Handbook of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts Part 7

This statue of a holy woman, probably one of the half-sisters of the Virgin, Mary Cleophas, the wife of Alpheus, or Mary Salome, the wife of Zebedee formed part originally, it may be presumed, of a Pieta group.

This remarkable example of German sculpture at the close of the XV century is carved in linden wood, and preserves largely intact the original gilding and polychromy which add so much to the decorative effect of the piece. A second figure from this group, a kneeling Magdalene, is in the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum in Berlin. There has been noted a similarity in style between these two sculptures and the work of the Meister des Blaubeurer Hochaltars (so called from the sculptured high altar in the choir of the cloister-church at Blaubeuren). We have represented, perhaps, a late phase of his art, stronger and more realistic than in his early period. It would be most interesting if the connection with this well-known master could be established, but, failing that, the figure may be confidently attributed to the school of Ulm, about 1500.

We do not expect to find in German sculpture of the XV century that spirituality which characterizes the great achievements of the Italian school. German plastic art was one of realism, modified by a strong decorative tradition centuries old, based not only on precedent but on propriety. If the carved altarpiece were to tell in the subdued light of the Gothic church, the artist had to resort to exaggeration, to sharp contrasts in modeling, to the added emphasis of gold and color, to secure his effect. The skillful artist converted his exaggerations of form and movement into beautiful decoration; seized upon the necessity of contrasting planes as a pretext for crumpling his draperies into numerous rhythmic folds, and used the resources of gilding and polychromy to enrich as well as to emphasize form.

But at his best, the German sculptor was more than a simple decorator.

Our statue is a case in point. Here we have the work of one who surely has looked into the human heart. Beneath the pattern of line and area, beneath the gold and colors, is a living woman. Not our idea of a saint perhaps; rather, a pretty woman, dainty in her ways, coquetting with religeon-nevertheless very real. Our artist may never have seen a saint, but, no doubt, he saw many a maid like this in his parish. If we are not raised to spiritual heights by his conception of a sainted character, we are at least delighted by his charming humanity.

[St. Mary Magdalene, Linden Wood. Attributed to Jorg Syrlin the Younger, 1425-after 1521]

St. Mary Magdalene, Linden Wood. Attributed to Jorg Syrlin the Younger, 1425-after 1521

This relief, attributed to a well-known sculptor of the school of Ulm, one of the chief centers of South German art, may be dated about 1500. Such carvings as this were commonly used to ornament the doors of large shrines. The decorative treatment of the drapery, with its involved folds, is characteristic of the German school.

[Small Column, Marble. Southern French, XIV Century]

Small Column, Marble. Southern French, XIV Century

The foliage carved on the capital of this small column, probably from some cloister, exemplifies the skill with which the Gothic sculptor utilized natural forms as decorative motives.

[St. Francis Receiving the Stigmata. School of Giotto, about 1330]

St. Francis Receiving the Stigmata. School of Giotto, about 1330

The supreme moment in the life of St. Francis, the seraphic Poverello of a.s.sisi, is the subject of this small panel picture, painted in tempera colors with a gold background, by an artist of Giotto's school in the Romagna, who was probably a direct pupil of the great Italian master, and whose charm of color and grace of line were vivified by a feeling for reality of form inspired by Giotto's example. Toward the close of the Saint's life, two years before his death, he retired with some companions to the solitudes of Monte La Verna. On the morning of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, as St. Francis knelt in prayer on a lonely part of the mountain, there appeared to him a seraph with six flaming wings bearing the effigy of Christ crucified. Two wings were raised above His head, two were spread in flight, and and two covered His body. As St. Francis gazed ecstatically upon this vision, the Savior's five wounds were miraculously imprinted on his hands and feet and side. The second figure in the composition is that of the Saint's companion, Brother Leo, who by his aloofness from the dramatic action of the picture serves effectively as a foil to the figure of St. Francis.

[Madonna and Child. The Master of the St. Ursula Legend]

Madonna and Child. The Master of the St. Ursula Legend

The Master of the St. Ursula Legend, a Flemish painter of the second half of the XV century, derives his name from the famous altarpiece in the Convent of the Black Sisters in Bruges representing the history of St.

Ursula, a work painted about 1470. The anonymous master of the Bruges altarpiece shows to some extent the influence of Memling; his style, however, is thoroughly personal in its naivete and admirable expression of a good-natured temperament. His character is well seen in such a painting as ours, where the Mother is full of modesty, her face expressing a tender, timid love for her child, who does not embrace her after all, not the most natural thing for a baby to do, but amuses himself with playing with the leaves of a book which the Madonna holds. The Virgin is a home-like, simple type, wholesome if not beautiful.

[Madonna and Angels. Atelier of Jean Bourdichon, 1457-1521]

Madonna and Angels. Atelier of Jean Bourdichon, 1457-1521

This delightful French miniature, or illuminated page, on parchment is from some dismembered Book of Hours. If not painted by Bourdichon himself, it was certainly done in his studio under his direction. The invention of printing eventually brought to a close the beautiful art of illumination, but at the time of Bourdichon it flourished in highest perfection.

[The Miraculous Field of Wheat. Joachim Patinir and Quentin Ma.s.sys]

The Miraculous Field of Wheat. Joachim Patinir and Quentin Ma.s.sys

Two leading artists of the Flemish school were Quentin Ma.s.sys and Joachim Patinir. Ma.s.sys (1466-1530) began a new epoch in Netherlandish art; he served as a "connecting link" between Jan van Eyck and Rubens. Patinir (died 1524) was one of the first artists to emphasize the landscape rather than the figures in a painting, but the time had not yet come when landscape could be painted for itself alone. It was necessary to relate it with the familiar religious painting of the day by introducing some biblical or legendary theme. A favorite subject was the flight of the Holy Family into Egypt. This is the subject of our panel-painting in which these two great masters collaborated; the landscape and the smaller figures by Patinir, the group of the Holy Family in the foreground by Quentin Ma.s.sys. It is related that the Holy Family, closely pursued by Herod's soldiers, chanced to encounter by the roadside a man sowing wheat in a field. The Virgin spoke to him, saying that if anyone inquired if they had pa.s.sed he should answer, "Such persons came by when I was sowing wheat"; then by a miracle Jesus caused the wheat to spring up and ripen in one night. The next day when the farmer was cutting the wheat, those pursuing the Holy Family came up and asked if he had seen them. He replied as he had been told, with the result that the soldiers turned back, convinced that they had mistaken the road and that the fugitives had gone elsewhere.

RENAISSANCE ART

[A Group in the First Renaissance Gallery]

A Group in the First Renaissance Gallery

Renaissance means re-birth. When the barbarians wrote "finis" on the page of Rome's ancient story, long centuries of tenebrous reorganization were to elapse before Italy once more emerged into the light of civilization.

In comparison with the shadowy gropings of this age of transition, the brilliant culture of the XV and XVI centuries seemed indeed a re-birth, or renaissance of long-departed glories; and, as an apposite description of the art of this period, the word Renaissance is, on the whole, well chosen. Renaissance art attained its most complete expression in Italy during the XV and XVI centuries; but the new style was not confined by any means to Italy alone. During the XV century, Renaissance art began to spread from Italy to other European countries. Late Gothic art could not withstand its bewitchment, and in the XVI century, European art yielded almost without reserve to the ascendancy of the Renaissance style.

Enthusiasm for antiquity and enthusiasm for nature, it has been said, are the chief characteristics of Italian Renaissance art. While this is correct, it is princ.i.p.ally the enthusiasm for antiquity that gives to renaissance art its peculiar distinction; for naturalism we find quite as potent a factor in the development of Gothic art as in that of the Renaissance. The Renaissance artist differed in the main from the Gothic not so much in his att.i.tude toward nature as in the way he recorded his reactions-his style, in other words.

[The Second Renaissance Gallery]

The Second Renaissance Gallery

In the development of the Renaissance style, as distinguished from the Gothic, the example of Graeco-Roman art played an important part.

Humanism, the taste for the literature and history of the ancients, awakened the interest of Italian artists in the monuments of their forgotten past, and led them to seek, in the surviving remains of Roman architecture and in the scanty examples of ancient sculpture and painting that chance had brought to light, the secret of beauty.

The att.i.tude of the Early Renaissance toward the antique differed from that of the Late Renaissance. In the former period (XV century), enthusiasm for the art of an unfamiliar past, romantically dreamed of, rather than archeologically reconstructed, did not lead to that sterile imitation which came with wider knowledge and greater technical facility in the late days of Renaissance art. Artists of this period were disciples rather than imitators. Grandiose and formal, the Late Renaissance (XVI century) lost the child-like, romantic enthusiasm of the earlier period for cla.s.sical art. Sculptors and painters not only sought forms which should recall the antique, but also turned eagerly to Greek and Roman mythology for their subjects. As the Renaissance drew to a close, artists began to borrow not only from the antique but also from the great masters of their own Golden Age, Leonardo (1452-1519), Raphael (1483-1520), Michelangelo (1475-1564), Correggio (1494-1534), and t.i.tian (1477-1576). In this futile eclecticism the Renaissance came to an end.

[Madonna and Child. The Master of the San Miniato Altar-piece]

Madonna and Child. The Master of the San Miniato Altar-piece

The author of this charming panel-painting derives his name from his princ.i.p.al work, a large altarpiece still preserved in the little Tuscan town of San Miniato dei Tedeschi. We do not know the artist's real name nor anything of his life save that his work, of which some eight or nine examples are recorded, shows the influence of the great Florentine master, Fra Filippo Lippi, and of another anonymous painter, the so-called Companion of Pesellino. The painting in our collection dates about 1480.

We note in this picture the plastic quality which distinguishes the work of the Florentine artists from that of other schools. This love of form is an expression of the same temperament which enabled Florence to produce the greatest sculptors of the Renaissance.

[Portrait of an Ecclesiastic. Giovanni Battista Moroni, ca. 1520-1578.]

Portrait of an Ecclesiastic. Giovanni Battista Moroni, ca. 1520-1578.

A contmplative, dignified spirit is admirably expressed in this beautiful portrait, which goes to prove that Moroni at his best is ent.i.tled to a place among the great Italian painters of the Renaissance. Moroni spent most of his life in the little North Italian town of Bergamo, where he lacked the stimulating compet.i.tion that occurred in larger centers. At times, his work, mostly in the field of portraiture, is commonplace, but in such paintings as the celebrated Tailor, in the National Gallery at London, or our own Ecclesiastic, we find an unusual power of perception combined with the "measure, distinction, and clearness" which were the h.e.l.lenistic ideals of his generation.

[Madonna and Child. Giampietrino, fl. first half of XVI Century]

Madonna and Child. Giampietrino, fl. first half of XVI Century

Among Leonardo's Milanese disciples was Gian Pietro Rizzi, commonly known as Giampietrino, a definite artistic personality, but historically hardly more than a name. Although he was probably not a direct pupil of Leonardo, there is ample evidence in his work that he came under the influence of this great master, whose exquisitely perfect art had captivated all of Lombardy. Whatever the subject of his paintings, Giampietro's real theme is always the beauty of woman. Affection, but never any great emotional feeling, is expressed in his numerous paintings of the Madonna, since pa.s.sion would distort the delicate, aristocratic beauty of the forms he modeled with such loving skill. Our painting is exhibited as and indefinite loan from Mr. E. J. Carpenter.