design whereof,” wrote Lord Herbert of Cherbury, “was so glorious that it exceeded far that of Henry VII.” ²³ When the Cardinal fell he begged the King to let him keep at least the effigy for a humbler tomb in York; Henry refused, and confiscated the whole as a receptacle for himself; he bade the artists replace Wolsey’s figure with his own; but religion and marriage distracted him, and the funereal monument was never completed. Charles I wished to be buried in it, but a hostile Parliament sold the decoration piece by piece, until only the black marble sarcophagus remained, to serve at last (1810) as part of Nelson’s shrine in St. Paul’s.

Aside from these labors, and the glorious wood screen and stalls and stained glass and vault of King’s College Chapel at Cambridge, the memorable architecture of this age was dedicated to glorifying the country houses of the aristocracy into fairy palaces rising amid the fields and woods of England. The architects were English, but a dozen Italians were enlisted for the decoration. An imposingly wide façade in mixed Gothic and Renaissance, a turreted gateway leading into a court, a spacious hall for crowded festivities, a massive staircase, usually in carved wood, rooms adorned with murals or tapestry and lighted with lattice windows or oriels, and, around the buildings, a garden, a deer park, and, beyond, a hunting ground—this was the English nobleman’s skeptical forestalling of paradise.

The most famous of these Tudor manor houses was Hampton Court, built by Wolsey (1515) for himself, and bequeathed in terror to his King (1525). Not one architect but a coalition of English master builders created it, basically in Perpendicular Gothic and on a medieval plan, with moat and towers and crenellated walls; Giovanni da Maiano added a Renaissance touch in terra-cotta roundels on the façade. The Duke of Württemberg, visiting England in 1592, called Hampton Court the most magnificent palace in the world.²⁴ Only less sumptuous were Sutton Place in Surrey, built (1521–27) for Sir Richard Weston, and Nonesuch Palace, begun for Henry VIII in 1538 on an imperial scale. “He invited thither,” says an old description, “the most excellent artificers, architects, sculptors, and statuaries of different nations, Italians, Frenchmen, Hollanders, and native Englishmen; and these presented a marvelous example of their art in the decoration of the palace and both within and without adorned it with statues which here recall in literal reproduction the ancient works of Rome, and elsewhere surpass them in excellence.” ²⁵ Two hundred and thirty men were constantly employed on this palace, which was intended to outshine the Chambord and Fontainebleau of Francis I. Seldom had English kings been so rich, or the English people so poor. Henry died before Nonesuch could be finished. Elizabeth made it her favorite residence; Charles II gave it to his mistress Lady Castlemaine (1670), who had it pulled down, and sold the parts, as the only way to transform a liability into an asset.

VI. HOLBEIN THE YOUNGER: 1497-1543

How futile are words before a work of art! Each art successfully resists translation into any other medium; it has its own inalienable quality, which must speak for itself or not at all. History can only record the masters and the masterpieces; it cannot convey them. To sit silently before Holbein’s picture of his wife and children is better than a biography. However ....

He was more fortunate in his parentage than in his time. His father was among the leading painters in Augsburg. From him Hans learned the elements of the art, and from Hans Burgkmair something of Italian grace and modeling. In 1512 he painted four altar panels now in the Augsburg Gallery—middling enough, but astonishingly good for a lad of fifteen. Two years later he and his brother Ambrose, also a painter, decamped to Basel. Perhaps the father had insisted too much on his own—still Gothic—style; perhaps there was not enough educated money in Augsburg to support more than a few artists; in any case youth and genius seldom love home. In Basel the lads discovered that freedom is a trial. Hans illustrated various volumes, including Erasmus’ Praise of Folly; he did some rough painter’s work, made a signboard for a schoolmaster, and decorated a table top with lively incidents from the story of St. Nobody—that handy nonentity who was charged with every anonymous mischief, and never said a word in his own defense. The skill shown in this work earned Hans a fruitful commission—to paint portraits of the burgomaster Jakob Meyer and his wife (1517). The fame of these portraits traveled; Jakob Hertenstein called Holbein to Lucerne, and there Hans frescoed the façade and walls of the patron’s home, and painted that portrait of Benedict Hertenstein which is now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. From Lucerne he may have passed into Italy; his work henceforth revealed Italian influence in anatomical accuracy, architectural backgrounds, and the management of light. When he returned to Basel, aged twenty-two, he set up his own studio, and married a widow (1519). In that year his brother died and in 1524 their father.

German realism mingled with Romanesque architecture and classic ornament in the religious pictures that Holbein now produced. Startling is the realism—echoing Mantegna—of Christ in the Tomb: the body all bone and skin, the eyes ghastly open, the hair disheveled, the mouth agape in a last effort to breathe; this seems irrevocable death, and no wonder Dostoievski said the picture could destroy a man’s religious faith.²⁶ About this time Holbein painted murals for the hall of the Grand Council in Basel. The councilors were pleased, and one of them commissioned him to provide an altarpiece for a Carthusian monastery. This Passion of Christ suffered in the iconoclastic riots of 1529, but two shutters were saved, and were presented to the cathedral at Freiburg-im-Breisgau. They borrow much from Baldung Grien, but they have their own power in the remarkable play of the light that emanates from the Child. In 1522 the town clerk of Basel ordered another altarpiece; for this placidly beautiful Madonna, now preserved in the Kunstmuseum of Solothurn, Holbein used his wife and son as models—the wife then a woman of modest comeliness, not yet touched by tragedy. Probably near this time²⁷ he produced his religious masterpiece, The Virgin and Child with the Family of Burgomaster Meyer—splendid in composition, line, and color, and intense in feeling; we understand more sympathetically the Burgomaster’s prayer to the Madonna when we learn that at the time of this painting the two sons pictured at his feet, and one of the two wives kneeling at the right, were dead.

But the fees for such religious pictures were small in proportion to the care and labor they required. Portraits were more lucrative, and there was a growing family to support. In 1519 Holbein painted the young scholar Bonifacius Amerbach—a noble face, in which idealism survives a penetrating view of the world. About 1522 he painted the great printer Froben—a man dedicated, disturbed, creatively worn out by life. Through Froben, Holbein came to know Erasmus; and in 1523 he painted two of his many portraits of the saddened humanist. In the three-quarters portrait (in the Earl of Radnor’s Collection at Salisbury) the artist, now in the fullness of his powers, caught the soul of a man who had lived too long; illness and Luther had deepened the lines in the face, the melancholy in the eyes. The profile in the Basel Kunstsammlung shows him calmer and more alive; the nose advancing to battle like a gladiator’s sword; perhaps the manuscript under the pen is a draft of the De libero arbitrio (1524) with which he was entering the lists against Luther. Probably in 1524 Holbein painted Erasmus again, in the best portrait of all, which hangs in the Louvre; seeing that profound and chastened face one thinks of Nisard’s perceptive comment—that Erasmus was one of those dont la gloire a été de comprendre beaucoup et d’affirmer peu—“whose glory it has been to understand much and to affirm little.” ²⁸

About 1523 Holbein painted himself, now twenty-six, and seemingly prosperous; but the cold glance suggests some fighting resentment of life’s bufferings. Tradition discredits him with a moderate addiction to drink and women, and represents him as unhappy with his wife. Apparently he shared some Lutheran views; his woodcuts of The Dance of Death (c . 1525) satirized the clergy—but even the clergy did that in those days. The series showed Death dogging the steps of every man, woman, or class—Adam, Eve, the Emperor, a noble, a physician, a monk, a priest, a pope, a millionaire, an astrologer, a duchess, a jester, a gambler, a thief—all en route to the Last Judgment; it is as powerful a work as any of Dürer’s in this medium. Aside from this masterpiece of drawing, and the Meyer Madonna, Holbein is without visible piety. Perhaps he imbibed some skepticism from Erasmus and the Basel humanists.²⁹ He was more interested in anatomy than in religion.

The Reformation, though he presumably favored it, ruined his market in Basel. No more religious pictures were asked of him. Payments on the paintings for the council hall were suspended. Rich men, frightened by the Peasants’ War, retreated into privacy and parsimony, and thought the time unpropitious for portraits. “Here the arts are freezing,” wrote Erasmus from Basel in 1526.³⁰ He gave Holbein letters of introduction to friends in Antwerp and London, and Holbein, leaving his family at home, sought fortune in the north. He visited Quentin Massys, and doubtless they exchanged notes about Erasmus. From Antwerp he crossed to England. Erasmus’ letter assured him a cordial welcome from Thomas More, who gave him a place in his Chelsea home; and there he painted (1526) the portrait of More that is now in the Frick Gallery in New York. To the hindsight of the historian the tense and half-somber eyes foreshadow the devotion and tenacity of the martyr; to the insight of an artist the wonder will be in the fur and folds of the sleeve. In 1527 Holbein painted Thomas More and His Family—the oldest known group picture in transalpine secular art.

Late in 1528 Holbein, having made some pounds and shillings, returned to Basel, gave Erasmus a copy of More and His Family, and rejoined his wife. Now he painted one of his greatest, most honest pictures, showing his own family with a realism unsparing to himself. Each of the three faces is sad: the girl resigned, almost hopeless; the boy gazing up plaintively at his mother; she looking upon them with grief and affection profoundly mirrored in her eyes—the grief of a wife who has lost the love of her husband, the affection of a mother whose children are her only tie to life. Three years after painting this masterly self-indictment, Holbein left his family again.

During this stay in Basel he painted another portrait of Froben, and made six more of Erasmus, not as searchingly profound as those of 1523–24. The town council renewed his commission to fresco its chambers, but, yielding to the triumphant iconoclasts, it condemned all religious pictures, and ruled that “God has cursed all those who make them.” ³¹ Commissions fell, and in 1532 Holbein returned to England.

There he painted portraits so plentifully that most of the figures dominating the English scene in those turbulent years are still alive by the magic of Holbein’s hand. In the Queen’s Library at Windsor are eighty-seven sketches in charcoal or chalk, some for cartoons, most of them for portraits; apparently the artist required only one or two sittings from his subjects, and then painted their likeness from such sketches. The Hanseatic merchants in London solicited his art, but did not inspire his best. For the Guildhall of the Hanse he painted two murals preserved only in copies or drawings: one represented The Triumph of Poverty, the other The Triumph of Riches; both are marvels of individualized character, living movement, and coherent design, and illustrate the motto of the Guild—“Gold is the father of joy and the son of care; he who lacks it is sad, he who has it is uneasy.” ³²

Thomas Cromwell, who was to exemplify this adage, submitted his hard face and soft frame to Holbein’s brush in 1534. Through him the artist found access to the highest figures at the court. He painted The French Ambassadors, and one of them, Charles de Saulier, he portrayed with especial success, revealing the man beneath the vestments and insignia of office. Four others—Sir Henry Guilford (controller of the royal household), Sir Nicholas Carew (royal equerry to the King), Robert Cheseman (royal falconer to the King), and Dr. John Chambers (physician to the King)—suggest the thick skins that alone could safely live near the parboiled King, Holbein became one of them about 1537 as official court painter. He received a workshop of his own in Whitehall Palace, dwelt in comfort, had mistresses and bastards like anybody else, and dressed in color and silk.³³ He was called upon to decorate rooms, design ceremonial garments, bookbindings, weapons, tableware, seals, royal buttons and buckles, and the gems that Henry presented to his wives. In 1538 the King sent him to Brussels to paint Princess Christine of Denmark; she proved quite charming, and Henry would gladly have had her, but she took Duke Francis of Lorraine instead; perhaps she preferred to hang in a gallery rather than die on the block. Holbein took the opportunity to visit Basel briefly; he arranged an annuity of forty guilders ($1,000?) for his wife, and hurried back to London. Soon thereafter came the commission to paint Anne of Cleves; Holbein almost foreshadowed the result in the sad eyes of the portrait now in the Louvre.

For the King himself he painted several large pictures, nearly all lost. One survives in the Barber Surgeons’ Hall in London: Henry VIII Granting a Charter of Incorporation to the Barber Surgeons’ Company; Henry dominates the scene in his robes of state. The artist made appealing portraits of Henry’s third wife, Jane Seymour, and the fifth wife, Catherine Howard. When Henry himself sat or stood for Holbein the painter rose to the challenge, and produced portraits surpassed in his own work only by the Louvre and Basel pictures of Erasmus. The portrait of 1536 shows the monarch Teutonically pompous and stout. Henry liked it despite himself, and commissioned Holbein to paint the royal family as a fresco in Whitehall Palace; this mural was destroyed by fire in 1698, but a copy made in 1667 for Charles II reveals a masterly design: at the upper left Henry VII, pious and modest; lower, his son, brandishing the symbols of power and spreading his legs like a colossus; at the right his mother and his third wife; and in the center a marble monument retailing in Latin the virtues of the kings. The figure of Henry VIII was elaborated with such realism that a legend arose about persons entering the room and mistaking the portrait for the living King. In 1540 Holbein painted a still more imposing Henry VIII in Wedding Dress. Finally (1542) he displayed Henry in the deterioration of mind and body. Nemesis here worked leisurely, lengthening the revenge of the gods from clean or sudden death to prolonged and ignominious decay.

Two lovely pictures redeem the royal gallery: one of Prince Edward at the age of two, all innocence; the other of Edward aged six (in the Metropolitan Museum of Art). This second portrait is a delight to behold. We may judge the art of Holbein when we see him, within a year or two, portray unflinchingly the obese pride of the father, and then catch with such mysterious skill the guileless kindliness of the son.

At forty-five (1542) the artist pictured himself again, and with the same objectivity with which he had depicted the King: a suspicious, pugnacious fellow with carelessly kept graying hair and beard; and once more (1543) in a roundel showing him in a gentler mood. In that year plague came to London, and chose him as one of its victims.

Technically he was one of the supreme painters. He saw meticulously, and so portrayed; every line, color, or attitude, every incidence or variation of light, that could reveal significance was caught and pinned down upon the paper, linen, wood, or wall. What accuracy in the line, what depth and smoothness and warmth in the color, what skill in ordering details into a unified composition! But in many of the portraits, where the object was not the subject but the fee, we miss the sympathy that could see, and feel with, a man’s secret soul; we find it in the Louvre and Basel Erasmus, and in the picture of his family. We miss, except in the Meyer Madonna, the idealism that ennobled the realism in the Van Eycks’ Adoration of the Lamb. His indifference to religion kept him short of the grandeur of Grünewald, and marked him off from Dürer, who always had one foot in the Middle Ages. Holbein was neither Renaissance like Titian nor Reformation like Cranach; he was German-Dutch-Flemish-English matter-of-fact and practical sense. Perhaps his success prevented the effective entry of Italian pictorial principles and finesse into England. After him Puritanism triumphed over the Elizabethan passion, and English painting languished till Hogarth came. At the same time the glory departed from German painting. A flood of barbarism would have to pass over Central Europe before the sense of beauty would find voice there again.

VII. ART IN SPAIN AND PORTUGAL: 1515–55

Despite El Greco and Velazquez, Cervantes and Calderón, Spain never had a Renaissance in the rich Italian sense. Her far-won wealth gave new ornaments to her Christian culture, it offered productive rewards to native genius in literature and art, but it did not flow into any exciting recapture-as in Italy and France—of that pagan civilization which had adorned the Mediterranean world before and after Christ, and which had begotten Seneca, Lucan, Martial, Quintilian, Trajan, and Hadrian on the soil of Spain itself. The remembrance of that classic era had been deeply overladen by the long struggle of Spanish Christianity with the Moors; all the glorious memories were of that protracted victory, and the faith that had won it became inseparable from the proud remembrance. While everywhere else in Europe the state was humiliating the Church, in Spain the ecclesiastical organization grew stronger with the generations; it challenged and ignored the papacy, even when Spaniards ruled the Vatican; it survived the pious absolutism of Ferdinand and Charles V and Philip II, and then dominated every aspect of Spanish life. The Church in Spain was almost the sole patron of the arts; therefore it called the tune, named the themes, and made art, like philosophy, the handmaiden of theology. The Spanish Inquisition appointed inspectors to outlaw nudity, immodesty, paganism, or heresy in art, to specify the manner of treating sacred subjects in sculpture and painting, and to direct Spanish art toward the transmission and confirmation of the faith.

And yet Italian influence was pouring into Spain. The rise of Spaniards to the papacy, the conquest of Naples and Milan by Spanish kings, the campaigns of Spanish armies and the missions of Spanish statesmen and churchmen in Italy, the busy trade between Spanish and Italian ports, the visits of Spanish artists like Forment and the Berruguetes to Italy, of Italian artists like Torrigiano and Leone Leoni to Spain—all these factors affected Spanish art in methods, ornament, and style, hardly in spirit or theme, more in painting than in sculpture, and in architecture least.

The cathedrals dominated the landscape and the towns as the faith dominated life. Traveling in Spain is a pilgrimage from one to another of these mighty fanes. Their awesome immensity, their wealth of interior ornament, the dim-lit silence of their naves, the devoted stonework of their cloisters, accentuate the simplicity and poverty of the picturesque tiled dwellings that huddle below, looking up to them as the promise of a better world. The Gothic style still ruled in the giant cathedrals that rose above Salamanca (1513) and Segovia (1522); but at Granada Diego de Siloé, architect son of a Gothic sculptor, designed the interior of the cathedral with classic columns and capitals, and crowned the Gothic plan with a classic dome (1525). The style of the Italian Renaissance completely dislodged Gothic in the palace of Charles V at Granada. Charles had reproved the bishop of Cordova for spoiling the great mosque by building within its 850 pillars a Christian church;³⁴ but he sinned almost as grievously when he tore down some halls and courts of the Alhambra to make room for a structure whose stern mass and dull symmetry might have passed without offense amid kindred buildings in Rome, but proved strikingly out of harmony with the frail elegance and gay diversity of the Moorish citadel.

Something of the Moors’ flair for architectural decoration appeared in the “plateresque” style that marked chiefly the civil architecture of this reign. It took its name from its resemblance to the complex and delicate ornament lavished by the silversmith (platero) or goldsmith upon plate and other objects of their art. It topped and flanked portals and windows with winding arabesques of stone; it grooved or spiraled or flowered columns with Moorish fantasy; it pierced grilles and balustrades with marble foliage and embroidery. This plateresco marked the Obispo Chapel at Madrid, the church of Santo Tomás at Ávila, the choir of the cathedral at Cordova, and it disported itself without restraint on the Ayuntamiento or Town Hall of Seville (1526 f.). Portugal adopted the style on a portal suffused with ornament, and columns carved with decoration, in the magnificent monastery of Santa Maria at Belem (1517 f.). Charles V took the style to the Lowlands and Germany, where it flourished its signature on the town halls of Antwerp and Leyden and the castle of Heidelberg. Philip II found plateresque too florid for his taste, and under his frowns it died an early death.

Spanish sculpture yielded more readily than architecture to the swelling Italian tide. Pietro Torrigiano, after breaking Michelangelo’s nose in Florence and bearding Henry VIII in London, settled in Seville (1521), and modeled in terra cotta an ungainly St. Jerome which Goya mistakenly judged to be the supreme work of modern sculpture.³⁵ Feeling poorly paid for a statue of the Virgin, Torrigiano smashed it to bits, was arrested by the Inquisition, and died in its jails.³⁶ Damian Forment, returning to Aragon from Italy, carried the spirit of the Renaissance on his chisel and in his boasts; he called himself “the rival of Pheidias and Praxiteles,” and was accepted at his own estimate. The ecclesiastical authorities allowed him to carve likenesses of himself and his wife on the base of the reredos that he made for the abbey of Monte Aragon. For the church of Nuestra Señora del Pilar at Saragossa he cut in alabaster a spacious retable in bas-relief, combining Gothic with Renaissance elements, painting with sculpture, color with form. To another retable, in the cathedral of Huesca, Forment devoted the last thirteen years of his life (1520–33).

As Pedro Berruguete had dominated Spanish painting in the half-century before Charles V, so his son became the leading Spanish sculptor of this age. Alonso learned the art of color from his father, then went to Italy and worked with Raphael in painting, with Bramante and Michelangelo in statuary. When he came back to Spain (1520) he brought with him Michelangelo’s penchant for figures caught in tense emotion or violent attitudes. Charles appointed him court sculptor and painter. At Valladolid he worked for six years carving in wood an altar screen, forty-two by thirty feet, for the church of San Benito el Real; only fragments remain, chiefly a San Sebastian vividly colored, with blood pouring from the wounds. In 1535 he joined with his chief rival, Felipe de Borgoña, to carve choir stalls in the Toledo Cathedral; here too the Michelangelesque manner swayed his hand, and presaged baroque in Spain. When he neared eighty he was commissioned to erect in the hospital of St. John at Toledo a monument to its founder, Cardinal Juan de Tavera; he took his son Alonso as helper, created one of the chefs-d’oeuvre of Spanish sculpture, and died in the attempt in his seventy-fifth year (1561).

Spanish painting, still in tutelage to Italy and Flanders, produced no outstanding master under Charles V. The Emperor favored foreign painters, imported Anthonis Mor to make portraits of Spanish notables, and for himself declared that he would allow none but the great Titian to paint him. The only Spanish painter of this age whose fame crossed the Pyrenees was Luis de Morales. The first fifty years of his life were spent in the poverty and obscurity of Badajoz, painting for churches and chapels in the province of Estremadura. He was fifty-four when Philip II bade him come and paint in the Escorial (1564). He presented himself in magnificent array, which the King thought unbecoming in an artist, but Philip softened when he learned that Luis had spent his life’s savings to attire himself fitly for an audience with his Majesty. Morales’ Christ Carrying the Cross did not strike the royal fancy, and he returned to Badajoz and penury. Several of his pictures can be seen at the Hispanic Society in New York, all of them beautiful; but the best example of his work is a Virgin and Child in the Prado—a bit too redolent of Raphael. Philip, passing through Badajoz in 1581, allotted the artist a tardy pension, which enabled him—now disabled by palsy and failing eyes—to eat regularly during the five years left to him of life.

The artisans of Spain were often artists in all but name. Spanish lace and leather continued supreme in Europe. The woodworkers too were unsurpassed; Théophile Gautier thought that Gothic art had never come closer to perfection than in the choir stalls of Toledo Cathedral. Metalworkers made works of art out of sanctuary screens, window grilles, balcony railings, door hinges, even nails. Goldsmiths and silversmiths transformed some of the precious metal flowing in from America into ornaments for princes and vessels for the Church; famous were the custodias they made in filigree silver or gold to hold the consecrated Host. Gil Vicente, not satisfied to be the leading dramatist of Portugal and Spain in this period, executed a monstrance—for displaying the Host to the congregation—which has been rated “the masterpiece of the goldsmith’s work in Portugal.”³⁷ And Francisco de Hollanda, Portuguese despite his name, carried on with distinction the dying art of illumination.

All in all, this less than half a century came off with credit in the field of art despite the absorption and disruption of energies in the religious revolution. The masters in architecture, sculpture, and painting were hardly comparable to the giants who shook all Europe with theology; religion was the tune of the time, and art could only provide an accompaniment. But II Rosso, Primaticcio, Lescot, Delorme, Goujon, and the Clouets in France, the Berruguetes in Spain, Brueghel in Flanders, Cranach in Germany, Holbein everywhere, made an honorable roster of artists for an age so agitated and so brief. Art is order, yet everything was in chaos—not religion only, but morals, social order, art itself. Gothic was fighting its losing battle with classic forms, and the artist, uprooted from his own past, had to experiment with tentatives that could not give him the grandeur of a stability mortised in confident time. In the universal turbulence faith too was hesitant, and ceased to give clear imperatives to art; religious images were attacked and shattered; sacred themes that had inspired the creator and the beholder of beauty were losing their power to stir either genius or admiration or piety. And in science the greatest revolution of all was deposing the earth from its theological throne, and losing in the endless void the little globe whose divine visitation had formed the medieval mind and generated medieval art. When would stability come again?