The same peculiarities which have given him fame as a sculptor he carried out into painting, in which he is even more remarkable; for the artists of Italy at this period often combined a skill for all the fine arts. In sculpture they were much indebted to the ancients, but painting seems to have been purely a development. In the Middle Ages it was comparatively rude. No noted painter arose until Cimabue in the middle of the thirteenth century. Before him, painting was a lifeless imitation of models afforded by Greek workers in mosaics; but Cimabue abandoned this servile copying, and gave a new expression to heads, and grouped his figures. Under Giotto, who was contemporary with Dante, drawing became still more correct, and coloring softer. After him, painting was rapidly advanced. Pietro della Francesca was the father of perspective;Domenico painted in oil, discovered by Van Eyck in Flanders, in 1410; Masaccio studied anatomy; gilding disappeared as a background around pictures. In the fifteenth century the enthusiasm for painting became intense; even monks became painters, and every convent and church and palace was deemed incomplete without pictures. But ideal beauty and harmony in coloring were still wanting, as well as freedom of the pencil. Then arose Da Vinci and Michael Angelo, who practised the immutable principles by which art could be advanced; and rapidly following in their steps, Fra Bartolommeo, Fra Angelico, Rossi, and Andrea del Sarto made the age an era in painting, until the art culminated in Raphael and Corregio and Titian. And divers cities of Italy--Bologna, Milan, Parma, and Venice--disputed with Rome and Florence for the empire of art; as also did many other cities which might be mentioned, each of which has a history, each of which is hallowed by poetic associations; so that all men who have lived in Italy, or even visited it, feel a peculiar interest in these cities,--an interest which they can feel in no others, even if they be such capitals as London and Paris. I excuse this extravagant admiration for the wonderful masterpieces produced in that age, making marble and canvas eloquent with the most inspiring sentiments, because, wrapt in the joys which they excite, the cultivated and imaginative man forgets--and rejoices that he can forget--the untidiness of that World Capital, the many reminders of ages of unthrift, which stare ordinary tourists in the face, and all the other disgusting realities which philanthropists deplore so loudly in that degenerate but classical and ever-to-be-hallowed land. For, come what will, in spite of past turmoils it has been the scene of the highest glories of antiquity, calling to our minds saints and martyrs, as well as conquerors and emperors, and revealing at every turn their tombs and broken monuments, and all the hoary remnants of unsurpassed magnificence, as well as preserving in churches and palaces those wonders which were created when Italy once again lived in the noble aspiration of making herself the centre and the pride of the new civilization.
Da Vinci, the oldest of the great masters who immortalized that era, died in 1519, in the arms of Francis I. of France, and Michael Angelo received his mantle. The young sculptor was taken away from his chisel to paint, for Pope Julius II., the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. After the death of his patron Lorenzo, he had studied and done famous work in marble at Bologna, at Rome, and again at Florence. He had also painted some, and with such immediate success that he had been invited to assist Da Vinci in decorating a hall in the ducal palace at Florence. But sculpture was his chosen art, and when called to paint the Sistine Chapel, he implored the Pope that he might be allowed to finish the mausoleum which he had begun, and that Raphael, then dazzling the whole city by his unprecedented talents, might be substituted for him in that great work. But the Pope was inflexible; and the great artist began his task, assisted by other painters; however, he soon got disgusted with them and sent them away, and worked alone. For twenty months he toiled, rarely seen, living abstemiously, absorbed utterly in his work of creation; and the greater portion of the compartments in the vast ceiling was finished before any other voice than his, except the admiring voice of the Pope, pronounced it good.
It would be useless to attempt to describe those celebrated frescos. Their subjects were taken from the Book of Genesis, with great figures of sibyls and prophets. They are now half-concealed by the accumulated dust and smoke of three hundred years, and can be surveyed only by reclining at full length on the back. We see enough, however, to be impressed with the boldness, the majesty, and the originality of the figures,--their fidelity to nature, the knowledge of anatomy displayed, and the disdain of inferior arts;especially the noble disdain of appealing to false and perverted taste, as if he painted from an exalted ideal in his own mind, which ideal is ever associated with creative power.