\\Ull 



RISE AND PROURKSS 



order, and expended the vast revenue raiso-1 

 front the love or the fears of mankind, in the 

 embellishment of the church. It is true that 

 travelling scholars, waiulerinir burds, and other 

 ftrangers, were entertained hospitably, but the 

 surplus, which our married clergy bestow upon 

 their wives and children, was laid out by the 

 clergy of the lioinish church on illuminated mis- 

 sals, splendid copies of the evangelists, statues 

 of saints and founders of their order, and on 

 pictures by the most inspired masters, in which 

 the glory of religion was maintained, and the 

 taste and wealth of the proprietors manifested. 

 During those days grants were made of oaks 

 from the royal forests for the manufacture of 

 saints and apostles; quarries were opened for 

 the construction of sacred edifices ; artists were 

 allured from foreign parts, and encouragement 

 extended to those at home, and the cathedrals of 

 York and Gloucester, and others scarcely inferior, 

 were erected, forming the wonder of their age 

 as well as of our own. 



The outlay of genius as well as labour in our 

 Gothic edifices is truly wonderful : the geomet- 

 rical combinations and unity of the whole are 

 scarcely less remarkable than the ornamental 

 detail and sculptural enrichments of every part 

 which court the eye. With what skill proces- 

 sions of saints and labours of the apostles are 

 made to work harmoniously in with the starting 

 of arches, or the gatherings of bands ; with how 

 much taste an angel or a devil for the church 

 employed both supports the fantastic ribs of the 

 arched aisles : how gracefully a madonna per- 

 forms her duty, by sustaining the weight of some 

 important portion of the church, while into the 

 hollow, or upon the swelling members of cornices 

 or bands, histories and* miracles are delineated, 

 often with great force and elegance. In one of 

 the screen cornices in Westminster abbey, we 

 have a whole royal history carved ; there is a 

 royal birth, a coronation, a royal judgment-seat, 

 a royal festival, a royal wedding, a royal voyage, 

 a royal visit to a cathedral, and, finally, a royal 

 deathbed. All this is pronounced barbarous by 

 classic scholars and others who see little merit 

 in aught new, and who deem it ,a nobler thing to 

 correct a passage in Pindar or Plutarch than 

 create a Paradise Lost, or a Macbeth. The 

 love of classic architecture is not natural, but 

 inoculated, and must sink beneath the taste of 

 the public which perceives genius akin to its own 

 in the geometrical combinations and historic and 

 legendary embellishments of the Gothic architec- 

 ture. 



The impulse given to painting by Cimabue 

 and Giotti was felt all over Christendom ; archi- 



tecture nevertheless detained it long in bondage 

 as an auxiliary, nor was it till the fifteenth cen- 

 tury that it asserted its superiority and indepen- 

 dence. The frescoes of Masaccio, the works of 

 Mantegna, and the genius of Luca Signorelli of 

 Cortona, united the dawn of art with its fuller 

 radiance the days of Giotti with those of da 

 Vinci. The merits of Signorelli were of a high 

 order ; he contemplated his subjects with a dis- 

 criminating eye ; he determined what was acci- 

 dental, and what was essential and fixed ; he 

 balanced light and shade, and foreshortened with 

 a happy boldness which Michael Angelo did not 

 disdain to imitate. A brighter star now arose : 

 " Leonardo da Vinci," says the enthusiastic 

 Fuseli, " broke forth with a splendour which 

 surpassed former excellence : made up of all the 

 elements that constitute the essence of genius, 

 favoured by education and circumstances, all 

 ear, all eye, all grasp ; painter, poet, sculptor, 

 anatomist, architect, enginee/, chemist, machi- 

 nest, musician, man of science, and sometimes 

 empiric, he laid hold of every beauty in the 

 enchanted circle, but without exclusive attach- 

 ment to one, dismissed in her turn each. To a 

 capacity which at once penetrated the principle 

 and real aim of the art, he joined an inequality 

 of fancy, that at one moment lent him wings for 

 the pursuit of beauty, and the next flung him on 

 the ground to crawl after deformity : we owe him 

 chiaroscuro with all its magic ; we owe him cari- 

 cature with all its incongruities." This great 

 painter was distinguished in his best works by a 

 calm, a solemn grandeur of soul which nothing 

 has ever surpassed ; his Last Supper has a 

 tranquil sublimity, a pathetic grace diffused over 

 it, which contrasts strangely with the whirlwind 

 charge of his horsemen in the celebrated cartoon 

 for Florence. 



A graver, a severer dignity of execution has 

 been claimed for Bartolomeo della Porta ; his 

 style was pure ; the subjects which he selected 

 were chiefly serious ; his draped figures have 

 great simplicity ; his naked figures show his 

 acquaintance with anatomy and the antique ; he 

 foreshortened with equal boldness and accuracy, 

 and used his drapery as subordinate to the body 

 which it exhibited rather than concealed. He is 

 considered the true master of Raphael ; nay, 

 critics have intimated that he had influence on 

 what Fuseli calls the mighty style of Michael 

 Angelo Buonarotti. 



Of Michael Angelo much has been written and 

 said : to the imaginative he appears the mightiest 

 of all the children of art ; to the cold and the 

 reasoning he seems wild and extravagant ; but 

 all agree that his genius was various and of the 



