[b] Christ Blessing at the Brescia Gallery.
[d] Christ bereft of His clothes before the Crucifixion, Sienna Academy.
[f] The Dead Christ, and Calling of the Children of Zebedee, Academy, Venice.
It is evident that the ideal Christ as established by the Italians can scarcely be improved upon in art within the prescribed limitations. Christ having lived as an actual man, His representation must be within the bounds of possible experience; and since He died at the age of thirty-three, intellectual power cannot be suggested in His countenance, for this in life means an expression implying large experience warranted only by mature age. The representation is therefore confined to that of a man who, while exhibiting a healthy regularity of form and feature, has lost all sense of earthly pleasure. The beauty achieved by this type is negative, the only marked quality being a suggestion of sadness which, in painting, is necessarily present in all expression where an unconcern with human instincts and passions is depicted. The Italians in their representation of Christ were thus unable to reach the height of the Greek divine portrayals. They were confined to earth, while the Greek figures were symbols of spiritual forms which were pure products of the imagination. Giotto and his successors sought a physically perfect man with all purely human features in expression eliminated. The Greeks, even when representing divinities below Zeus, generalized all human attributes, excluding nothing but the exceptional. They embodied in their forms, truths acknowledged by the whole world; summed up human life to the contentment of all men: there was nothing in their divinities which would prevent their acceptance as spiritual symbols in all religions of civilized peoples. To them human instincts were sacred: all human passions could be ennobled: everything in the natural progression of life came within the purview, and under the protection, of the gods. So the course of their art was definite: there was never a difference as to the goal, for it was universal.
From the point of view of the development of art the ideal Christ has been of little importance compared with the ideal Madonna, though here also the Italians aimed for a particular instead of a general type. They wanted a living woman with the form and features of a pulsating mother; a woman of ordinary life in fact, but infinitely superior in physical beauty, and endowed with the highest grace that their imaginations could conceive and their hands execute. This ideal seemed to germinate with Cimabue, but an immense advance upon him was made by Giotto who was unsurpassed in the representation of the Holy Mother for more than a century. But the ideal was yet purely formal and continued so till past the middle of the fifteenth century, both in Italy and Flanders. Giotto was then excelled by many artists, but the Madonnas they produced, though often very beautiful, are not humanly attractive. They are on the side of the Angels; have never been women evidently, and are far, far away from the human type with tingling veins and heaving breath. Filippo Lippi marked the border line between this type of Madonna, and the advanced pattern produced by the series of great artists of the latter part of the fifteenth century. But with Lionardo, Ghirlandaio, Botticelli, and the rest, the Madonna was scarcely an ideal woman. Living persons were commonly taken as models, and although the portraits were no doubt "improved," they have little connection with the ideal which the artists evidently had in mind. The very life which the artist transfers to canvas in a portrait is destructive of the ideal, for it is a particular life with evidence of particular emotions and passions from which the Madonna should be free.