Giotto
by Harry Quilter · English · Gutenberg #42352 · 320,641 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Giotto
Author: Harry Quilter
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[Illustration: MADONNA AND SAINTS, ATTRIBUTED TO GIOTTO
_In the lower church of Assisi_]
GIOTTO
by
HARRY QUILTER
London
Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington
Crown Buildings. 188, Fleet Street
1880
(All rights reserved.)
London: R. Clay, Sons, and Taylor,
Bread Street Hill, E.C.
TO THE MEMORY
OF
ELIZABETH HARRIET QUILTER
THIS ESSAY IS LOVINGLY DEDICATED
BY
_HER YOUNGEST SON_.
PREFACE.
My only object in writing these few words of preface is to state
plainly the share of originality which belongs to this essay. This is
rendered necessary because the subject of the work has occupied the
attention of many authors of far greater ability and experience than
that of which the present writer can boast.
The extent, then, to which this essay is original is as follows:--The
facts of Giotto's life have been taken from Vasari's _Lives of the
Painters_ and compared with those given by all later writers on the
same subject. As these later authors are mentioned throughout the
book, wherever their opinions are quoted, I need not give a list of
them here. The descriptions of the pictures and sculptures of Giotto
are, in all cases, written by myself after careful study of the
originals. In no case whatever is an opinion expressed upon the merit
or meaning of a work which I have not personally examined; this
applies to all pictures and statues mentioned in the essay as well as
to those of Giotto.
The descriptions of Padua, Assisi, and Florence were written on the
spot, and the vignettes of the two former towns are reduced from
sketches made by myself on purpose for the present work.
The fresco of the _Unknown Madonna_, formerly attributed to Giotto,
and still ascribed to him by the monks of Assisi, is reproduced here,
by chromo-lithography, from a watercolour drawing made by me at Assisi
in the spring of last year--its only use is to show readers the kind
of colouring prevalent in Giotto's work.
Lastly, for all criticisms, theories, and illustrations given in the
essay, I am alone responsible, except in cases where the name of the
author is subjoined in a footnote.
THE WHITE HOUSE, CHELSEA,
_May, 1880_.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I. PAGE
INTRODUCTORY 1
CHAPTER II.
ART IN ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY 11
CHAPTER III.
FRESCO-PAINTING 28
CHAPTER IV.
CIMABUE 33
CHAPTER V.
GIOTTO 41
CHAPTER VI.
THE CHIEF FUNCTION OF PAINTING 53
CHAPTER VII.
THE EARLY WORK OF GIOTTO AT FLORENCE AND ROME 59
CHAPTER VIII.
GIOTTO AT PADUA 68
CHAPTER IX.
GIOTTO'S STYLE 86
CHAPTER X.
GIOTTO AT ASSISI. THE UPPER CHURCH 94
CHAPTER XI.
THE LOWER CHURCH OF ASSISI 111
CHAPTER XII.
GIOTTO'S LATER WORK AT FLORENCE 128
ILLUSTRATIONS.
PAGE
THE UNKNOWN MADONNA AT ASSISI. ATTRIBUTED TO GIOTTO--Frontispiece
THE MADONNA ENTHRONED. BY CIMABUE. IN THE RUCELLAI CHAPEL,
S. MARIA NOVELLA, FLORENCE 36
PASTORAL LIFE. BY GIOTTO. BAS-RELIEF ON THE CAMPANILE,
FLORENCE 42
PADUA. FROM A DRAWING BY THE AUTHOR 71
PARADISE. BY GIOTTO. (GREATLY RESTORED.) IN THE ARENA
CHAPEL, PADUA. _Photograph_ 74
JOACHIM RETIRES TO THE SHEEPFOLD. BY GIOTTO. IN THE ARENA
CHAPEL, PADUA. _Wood Engraving_ 76
THE ENTOMBMENT OF CHRIST. BY GIOTTO. IN THE ARENA CHAPEL,
PADUA. _Photograph_ 80
THE RESURRECTION. "NOLI ME TANGERE." BY GIOTTO. IN THE
ARENA CHAPEL, PADUA. _Photograph_ 82
JUSTICE. BY GIOTTO. IN THE ARENA CHAPEL, PADUA. _Photograph_ 84
THE CHURCH AT ASSISI. FROM A DRAWING BY THE AUTHOR 97
VIEW OF FLORENCE, SHOWING GIOTTO'S CAMPANILE AND THE "DUOMO" 135
THE FIRST ARTS. BY GIOTTO. BAS-RELIEF ON THE CAMPANILE 140
RIDING. BY GIOTTO. BAS-RELIEF ON THE CAMPANILE 142
"As in passing through life we learn many new things, so do we forget
many old things, and gradually the remembrance of them is lost from
among men. Therefore those persons do not reason well who do not study
to perpetuate useful things by writing, because in such case posterity
will hereafter seek in vain for their origin, perfection, and
use."--_Tambroni._
* * * * *
"Such as are ignorant of things done and past before themselves had
any being continue still in the estate of children, able to speak and
behave themselves no otherwise; and even within the bounds of their
native countries (in respect of knowledge or manly capacity) they are
no more than well-seeming dumb images."--_From the Dedication of an
anonymous translation of Boccaccio's Novels, &c._ 1634.
* * * * *
"And so it is with all truths of the highest order: they are separated
from those of average precision by points of extreme delicacy, which
none but a cultivated eye can in the least feel, and to express which
all words are absolutely meaningless and useless. Two lines are laid
on canvas, or cut on stone: one is right and another wrong. There is
no difference between them appreciable by the compasses--none
appreciable by the ordinary eye--none which can be pointed out if it
is not seen. One person feels it, another does not; but the feeling or
sight of the one can by no words be communicated to the other. That
feeling and that sight have been the reward of years of
labour."--_John Ruskin._ 1853.
* * * * *
"I offer this little work as long as I live to the correction of those
who are more learned. If I have done wrong in anything I shall not be
ashamed to receive their admonitions; and if there be anything which
they like, I shall not be slow to furnish more."--_Wilhelm of Bamberg,
circa 1000 A.D._
ERRATA.
Page 28, line 3 from bottom, _for_ Tambrani _read_ Tambroni.
" 46, " 23 " top " hand " panel.
" 68, " 6 " " " O'er " O'erspread.
" 70, " 8 " " " chi " ché.
" 76, " 12 " " " Baptism of Lazarus " Raising of
Lazarus.
" 84, " 16 " bottom, " Selvatia " Selvatica.
" 95, " 1 " " " Sulasio " Subasio.
" 105, " 3 " " Appendix C has been omitted for want of
space.
" 123, " 8 " " _for_ Scavegni _read_ Scrovegni.
" 128, " 5 " top " Links " Lamps.
GIOTTO.
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTORY.
The biographies in this series[1] are intended to help in the
preservation of the memories of those great artists, who, leaving to
the world the legacies of their genius, have not all died, but live to
this hour in the far-reaching influence their works exert. That such
men lived, worked, and perished, is almost the sum of knowledge that
most of us can boast of with regard to them; we here try to add the
simple story of their lives, and perhaps a few touches of description
as to the friends they loved, the country they lived in, and the times
in which they worked; so that, perhaps, they may become in some
measure to us, not only wielders of the chisel and the brush, but men
like ourselves, with moments of frailty as well as exaltation, with
lives more or less difficult through fading ambitions and frequent
failure, but nevertheless bound to us by the tie of a common humanity,
and claiming our sympathy and love, not only for the beauty they have
left us, but because they also carried the burden, and fought the
fight that we are fighting to-day. If it be true, as George Eliot
tells us, that the aspect of affairs for the race, is largely altered
by the influence of "those who have lived faithfully hidden lives, and
rest in unvisited tombs," it is none the less true, that there is some
danger in regarding those whose achievements are of historic
magnitude, as if they belonged to a separate order of humanity, and
were removed alike from its every-day joys and sorrows; and we shall
gain a knowledge by no means to be despised, if we once bring fairly
home to our consciousness the fact that the seeds of greatness
flourish in no other soil than that which we all possess; that the
divine light of genius glorifies natures that are subject to the like
joys, sorrows, and passions as our own, nay, that even, "like the
fierce light that beats upon a throne," it often reveals faults of
which the weakest of us might well be ashamed, as well as virtues of
which we are all capable. It is not by elevating the great to a
passionless region of undisturbed supremacy of life and action, that
we show them our truest reverence, or learn from them our most worthy
lesson, but by seeing them as they were in sober truth. If we would
knit into firmer unison the varying struggles, failures, and triumphs
of our great brotherhood, we must learn to look upon genius, not as
some cold, unapproachable excellence that finds its work in alien
spheres of imagination and action, but rather as a keener insight into
the truths of thought and feeling, with its relations to the everyday
aspects of life, no less than to its most exalted phases.
It will not be wasted time to the busy dwellers in the England of the
nineteenth century, to be led back in spirit to those old Italian days
when as yet civilisation dozed upon the stream of time, when the Arno
and the Tiber ran their course unspanned by other bridges than those
grey stone ones that remain to this day, when under the shadows of the
Umbrian mountains, the rushes of Thrasymene wavered not with the rush
of the locomotive, but the sighing of the breezes, and on the hills of
Assisi the brethren of St. Francis chanted their earliest anthems,
and took their first solemn vows of poverty and obedience. It will not
be wasted time, if a thrill of kindly sympathy can be raised within us
for that old life without whose struggles our fuller knowledge could
never have existed, when the world was plainly divided into soldiers
and scholars, rulers and ruled, men of action and men of thought, when
the good was encrusted with no uncertainties, and the evil mitigated
by no doubts, and all the lives of men were poured along a deeper and
narrower channel than now. Though we should not regret, we should
still remember kindly those times and all that they wrought for us,
and the lessons that they teach, though our lives be cast in a far
different mould.
It is not possible now for a new regenerator of art to cause a new
departure for art by plain reference to natural fact, as did the
subject of this book six hundred years ago; but how long has it been
impossible? For little more than twenty years! Strange as it may seem
to many of our readers, a large portion of the very best art of the
present day is based upon principles which were derived from the works
of Giotto and his immediate successors, and such men as Millais,
Holman Hunt, Rossetti, and Burne Jones, would never have painted as
they have done,[2] had it not been for the Umbrian shepherd boy, whose
story we are about to tell. The quality which they found in Giotto's
work, of simple unswerving truth to the facts of nature and life, this
it is which lies at the root of all their work, this it is which they
sought to find in vain in the pictures of later artists, however
superior such might be, and were, in beauty of form and refinement of
colouring. Forced and eccentric as the work of the modern
pre-Raphaelites at first seemed, it was indubitably based upon a sound
principle--the principle of painting what they saw, and consequently
what they believed in, rather than what they might have seen. They
took up the theory that nature was essentially beautiful and,
carrying it a step further than was usual, drew the conclusion that if
they were absolutely faithful to nature, their work could not be
ugly.[3]
It is hardly too much to say that this principle has gone far to
effect as great a change in modern art as the practice of Giotto
effected in that of six hundred years ago. Even those artists who have
been most antagonistic to the pre-Raphaelite movement, as it is
called, have had their practice modified by it; and though they have
continued to uphold the necessity for following rules of art,
conventionally graceful arrangement of line, and contrasts of light
and shade as the chief elements of pictorial beauty, have still been
forced by their antagonists into bringing their works more into
accordance with natural fact.
Upon this point, however, this is not the place to dwell; it is
sufficient to bear in mind that the influence of Giotto, of which we
have spoken, is one which is even now modifying our art, and that
therefore it will be no small help to the right understanding of
present pictures and picture theories, to understand clearly what
reform it was that Giotto introduced into Italian painting, and how it
comes about that after so long an interval of time his work has come
to form a sort of rallying point for young English artists of our own
day.
There is still another reason for dwelling upon the work of this old
pre-Raphaelite painter; which is, that there is one considerable
section of the English art-world who unite in declaring the essential
and necessary superiority of the Venetian and Florentine painting, say
of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and in speaking in
despairing terms of the hopeless ugliness of modern civilisation. I
often wonder whether those worthy elders, had they lived in the times
of Giotto, would not have referred in terms of despairing eulogy to
the old Roman mosaics of the fifth and sixth centuries, and contrasted
their beauty with the innovating tendency of the shepherd painter, who
actually inserted portraits of living people into his sacred pictures,
and vulgarised the most holy subjects by the insertion of personages
who looked actually glad, or surprised, or sorry, just as they might
have done in actual life!
But it surely is not the case that art alone, of all the great
influences of the world, reached its apogee in the Middle Ages, and
that nothing henceforth remains for it but stagnation or decline. Can
we believe that progress will go on in all else, and that art alone is
doomed to stand still for ever, like a sort of Lot's wife, looking
backward to Venice and Florence, as she to Sodom? Such cannot be the
belief of those who hold that progress is not the result of an
accidental conjunction of fortunate circumstances, but rather that of
an universal law of nature, which ordains that we move for ever
forward, though the steps of our advance are rarely perceptible. It is
possible that all the older forms of art must die--as they seem to be
dying now, of inanition--ere the fuller art be born, but nevertheless
the fuller art must come in its season, and whatever be its
distinguishing characteristic, this at least is certain, that it will
be more in unison with the facts of nature and life, as we now know
them, than a reflection of the faded beauties of ancient story. So
that we are justified in looking with special interest upon the works
of the man who first asserted the principle of the broad relation of
art to life, and painted legends of the Madonna, or whatever were his
subjects, not in the ancient symbolical manner, but as incidents that
happened in the work-a-day world, and were witnessed by spectators,
such as might have really existed, some of whom were curious, some
scornful, and some indifferent.
Whatever changes art may undergo in the future, our debt will be none
the less to those who have made it such as we know it now, to those
early workers who struggled against difficulties and solved them for
us, and whose imperfections formed the groundwork of our fuller
knowledge. And chief of these, as the first who introduced a rational
and verifiable manner of painting, is Giotto Bondone, the pupil of
Cimabue, who not only cast on one side the arbitrary forms of
representation handed down from the Byzantine artists, but, as we have
said, introduced into his pictures the element of natural life, and
carrying his reform into the very heart of his subject, adopted for
his characters not only appropriate action and natural positions, but
made the whole picture tell a story of human life, instead of making
it a composition of more or less graceful lines and variegated
colours.
This will be treated of in subsequent portions of this essay, it is
sufficient to say here that painters were not slow to follow the
example thus set, nor the public to appreciate the change. It was so
sudden and of such marked importance, the advantages gained were so
great, that the new method of painting, completely vanquished the
traditional one, even in the artist's own lifetime; and with the whole
weight of tradition, and with the Church's dislike to innovation to
contend with, it succeeded in permanently establishing itself in
public favour.
From the time of Giotto's early manhood to the death of Titian, the
history of painting is mainly the history of the principles which the
former artist taught his pupils and exemplified in his works.
Even in landscape painting, which was hardly if at all practised in
his time, the advance made by Giotto was remarkable, as he substituted
for the ordinary conventional background, scenes in which nature was
represented faithfully, though with many shortcomings of perspective
and errors of proportion such as were inevitable in a first attempt.
However, for two hundred years afterwards the advance in landscape was
very slight,[4] and in some respects his designs of leaves and
foliage, especially some of those in the sculptures on the Campanile
at Florence, are still worthy of our admiration for their fidelity, no
less than for their beauty.
And lastly, to conclude this introductory chapter, it may be worth
while to attempt to answer the question of what analogy we can find
between the work of Giotto and that of the present day, and what
lessons we can derive from the former. Now that we have had our road
cleared of the many difficulties that beset the old Italian artist,
have we any left that he can teach us how to master, and if so, what
are they?
The answer is a very simple one. In his time art was suffering its
restriction to a certain class of subjects, the religious; and a
certain way of representing those subjects, the conventional. This
restriction had engendered a purely formal and unemotional art, and an
almost total suppression in pictures of the elements of fancy and the
realisation of natural fact. In the present day, as in the thirteenth
century, art suffers from restrictions, the difference being, that
instead of being imposed from without, they are imposed from within,
or in other words, they are developments from her own practice. The
effect of the great advance in art made in the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries has been to make modern artists look at nature in a
particular way, _i.e._, in the manner in which the painters of that
day originated; and instead of aiming at beauty through truth to
nature and life, they rather aim at it through an imitation of the
works of Raphael and Titian. The perfection of _technique_ reached by
those masters and their contemporaries, has raised the admiration of
all later painters to such a degree that they have exalted the methods
of this Renaissance painting into a religion, and seek to find in the
laws of chiaroscuro, composition, balance, and harmony of colour,
which they can deduce from the pictures of that period, the source of
the inspiration that renders those works immortal. Thus art is still
in service, in service to itself; it has but burst one set of fetters
that it might "gather the links of the broken chain to fasten them
proudly round her." No longer bound by superstition and formalism; she
is bound by bonds of her own making, and falls down, like Narcissus of
old, in worship of her own fair face. Indeed the present error is
really a deeper one than that which Giotto vanquished, for throughout
all the degradation of art in the early centuries of the Christian
era, there was one principle which had been clung fast to, and that
was, that pictures should represent things worthy to be represented;
it is true that the range was narrowed and its treatment governed by
rule, but it may be doubted whether this was not preferable to our
present indifference of what it is that is painted, or whether
anything should be painted at all.
For it must be noticed that many modern writers on art seem to hold,
and artists to exemplify, the principle, that one subject is as good
as another; in fact, that the treatment is everything, the meaning of
the work wholly subsidiary. Art no longer exists to depict worthily
worthy things, but rather like an æsthetic Blondin balances itself
solemnly on a tight-rope of its own construction, seeming to pride
itself upon its removal from the vulgar crowd, and moves onward with
abstracted gaze, heedless of the oft repeated cries of "Come down."
Yet now, as in the older centuries, men sorrow and hope, succeed and
fail, and woman's beauty is as fair, and her heart as tender, as under
the Italian sunshine six hundred years ago; there may be at the
present hour in the cottages of England, as then mid the hills of
Vespignano, peasants' children in whom the inspiration of art is
struggling for utterance, needing but the chance that Cimabue gave to
Giotto, to give to mankind new lessons of beauty and truth. In a word,
now as then, the subjects of art and its power are the same as they
have ever been, and men have not ceased to be the same because the
fashion of their dress is changed, and they no longer display their
emotions with the frank egotism of the Middle Ages. And, as has been
said, the history of Giotto is the history of the man who first in
painting gave expression to all the diverse emotions of men, who
refused to believe that traditional arrangements of line, and
profuseness of colouring, could be efficient substitutes for the vital
facts of nature and life; who taught that painting is but one of the
means by which man speaks to man, and that therefore the words it says
are as important, perhaps more so, as the way in which they are said.
So I repeat the history of this old pre-Raphaelite is doubly
important to us at this day, not only as the founder of the great
schools of Italian painting, but as the energetic reformer in whose
works our artists may find an exhortation to cast away formulas for
facts, and rely for the beauty and attractiveness of their pictures,
more upon their correspondence with nature, than their subservience to
artistic tradition.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] This essay was originally written for, and will ultimately appear
in, the series of "Illustrated Biographies of the Great Artists,"
published by Messrs. Sampson Low, and Co.
[2] See _Pre-Raphaelitism_, by John Ruskin. 1862.
[3] In this connection the following quotation from Mr. Ruskin's
description of the origin of English pre-Raphaelitism may be found
interesting. He is here speaking of Messrs. Millais, Hunt, and
Rossetti: "Pupils in the same schools receiving precisely the same
instruction, which for so long a time has paralysed every one of our
painters; these boys agree in disliking to copy the antique statues
set before them. They copy them as they are bid, and they copy them
better than anybody else; they carry off prize after prize, and yet
they hate their work. At last they are admitted to study from the
life, they find the life very different from the antique, and they say
so. Their teachers tell them the antique is the best, and they must
not copy the life. They agree among themselves that they like the life
and that copy it they will. They do copy it faithfully, and their
masters forthwith declare them to be lost men. Their fellow-students
hiss them whenever they enter the room. They cannot help it, they join
hands and tacitly resist both the hissing and the instruction.
Accidentally a few prints of the works of Giotto, a few casts from
that of Ghiberti, fall into their hands, and they see in them
something which they never saw before; something eternally and
everlastingly true."
[4] "From Giotto's old age to the youth of Raphael the advance
consists principally in two great steps: the first, that distant
objects were more or less invested with a blue colour; the second,
that trees were no longer painted with a black ground but with a rich
dark brown, or dark green one."--_John Ruskin._
CHAPTER II.
ART IN ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY.
If we would gain a true and adequate conception of the works and merit
of any painter, it is necessary for us not only to examine his special
productions, but to become in some measure acquainted with the state
in which art was during his time. And not only is it necessary to take
into account the actual amount of progress then manifested in one
particular branch, such as painting, but to consider also the
tendencies of the age, if we would separate the influence exercised by
the artist's work, and define its true significance. Therefore readers
will not think it irrelevant to the right telling and understanding of
the life of Giotto, if they are first asked to consider for a short
time the condition of art in the year 1276; and in order to thoroughly
comprehend this condition, we must for a moment carry our thoughts
back a thousand years further still, and think of those days when art
and paganism flourished side by side in the Grecian republic.
It would be difficult at any time, impossible in the short space at
our disposal, to explain the peculiar action and reaction of Greek art
upon Greek religion; we must content ourselves with noting the fact
that the two were absolutely inseparable--that the religion owed its
influence over men's minds in no small degree to the power of art, is
as indisputable as that art gained enormously in dignity and strength
by being considered as the greatest exponent of religion, and by all
its most important achievements being consecrated to that service. But
if the Greek art was on the one hand indissolubly connected with the
national religion, it was, on the other, no less connected with the
national life. If the wisdom of Zeus, the pride of Juno, and the
tenderness of Venus ornamented one side of the amphora, the struggles
of the chase and the contests of the gymnasia adorned the other; nor
did it seem to the people that there was anything extraordinary in
thus mingling the doings of their neighbours, and the actions of their
gods. Why! their gods, after all, were but neighbours of a higher
order, and had even been known to succumb to the craft or bravery of
men. The barrier between seen and unseen scarcely existed; but nature
passed through almost imperceptible gradations, from the dryad of the
woodland, to the ruler of Olympus. Had their religion, their art, and
their life stood apart, as, unhappily, religion, art, and life stand
apart now, the rise of Christianity could never have produced the
withering effect upon all works of imagination which we know occurred;
for it could not have taken away, at one blow, both the motives and
the subjects of art, however it might have changed the mode of their
representation; nor would Christianity have been opposed to it in like
manner, had it not clearly perceived that it was one of the great
instruments in the hands of the pagan priests. Unable to pervert to
spiritual conceptions an art whose only conception of spiritual things
was the perfection of bodily ones, ascetic Christianity had no choice
but to discourage the practice of art altogether, and this is what
actually happened. Gradually as the study of the nude figure was
abandoned, the ignorance of the artists of the real outlines of the
human form increased; and gradually, as the first broad Christian
theory of fellowship and brotherhood, faded through the help of the
priest into a stern, asceticism, enforced by Church tradition, all
representations of vigour and manly beauty were considered to verge
upon the profane, till at last we find in the work of the fifth to the
tenth centuries, an almost total absence of all study of either nature
or man; the former being totally disregarded, the latter represented
under rude types, which were repeated from age to age without variety
or improvement. Splendour of material and colouring were made to atone
for poverty of conception and absence of thought, and the great art of
those ages was one which the Greeks had only considered worthy to
decorate the floors of their palaces. This art of mosaic, which about
the fourth century[5] began to supersede painting in tempera and
encaustic, was peculiarly fitted to be the servant of asceticism. In
the course of its practice all the flowing lines of drapery became
harsh and stiff, the limbs lost their suppleness and movement, the
face its expression and life, and in fact the whole picture became
less a representation of an occurrence, than a type to recall
some subject to the mind. If we remember that many of the facts
of the Christian religion were such as almost to defy absolute
representation, we shall discover another reason for the adoption of
this work. It is to be noted that, according to Pliny, mosaic began to
be in vogue in Rome about 170 years before Christ. Kugler asserts that
this art was an invention of the Alexandrian age, but in this he
appears to be mistaken, and it is more probable that the Greeks
received it from Persia and Assyria (through their Ægean colonies and
the histories of Phoenician merchants), in which countries the art
seems to have been of great antiquity,[6] The finest examples of these
wall mosaics are to be found in Rome and Ravenna, and, at a later
date, in the decoration of St. Mark's, at Venice, to which we shall
hereafter have occasion to refer. Another kind of art of great
importance at this time was Illumination, the earliest traces of which
are found towards the close of the second century, when the present
form of leaves sewn together at the back superseded the rollers which
had been previously used. The first embellishments were simple
enlargements and variety of colouring in the letters; from this, the
advance to borders and illustrative designs was comparatively
rapid.[7] The earliest examples of importance remaining at the present
day, are the _Dioscorides_, in the library at Vienna, and the
_Virgil_, in the Vatican, both of which are supposed to be of the
fourth century.
The influence of tradition, asceticism, and sacerdotalism, acted in a
precisely similar way to restrain the art of illumination, as it did
to destroy that of painting and sculpture. At first the Byzantine
school of illuminators greatly surpassed those of the Western world,
but, as Humphreys says, "They belonged to a sinking and not a rising
civilisation, and we find them gradually deteriorating after the tenth
century, and never originating a new style or gradually progressing to
more intricate or beautiful treatment of their subjects, but on the
contrary, uninfluenced by the change and progress that was at work in
Western Europe, they plodded on in the traditional track; the ancient
costume and the bright gold of their miniatures of the fifth century
still continuing in practice to the later period of Byzantine
illumination; and even in the year 1846, M. Papetie found the monks of
Mount Athos decorating portions of their monastery with figures of the
apostles and evangelists of the old approved pattern, and painted on
the traditional gold grounds, the exact counterpart of those of the
fifth century."[8]
We have spoken of the Byzantine mosaic and illumination, and have only
to mention their architecture to complete our account, for it must be
remembered that almost every artistic impulse of these centuries was
due either mediately or immediately to the influence of
Constantinople, which, however stationary, or even declining in its
civilisation, was yet the great centre of enlightenment.
It is quite impossible I believe to give in a few lines any
description of the peculiarities of Byzantine architecture, dependent
as that style was upon a combination of the Grecian, Roman, and
Arabian methods of building. We know that one element in the style was
the combination of the round dome with the ancient temple, and that
the shape and size of the building was in the first place determined
by the necessities of its worship. As is pointed out by Professor
Brown,[9] "the Christian mode of worship required a style of building
considerably different from the heathen temple. Instead of a mere
sacristry for the priest, the term at which the pomp of processions
ended, and in the front of which, under the vault of the sky,
sacrifices were performed, shelter was now required for the multitude
offering their prayers, according to ritual, and receiving instruction
from their pastors. New places for sacred edifices were therefore
required, and those of great dimensions, with ample space and superior
accommodation within the interior." The result of this demand led to
the selection and adaptation of the most suitable buildings which were
then available, and these happened to be the ancient basilicas or
halls of justice, of which, as they are the origin of all Christian
churches, the following description may be interesting to some of my
readers:[10] "A basilica was a public edifice of the ancient Romans,
consisting of an oblong interior divided in its width into three
divisions by two rows of columns. At the upper end it had a large
niche or tribune, where courts of justice were held. The basilica was
a place of general resort, like an exchange of modern times. These
places also became to be used by the Christians for their place of
meeting, and afterwards churches were built on the model of the
basilicæ, and the name of basilicæ is still affixed to the principal
churches in Rome. To a building of this kind there was added a
transept, to give a cruciform shape; and so the general plan of our
churches came to be adopted."
If the exigencies of room and haste led to the transposition of these
ancient exchanges into churches, and fixed the form of the Christian
architecture of the future; the zeal of the new faith also determined
in no small measure the style of adornment of their interiors. For,
again, the haste for their decoration was so great that the
importation of marble from the quarries nearly twenty miles from Rome
was too slow a method for the Christians to adopt, and they
"immediately commenced the work of demolition among the classic
edifices of antiquity erected by the pagan Romans, chiefly for the
value of the materials."[11] This was probably the origin of the
method of incrustation, which forms such a remarkable feature in the
Byzantine architecture, and indeed is, according to Ruskin, its most
typical feature. The process of changing a basilica into a cathedral
being somewhat akin to that of changing a barrack into a palace, the
rich materials had to be used as sparingly as possible, in order to
make them sufficient for the concealment of the original poverty of
the structure, and this naturally led to the blocks of marble being
divided into thin slabs, in order to gain as much surface decoration
as possible, and caused also the delicate proportions of symmetry and
uniformity in the Grecian temples to be neglected, since the
proportions had to be taken as they were found, and made the best of.
If we then add to this first origin of the Christian architecture, the
influences which were likely to attend upon its transference to the
East, we easily perceive how its more elaborate decorations and
peculiarities arose. The employment of coloured marbles, which arose
first from the necessity of making use of the scattered fragments of
the ancient temples, was continued, through a love for the
picturesqueness of the effect produced; the elements of size,
proportion, and simplicity, on which the structure of the Grecian
temples had been founded, once lost sight of, those of variety and
intricacy took their place. Eastern magnificence covered the walls
with gold and colours, while the necessities of excluding the fierce
sunshine of the East, narrowed the windows, and produced the chequered
gloom, through which the lustre of the golden crucifix, and the silver
lamp, alone shone clearly. Such was the rise of the Byzantine
architecture, which, however lacking it may be in strictness of taste
and correctness of method, has always been powerful over men's minds
to an almost unparalleled extent.[12]
And in this architecture and decoration everything was subordinated to
the religious impression; from its meanest detail, to the very shape
of the church itself, everything was a type of the Christian faith and
hope, and was neither valuable nor precious, save as the symbol of the
unseen divinity. It can be easily imagined how quickly art sank wholly
under this influence, and became the mere servant of the popular
superstition. As in ancient Greece, so in Byzantium, the priests used
art for their great lever to move the imaginations of the people; the
difference being only that as the religion was of a different kind, so
was the art. This world was a hospital; "health and heaven were to
come";[13] that was practically the belief of these early ages of the
Christian Church. It is indeed the theory of the Church at the present
day. So art no longer sought to find her gods in an apotheothised
humanity, but substituted arbitrary types for the things unspeakable;
thus a hand reaching down from the sky typified the Almighty; a dove
was the recognised symbol of the spirit, and so on.[14]
And as the Church gradually encroached more and more upon the lives of
the people, and as with its increasing influence it asserted its
supremacy on every domain of human life; so it extended its power of
repression upon the subjects as well as upon the methods of art. Not
only was the barrier raised against all representations of bodily
strength, grace, and beauty, but even in the delineation of sacred
subjects, the artist was forbidden to render them in any way human by
using his powers of conception and modification. Hardly even was a
variation of grouping or the introduction of a figure allowed in the
treatment of the religious events; and for hundreds of years St. John
and the Virgin stood in the same attitude, at the right and at the
left hand of the cross, and Christ, in the centre of the picture,
gazed upon the spectators with the placid eyes of divine power, of
which no agony could avail to dim the Godhead. To the end of the
eleventh century all expression of pain upon the face of the Saviour
was entirely absent, absolutely forbidden by the priesthood. He was
depicted as standing upon the cross with erect head and widely open
eyes,[15] and in aspect, as Crowe says, "either erect or menacing."
While this spirit of representation continued, it was manifestly
impossible for art to improve. All study of the nude discouraged, if
not forbidden, all the worth of material beauty despised, all
originality of conception sternly interdicted, and all expression of
human emotion considered as irreligious, the unhappy painters had no
opening left them for anything but slavish imitations of their
predecessors. It would take me too long to show how this
anti-naturalism of the Church came to be in some degree modified;
probably one of the chief causes was the recognition by the priesthood
of the progressive tendency of the times, and the consequent
relaxation of the harsh restrictions which had fixed the limits of
pictorial art. In every age the essential principle of the Catholic
religion in its dealings with secular matters has been an adoption of
the tendencies which it could not repress, and the endeavour to turn
them to its own advancement. It may well be that the growing
naturalism of pictorial representation from the twelfth century to the
end of the thirteenth was sanctioned by the Church from this cause. In
any case, during this period religious art took its first hesitating
steps in the right direction. Slowly the crucifixes represented the
Saviour with downcast head and closed eyes, and his body no longer
stood erect upon the cross, but swayed outward in the pain of death.
Such was the state of painting at the beginning of the thirteenth
century, purely devoted to religious subjects, and representing those
subjects according to established forms--influenced chiefly by the
traditions of ancient art which were received from the schools of
Byzantium, but fettered by those traditions being embodied in
Christian types, and complicated by the introduction of Church
symbolism. Thus, for instance, in the treatment of the drapery in the
mosaics executed at Venice by the Greek, Apollonius, something of the
ancient manner may be observed through all the figures; but the
rigidity of the lines, the meagreness of the bodies, and the
lifelessness of the composition are entirely due to the influences of
asceticism which prevailed in the early Church.
Sculpture was in an identical position till the celebrated pulpit at
Pisa was made by Niccola Pisano in 1260; in which the same imitation
of the antique, combined in a lesser degree with the restraining
influences above mentioned, forms a nearer approach to the Gothic
naturalism of Giotto than we can trace elsewhere. Pisano's gift in
design was a far lower one than Giotto's, though he was much greater
in sculptural skill, for in his works the new element is not so much
the rejection of tradition for the sake of nature, as the partial
rejection of ascetic religion for the sake of imitating the antique.
It is true that by this adherence to the form of Grecian sculpture he
far exceeds the works of his contemporaries and predecessors of the
Middle Ages, but that is only because the schools he imitated had
studied nature so devotedly; there is in his work much of the spirit
of the antique, but little of the spirit of nature on which the
antique was founded. According to Crowe,[16] in the later work of
Niccola Pisano there is a reference to natural models observable, but
I have not seen the pulpit at Siena of which he is speaking; and it is
notable that there were several pupils of Pisano engaged upon this
work, and that Crowe admits that where the references to nature occur,
precisely there "is the master's ability least visible," so it is at
least possible that they may not have been the work of his own hand.
Many other architects and sculptors of the thirteenth century there
are; but we cannot spare space to do more than mention their names.
Arnolfo, Giovanni Pisano, Fra Guglielmo, and the three Florentines,
Lapo, Donato, and Goro are the chief; their doings are described by
Crowe in his chapter on the progress of sculpture in the first volume
of the _History of Painting in Italy_, in which there is a full
description of the manner of each, and an examination of the
questionable statements of Vasari concerning them.
What is interesting with regard to the subject of our biography in
respect of these sculptors is, that they were the forerunners of that
revival of the study of nature, in which he subsequently played the
most important part. It does not appear to me that they actually
attempted, as is asserted by Crowe, "to graft on the imitation of the
antique a study of nature," but rather that their imperfect naturalism
arose from a misrepresentation of the antique work, and an almost
total rejection of the Byzantine formalism. It is a curious example of
Ruskin's dictum that the energy of growth in any people may be almost
directly measured by their passion for sculpture or the drama, that
just at the time when Italy was beginning that splendid forward
movement which crowned, with a blaze of light, the dark mountain of
the Middle Ages; just then sculpture should have as it were leapt into
full life after a sleep of nearly a thousand years.
According to Lanzi[17] the improvement of mosaic followed that of
sculpture, and a Franciscan friar named Fra Jacopo Torriti, surpassed
all the contemporary Greek and Roman workers in mosaics. "On examining
what remains of his works at Santa Maria Maggiore at Rome, one can
hardly believe that it is the production of so rude an age, did not
history compel us to believe it. It appears probable that he took the
ancients for his models, and deduced his rules from the more chaste
specimens of mosaic still remaining in several of the Roman churches,
the design of which is less crude, the attitudes less forced, and the
composition more skilful, than were exhibited by the Greeks who
ornamented the church of San Marco at Venice. Mino surpassed them in
everything. From 1225 when he executed, however feebly, the mosaic of
the tribune of the church of San Giovanni at Florence, he was
considered at the head of living artists in mosaic. He merited this
praise much more by his works at Rome; and it appears that he long
maintained his reputation."
There is no doubt that the art of mosaic was in full practice in Italy
at this period, and was not, as has been supposed, confined to the
Greeks. There is a curious passage in the work of the Abbé
Montfaucon[18] who made an extensive tour through Italy in 1695, to
the effect that in the cathedral of Spoleto above the front entrance,
he saw a piece of mosaic work made in the year 1207, with the
following inscription:--
"Hic est pictura quam fecit sat placitura,
Doctor Solfernus hac summo in arte modernus.
Annis inventis cum septem mille ducentis
Operarij Palmenus," &c., &c.
Translation of the above inscription--
"This picture, which will please well, was made by Doctor
Solfernus, the ablest of the moderns in this art, in the year
1207. The workmen were Palmenies," &c., &c.
I can find no other record of this Doctor Solfernus, but there can be
little doubt that the art was at this time generally known throughout
Italy.
We need not pause here to examine the question of whether Kugler is
right in asserting that towards the close of the ninth century the art
of mosaic had almost ceased in Italy; that it had done so at Rome
appears certain; but at Venice, and also in southern Italy and Sicily,
the art, if discontinued, was soon revived by the importation of Greek
artists, and continued in full practice from the eleventh to the end
of the fifteenth century, when it may be considered to have received
its death-blow from the hand of oil painting.[19] It may, I think, be
assumed that the arts of mosaic and painting were carried on at Rome
during the tenth century, but were probably in a very declining state,
and were quite superseded by the superior skill of the Greek artists.
There was a school of painting at Pisa as early, according to Lanzi,
as the beginning of the twelfth century, and he gives an account of "a
parchment containing the _exultet_, as usually sung upon Sabbato Santo
(which) is in the cathedral, and we may here and there observe painted
on it figures in miniature with plants and animals: it is a relique of
the early part of the twelfth century, yet a specimen of art not
altogether barbarous. There are likewise some other paintings of that
century in the same cathedral, containing figures of our Lady, with
the Holy Infant on her right arm: they are rude, but the progress of
the same school may be traced from them to the time of Giunta." We may
notice that Crowe and Cavalcaselle give the eleventh century as the
date of the earliest pictures (crucifixes) at Pisa, but their only
authority for this is the negative one of the Saviour's upright
position, which, as we have mentioned above, was always observed up to
the eleventh century. There is, however, no sufficient ground for
believing that after this date the erect position was invariably
departed from. Giunta of Pisa painted in the first half of the
thirteenth century, and was the best of the Pisan school as far as is
at present known. It is, however, supposed by some who are most
conversant with early Italian painting, that this school subsequently
developed some great artists whose works are still to be seen, though
their names have unfortunately perished; this would, however, be
denied by Cavalcaselle.
I have spoken as shortly as I could of the sort of art in painting,
mosaic, and sculpture which preceded Giotto; but before I close this
very imperfect, and I fear confused and tedious, historical sketch,
there is one other source of artistic influence which I must briefly
mention, that is the influence of the Lombardic architecture of the
twelfth century, which is seen to the greatest perfection in the
cities of northern Italy, and which Mr. Ruskin once asserted to be the
"root of all the mediæval art of Italy--without which no Giottos, no
Angelicos, and no Raphaels would have been possible." The influence of
this architecture upon Giotto, and his intense liking for it, is
evident from the frequency with which he introduced it into the
frescoes.
The Lombardic is the development in the West of the Romanesque
architecture, whose leading feature was the round arch; it is the
Byzantine style, without some of its Eastern characteristics, but with
other peculiarities derived from Western sources.
Perhaps its most special feature, the one in which it has been without
a rival in any bygone age, and is without a rival still, is in the
decorative use of brick and terra-cotta. The very name has reference
to this, for in the great plains of Lombardy where there is little
stone, clay was naturally used as far as it possibly could be, to
supply its place; and mouldings and statues which would have been
carved from the solid stone or marble under more favourable
circumstances, were here moulded out of brick. Hence arose a style
which, as it could not depend upon the richness of its material, or
the difficulty of its workmanship, could gain its only reward from
its delicacy of invention and grace of design, and in which the actual
building of its sculptured tiles formed no inconsiderable part. This
elevation of an ignoble material into value and dignity was, as Grüner
says, actually effected in the Lombardic churches, and to them belongs
that subtle charm which we involuntarily experience on discovering the
perfect adaptation of simple things to great uses. Though nowhere
carried to such perfection as by the Lombards of the twelfth century,
this decorative use of brick was by no means a discovery of the more
modern times, as we see from the following extract from Thomas Hope's
_Historical Essay on Architecture_:--"The ancient Romans wherever they
found clay more abundant or easier to work than stone, used it
plentifully, both in regular layers throughout the body of the walls
as we do, and in an external reticulated coating, which has proved to
be as durable as stone itself, from the fineness of its texture and
the firmness of its joints. Indeed far from considering brick as a
material fit only for the coarsest and most indispensable groundwork
of architecture, they regarded it as equally adapted for all the
elegances of ornamental form--all the details of rich architraves,
capitals, friezes, cornices, and other embellishments. Sometimes it
owed to the mould its various forms, and at others, as in the
_Amphitheatrum Castrense_, and the temple of the god Ridiculus, to the
chisel."[20]
I almost despair of conveying an idea of the peculiarities of this
architecture to those who have never seen any examples of it, its
chief elements being those of simplicity and intricacy, solidity and
lightness; it appearing, in fact, to be a mass of contradictions. Its
Byzantine origin, or rather the influence on it at some time of
Byzantine art, is clearly perceptible in the variety of colour which
is employed; yellow, and white, and red, and green, and black tiles
and bricks being used alternately, with the utmost skill and the
greatest variety of effect. But it is to the varieties of tower and
cupola and dome that Lombardic architecture shows its most distinctive
character; every combination of round arch vaulting with square,
hexagonal, or circular towers, was used by them with a boldness, and a
disregard of convention for which I know no parallel. And the result
justified their daring.
Constructed first simply on the model of the old Roman basilica, then
modified and extended by the influence of the art which Greek workmen
brought from Constantinople, combining the fancy of the Arab, the
roughness of the Goth, and the formalism of the Greek, this
architecture grew from the seventh to the twelfth centuries, like a
flower or tree, rejecting none of the influences with which it was
surrounded. It may be possible, I have no doubt it is, for those who
are skilled in the science of architecture, to discover the elements
of a correct uniform style in these Lombardic buildings; but I confess
that to me it seems but as the result of people who were prepared to
make use of anything that came in their way, and had never formulated
a method of building at all. The Roman arch, the Byzantine dome, the
Arabian minaret, the square tower, the mosque, the basilica, and the
temple, were all mingled here in a confusion of detail, which was yet
executed with the utmost simplicity, we had almost said poverty, of
material, and of which it is difficult to say whether the first
impression produced, is wonder at the variety, indignation at the
eccentricity, or delight at the effect of the whole building.[21]
I have now touched on the chief sources of artistic influence in Italy
towards the middle of the thirteenth century, which, briefly summed
up, are these--an art of painting which had become little more than a
handicraft, carried on in Rome after the recipes of long perished
masters, and in other parts of Italy either dormant, or kept alive
only by such men as Giunta of Pisa, and the pupils of the Greek
artists; an art of mosaic work which also owed its chief, if not its
only, importance, to Byzantine workmen, and which was even then
engaged in decorating the shrine of St. Mark at Venice, with Grecian
designs. In sculpture, the Pisani, father and son, and their pupils
and fellow workers, trying to revive classicalism as a barrier against
the false state of religious art, but failing to see that, after all,
the strength of the ancients lay not in their ideal, but in their real
perfection of nature--and so losing itself in the wilds of imitative
and traditional art; and lastly, there were flourishing in Italy, two
great schools of architecture closely allied, the Byzantine and the
Lombard, and gradually spreading was a third school destined to
destroy them both, which we have nicknamed Gothic. Try to realise the
artistic state of the country amongst this medley of dead and dying
styles, with the whole influence of the classic past in favour of the
traditional mode of painting and sculpture, and the whole strength of
the priesthood arrayed against any attempt to make fresh inroads upon
the sacred realm of Church symbolism and scriptural formalism; the
Church still holding fast to the ascetic theory as the one saving
grace, perhaps even the more strongly, because the ascetic practice
had become a thing of the past.
FOOTNOTES:
[5] See Kugler's _Handbook of Painting_, edited by Lady Eastlake,
1874, pp. 17 and 18, for a description of the origin of mosaic art.
[6] For origin of mosaic work see Pliny xxv., xxxiii., xxxv. See also
the _Iconographic Encyclopædia_, by Heck, translated from the German
by Spencer F. Baird, New York, 1851, vol. ii. p. 77, &c., and
Fosbroke's _Cyclopædia of Antiquities_, 1840.
[7] See _Art of Illumination_, 1844, and _Illuminated Books of the
Middle Ages_, 1849. By Henry Noel Humphreys.
[8] For more on this subject see the _Nouveau Traité de Diplomatie_ of
the Benedictines.
[9] Brown's _Sacred Architecture_, 1845, pp. 24, 25.
[10] Brown's _Sacred Architecture_, 1845.
[11] Cadell's _Italy_, vol. ii. p. 339.
[12] For a very interesting description of this feature in Byzantine
work see _The Stones of Venice_, by John Ruskin, vol. ii.
[13] Ruskin's _Crown of Wild Olive_, Introduction.
[14] For an account of Christian Symbolism, see Mrs. Jameson's _Sacred
and Legendary Art_.
[15] See _A New History of Painting in Italy_. By J. A. Crowe and G.
B. Cavalcaselle, 1864; vol. i. chap. 4.
[16] Lord Lindsay, in his _History of Christian Art_, asserts that in
painting, the schools of Giotto, Siena, and Bologna spring immediately
from the work of Niccola Pisano. Vol. ii., p. 113. See, for an account
of his pupils, pages 115 _et seq._ of vol. ii.
[17] _History of Painting in Italy_, vol. i. p. 9; Roscoe's
translation, 1828.
[18] See _The Antiquities of Italy_, translated from the original
Latin of Bernard de Montfaucon. London, 1725.
[19] For a full discussion of this question see Kugler's _Handbook of
Painting, Italian Schools_, vol. i. pp. 43 _et seq._
[20] For an interesting account of building in terra-cotta, and the
various operations of drying, baking the tiles, &c., see Grüner's
_Terra-Cotta Architecture of Italy_. Introductory Essay. 1867.
[21] See also chapter xxii. of Hope's _Historical Essay on
Architecture_.
CHAPTER III.
FRESCO PAINTING.
"Ascend the right stair from the further nave
To muse in a small chapel scarcely lit
By Cimabue's Virgin. Bright and brave
That picture was accounted, mark, of old;
A king stood bare before its sovran grace,
A reverent people shouted to behold
The picture, not the king, and even the place
Containing such a miracle grew bold."
--MRS. BARRETT BROWNING.
As we shall have occasion, in the following pages, to speak of fresco,
secco, and tempera, as distinguished from oil painting, it will be
wise to try and understand clearly what these methods of work are, and
in what respects they differ from, exceed, or fall short of, the
modern practice.
Tempera[22] is the old name for any vehicle used in painting. The two
great divisions of painting in the Middle Ages were fresco and secco;
shortly put "fresco," meaning the painting on walls when the plaster
was wet; "secco," the painting when it was dry. In fresco painting no
vehicle was used but water; in secco painting a tempera was used
composed of white and yolk of egg. Thus, in Cennino Cennini's
_Treatise on Painting_, written in 1437,[23] he says:--"Two sorts are
good, but one is better than the other. The first tempera consists in
the white and yolk of an egg into which are put some cuttings from the
top of a fig-tree; beat them well together, then add some of this
tempera, and not in too great quantity, to each of the vases (of
colour), as if you were diluting them with water. The second kind of
tempera is the yolk of the egg only, and you must know that this
tempera is of universal application on walls, on pictures, and in
fresco, and you cannot use too much of it, but it would be wise to
take a middle course."
It is to be noted that in his instructions for colouring in fresco,
Cennini is very particular to state several times that no vehicle is
to be used except water. All frescoes at this time were re-touched in
secco, with temperas such as above described; the fresco seems to have
been somewhat similar to the first painting in oil, and to have
received all its more minute details from the subsequent work in
secco. This was almost inevitably the case, as from the haste with
which large spaces of the wall had to be covered, there could hardly
be time to put in much detail, besides, many of the colours employed
could not be used in fresco,[24] though all were used to finish works
originally painted in fresco. Secco had an especial province of its
own; all _pictures_, as distinguished from wall paintings, being
executed in it. It must be remembered that in the time of Giotto the
use of canvas was not yet introduced, and all small designs were
painted upon linen cloths, stretched tightly over the surface of a
smooth panel, and covered with coats of plaster carefully trimmed;[25]
the next step in the preparation of the ground was to substitute
parchment stretched over wood for the prepared linen.
It must be noticed that from the time of Cennini to that of Raphael,
the practice of completing the fresco in secco grew gradually to be
considered as a mark of an inferior artist, though it was never wholly
discontinued (according to Mrs. Merrifield's treatise), except by a
few "very expert artists, formed chiefly in the school of the
Carracci." It is perhaps not always borne in mind by those
unacquainted with painting, that the range of colouring in fresco is
strictly limited; no colours being employed in it by the early
Italians except such as were natural, and nearly all the more
brilliant colours are artificial, such, for instance, as lake,
vermilion, azure. The blues were more fugitive than any other hues,
and in many cases have wholly disappeared, turned green or black, or
flaked off from the surface of the walls.
Thus it will be clearly understood that the difference between
painting in fresco and painting in secco, or (as it is more commonly
called) in distemper, lies in two things, the kind of vehicle
employed--water in the first, and glue of some sort (chiefly of egg)
in the second method; and in the nature of the colours used, the first
being restricted to tints comparatively simple and elementary, the
second able to make use of the most elaborate colours obtainable. The
first method is eminently suited to the expression of great thoughts
in simple language, the second is more adapted to give pleasure, from
the exquisiteness of the colours employed, and the skill with which
the details are elaborated. The latter is the painting of the studio;
the former the painting of the church, the palace, or the
market-place. I do not think this difference is sufficiently
understood in the present day; it does not appear as if painters had
grasped the fact that the greatest strength of fresco lay in its
emancipation from all the necessities of minute detail and careful
elaboration; a freedom gained by the nature of the material. It is not
that in itself this freedom is a good thing, but that it affords the
artist a means of expression which he can hardly gain through the
medium of painting in oil. In much the same way as a modern
dining-room, however perfect in its decoration and gorgeous in its
upholstery, can never give us the same effect as the rough pillars of
some ruined temple; so does the comparative rough sublimity of fresco
afford to a true artist a means of expressing great thoughts and lofty
ideas in a comparatively facile manner. For it must be remembered he
has not only spaces to decorate of a size commensurate with his
subject, be it ever so important, but he has hardly to do more than to
express his great thought clearly, and all small details are lost in
the splendour of his conception. This is the real power of size in
painting; a large picture, if it be not finished with the care of a
small one, needs to be a representation of some thought which gains in
grandeur from the size of its canvas; there can be no justification
for covering ten feet square with the representation of an incident of
no particular importance, or a scene of no particular beauty; for with
every added foot of space which the artist takes up, he really makes
an added claim to importance, and a subject which might have been of
sufficient interest to have justified a painting on a minute scale,
does but betray its insignificance when delineated on a large one. The
whole of art being but the nicest possible adaptation of means to
ends, it rightly shocks and repels us when we find an artist wilfully
violating these conditions, and, in order to appear of greater
importance in our eyes, making what might be a tolerable molehill,
into a very indifferent mountain. This was very clearly seen by the
old Italian masters, who almost invariably chose fresco as the medium
for their most important works, assigning to oil painting a lower
province.
In connection with this subject the following quotation of
Michelangelo's opinion may be interesting:--"Quand il fut question de
peindre dans la Chapelle Sextine, le frère Sebastiano, peintre
Vénitienne, conseiller de le Pape, de forcer Michel Ange à le faire à
l'huile, et la mur fut préparé à cet effet. Le grand homme arrive, et
fait degrader cet apprêt, disait fièrement que la peinture à l'huile
n'était bonne que pour les dames, les personnes lentes, et qui se
pique l'adresse, tels que le frère Sebastiano; et l'ouvrage fut fait à
fresque, parce que à genre de peinture méprise cette attention à
manoeuvre; vain merite qui est perdu pour elle. La touche disparait
dans l'enduit qui la dévore, elle n'occupe pas l'âme du grand artiste,
qui alors tout entière aux caractères, aux formes, aux expressions, et
à la saillie des corps. Son goût ne se manifeste pas sans science, sa
main ne s'occupe que d'expérience, et il se livre tout entier à cette
tâche difficile--la seule digne de lui. S'il la remplie, la spectateur
est transporté, et comme l'auteur, il va cherche rien au-delà."[26]
We cannot stay to define the limits, within which it seems to us that
this is a correct expression of the merits of fresco, but that it is
in the main true is indisputable, and it is impossible to tell the
good effect which might be produced upon the art of the present day,
by encouraging our young painters to work in fresco, simply requiring
of them that they should have something to say, and say it clearly. No
theories as to the production of a great school of painting, will, I
think, be able to map out a better means of attaining good art, than
this simple one of making clear expression of a great subject the
first object. Curiously enough, the only English artist who seems
thoroughly to have understood the great scope of fresco painting was
Fuseli, and in his lectures at the Royal Academy may be found a clear
and enthusiastic exposition of this method.
FOOTNOTES:
[22] Though frequently wrongly used as synonymous with secco.
[23] Recent researches by Signors Gaetano and Carlo Milanesi
(Florence, 1859) prove this date, which is given by Tambroni and in
Mrs. Merrifield's translation, to be only that of the copy of the
original MS. Cennini's work was originally written in all probability
at least ten years earlier.
[24] In fresco some colours cannot be used, as artiemen, cinnabar,
azuno della magna, mina, biucca, verdesume, and lacca.--_Cennini._
[25] According to Mrs. Jameson, _Lives of the Painters_, p. 8, all
movable pictures were, up to 1440, painted on panels of prepared wood;
an evident mistake, made from a superficial examination of the back of
the pictures.
[26] _Encyclopédie Méthodique._ Paris, 1788.
CHAPTER IV.
CIMABUE.
"I say 'Consider it' in vain; you cannot consider it, for you
cannot conceive the sickness of heart with which a young
painter of deep feeling toils through his first obscurity; his
sense of the strong voice within him, which you will not hear;
his vain, fond wondering witness to the things you will not
see; his far away perception of things that he could accomplish
if he had but peace and time, all unapproachable, and all
vanishing from him, because no one will leave him peace, or
grant him time."--JOHN RUSKIN, _Political Economy of Art_.
Look back six hundred and forty years, and linger in fancy by the side
of the Arno, where Florence in the height of her power and beauty,
stood then as now, and you may hear the joy-bells ringing across the
swift river for the birth of one of her proudest sons. Thirty years
more, and the whole city will rise in procession to honour him, and
bear his work in triumph to the quiet church of St. Mary; and six
hundred years later, the representation of that honour will hang on
the walls of an English gallery; and people will talk, question, and
whisper about _The Cimabue Procession_. They may well admire it and
ask its meaning; for to the painter it commemorated we owe the art of
England as surely, as that to Leighton we owe the picture which
represents the old master's triumph.
In two ways are we indebted to Cimabue for the emancipation of
painting; first, for the work which he did himself accomplish; and
second and in chief, for his discovery and education of the shepherd
boy, whose fame was ultimately to eclipse his own.[27] I say that the
master's fame was to be eclipsed by his pupil, but that must be taken
with one most important reservation. However much we may be convinced
of Giotto's superiority, we are always forced to bear in mind the
fact, that had it not been for Cimabue, that superiority would in all
probability never have been known. Differing in the particulars of the
story, all the accounts of Giotto's early life agree in this important
fact, that it was Cimabue who discovered his early talent, who
persuaded his father to let him enter his profession, and who educated
him as a painter at his own expense, from the time that he was ten
years old. Is not this a greater monument to Cimabue's name, than any
amount of Madonnas carried in triumph through the "street of
gladness?" Rightly understood, is it not even a surer testimony to the
fact of his being a true artist; for does it not prove that the
painter had more devotion to his art than his fame? To see in a youth,
poor and unknown, the signs of genius, greater perhaps than your own,
to take him from his obscurity, and to instruct his ignorance,
careless of the effect which may be thereby produced upon your own
reputation, and finally to stand aside while he wins the honour which
is his due, but which nevertheless would have fallen to your share,
had it not been for your own action; this seems to me as great a
sacrifice of petty pride, and as great a triumph over natural
selfishness, as can well be conceived. And this is what Cimabue did,
urged by no duty, and without possible reward, save that of doing his
best for his art and his pupil. We owe him then a double debt: for
his own work in loosening the bonds of tradition, and for the
instruction of the artist whose paintings and sculptures were to
inaugurate the real methods of art, and extend its province, from the
mere exponent of religious legend to the representation of the
passions of humanity and the beauty of nature.
What little is known of the life of Cimabue we can give in a very few
words. Even Vasari, garrulous as he is, has little more to tell us,
than that he lived, painted certain pictures, received certain
honours, had a pupil called Giotto, whose fame eclipsed his own, and
died.
"In the year 1240 Giovanni Cimabue, of the noble family of that name
was born at Florence, to give the first light to the art of painting."
Then follows the account of his Greek instruction in the art of
painting, which is doubted for various reasons by most modern
authorities, chiefly, it appears because Vasari has made him paint in
the chapel of the Gondi, which was not built at that time. Crowe and
Cavalcaselle however do not give any other explanation of Cimabue's
teaching; and Lindsay says he painted in the subterranean church under
the instruction of the Greeks; while Lanzi, in the _History of
Painting_, suggests that the paintings of the Greeks who are supposed
to have instructed Cimabue, may be seen in the chapels of the old
church beneath the sacristy of S. Maria Novella.
The point, however, is of little importance. After painting various
works at Florence and Pisa, all of which have now perished, he was
invited to help in the decoration of the church at Assisi. According
to Vasari, he there painted in both the upper and lower churches, but,
with some few exceptions, little of these frescoes remain; and the
whole question as to the authorship of the five remaining frescoes in
these churches has long been a favourite battle-ground for critics.
Vasari, Lanzi, Rumohr, Eastlake, Crowe and Cavalcaselle, and many
others having all theories more or less inconsistent with one another.
I shall content myself with noticing the chief theories on the subject
when I speak later on of the work of Giotto at Assisi. After this,
Cimabue returned to Florence, and executed his great panel, the
_Virgin Enthroned_, a picture of colossal size, which was placed in
the church of S. Maria Novella; this was the work which was carried
through the city by a triumphant procession of the people. "It is
further reported, and may be read in certain records of old painters,
that whilst Cimabue was painting this picture in a garden near the
gate of S. Pietro, King Charles the Elder of Anjou passed through
Florence, and the authorities of the city, among other marks of
respect, conducted him to see the picture of Cimabue. When this work
was thus shown to the King it had not before been seen by any one;
wherefore all the men and women of Florence hastened in great crowds
to admire it, making all possible demonstrations of delight. The
inhabitants of the neighbourhood, rejoicing in this occurrence, ever
afterwards called that place Borgo Allegri, and this name it has ever
since retained, although in process of time it became enclosed within
the walls of the city."[28]
Vasari has little to tell us of the incidents of Cimabue's life, nor
can I find any other records likely to be authentic, which have fuller
details. In a short time after the execution of this Madonna, the
artist was appointed to superintend the building of Santa Maria del
Fiore, in conjunction with a celebrated architect, Arnolfo Lapo, and
he died, whilst the building was still unfinished, at the age of
sixty.[29] If he adopted Giotto in 1286, _i.e._ when the latter was
ten years of age (the time given by most of the authorities), his
pupil must, according to the time given by Cennini, have just finished
his novitiate when his master died; as, in his treatise on painting,
that author gives thirteen years as the time in which the art of
painting can be acquired. As it may well be that amongst my readers
there be some who are desirous of knowing the shortest time in which
it is possible to learn to paint, I will quote the words of the
treatise. They may perchance aid amateurs to think a little more
justly of what the mechanical difficulties of painting were, even in
the rude days of early pre-Raphaelitism:--
[Illustration: THE MADONNA ENTHRONED. BY CIMABUE.
_In the Rucellai Chapel, S. Maria Novella, Florence._]
"Know that you cannot learn to paint in less time than that which I
shall name to you. In the first place you must study drawing for at
least one year, then you must remain with a master at the workshop for
the space of six years, at least, that you may learn all the parts and
members of the art; to grind colours, to boil down glues, to grind
plaster (gesso), to acquire the practice of laying grounds on
pictures, to work in relief, and to scrape (or smooth) the surface,
and to gild; afterwards to practise colouring, to adorn with mordants,
paint cloths of gold, and paint on walls for six more years, drawing
without intermission on holy days and work days. And by this means you
will acquire great experience. If you do otherwise you will never
attain perfection. There are many who say you may learn the art
without the assistance of a master. Do not believe them; let this book
be an example to you, studying it day and night. And if you do not
study under some master, you will never be fit for anything; nor will
you be able to show your face among the masters."
There is another curious statement about Cimabue, and one which is
very significant of his intense care for the best interests of art; it
occurs in an MS. commentary upon Dante, called the _Anonimo_, and was
written while Giotto was still living, that is before 1330.[30] The
author says:--"Cimabue of Florence, a painter of the time of our
author (_i.e._ Dante) knew more of the noble art (that of painting)
than any other man, but he was so arrogant and proud withal, that if
any one discovered a fault in his work, or if he perceived one himself
(as will often happen to the artist who fails from the defects in the
material that he uses, or from insufficiency of the instrument with
which he works), he would instantly destroy that work, however costly
it might be." There could be no surer testimony to the light in which
Cimabue regarded his painting than this of the old Florentine
commentator's, and it is amusing to see how, six hundred years ago,
artists were liable to exactly the same amount of mistaken blame and
misapprehension as they are to-day. [It is not six months ago since I
heard one of the greatest of our living painters severely censured,
because he would not part with a portrait which did not come up to his
standard of good work, and though the opinion was expressed in the
choicest slang of the nineteenth century, it was almost an exact
equivalent for the words of the author _Anonimo_; for I suppose "he
did it for swagger," really means much the same as "proud and
arrogant."]
The changes introduced by Cimabue into the conventional
representations of religious subjects were numerous, and though each
slight in itself, formed, when taken as a whole, a very marked
progression from the Byzantine manner, but whether owing to respect
for his early masters, or from the almost overpowering effect of
Church tradition, the artist never wholly succeeded in shaking off the
established forms of painting in the general arrangement of his
figures and backgrounds.
If we compare his great picture in S. Maria Novella with one of a
similar subject by Guido of Siena, his predecessor,[31] in the Church
of S. Domenico at Siena, we shall find that the main lines of the
composition are much the same. Nevertheless the advance is very
clearly marked. The folds of the drapery have lost much of the
stiffness and angularity, and the attitude and expression of the
Virgin, though still wanting life and energy, are simple and
comparatively natural. A still greater improvement may be noticed in
the gestures of the angels which support the throne, and in the action
of the child Saviour on the Virgin's lap. In this picture there is, I
think, a direct contradiction to the assertion of Crowe[32] that "in
the flow of his drapery Cimabue made no sensible progress;"[33] though
in other respects that author does full justice to the improvements
introduced by the artist. Many other modifications of style are
noticeable in Cimabue's works, especially the manner in which he
abandoned what we may call the mosaic-like manner of painting, which
had been in use for so long a time, and blended one colour with
another instead of leaving it as a bright patch, divided by a sharp
line. Much of his colour has either faded or disappeared entirely, but
enough is left to show that it must have been originally very rich in
hue, and though of a deep tone, free from the heaviness and obscurity
which was so prevalent in the work of the Byzantine artists. In the
_Enthroned Madonna_ of the Lower Church at Assisi, which is
indisputably one of his works, the colouring is far richer and deeper
than anything remaining of Giotto's, though it does not possess the
exquisite clearness and delicacy of the latter; and is comparatively
monotonous. This picture has however suffered so severely from damp,
that it cannot be judged fair to say what the colour has, or has not,
been, though it is still beautiful, and fortunately unrestored.[34]
In the Accademia of Florence there is another colossal Madonna by
Cimabue, also an altar-piece representing the same subject as that of
the one in S. Maria Novella, the arrangement, however, being slightly
different. Instead of the six guardian angels who support the chair on
which the Virgin is seated (in the former picture), there are here
eight, and beneath the throne in niches stand four prophets; the
thirty medallions of saints which surround the frame in the former
picture are here absent. I am unable to give an accurate description
of the differences between these two pictures, as I have only studied
the one in the Accademia;[35] but there is, according to Crowe and
Cavalcaselle, "a more obstinate maintenance of the old types" in the
latter picture: and it is certainly true, from my own observation,
that the colour has sustained such injuries from restoration and time,
as to be almost entirely destroyed. This picture was originally of the
gable form, but some ingenious artist, who considered that an
unpleasant shape for a picture, has supplied the two triangular pieces
necessary to complete the oblong, and painted thereon two cherubim, as
poor in conception, colour, and execution as could well be imagined.
The old shape of the work is still clearly visible, and in any other
country than Italy would be at once restored.[36]
FOOTNOTES:
[27] I have, throughout this essay, followed the mass of authority
which describes Giotto's father as a poor tenant farmer, or lower
still in the social scale; but the most recent researches go to prove
that he was in well-to-do circumstances, was, in fact, of the rank of
"Cavaliere," and it is certain that Giotto inherited some property
from him.
[28] Vasari, _Lives of the most Eminent Painters, &c._, vol. i. p. 42.
[29] Lord Lindsay gives the date of his death as 1302, on the
authority of Ciampi.
[30] See notes to Mrs. Foster's translation of Vasari.
[31] There are excellent engravings of both these pictures in Kugler's
_Handbook of Painting_, pages 105 and 109 of the fifth edition.
[32] _History of Painting in Italy_, vol. i. p. 205.
[33] Look, for instance, at the natural manner in which the border of
the Virgin's drapery falls into its folds. The woodcut of this picture
here given does little more than show the arrangement of the picture;
but even here the advance is perceptible.
[34] Vol. i. p. 206. Vasari attributes the loss of colour in
Buffulmacco's pictures to the use of a peculiar purple mixed with
salt, which corroded the other colours; possibly this may be the case
with Cimabue's.
[35] Since writing the above sentence I have been to the Rucellai
Chapel for the purpose of studying the great Cimabue referred to
above, the description of which is accordingly given in a later
chapter.
[36] It is noticeable that in Lindsay's _Christian Art_, it is to the
influence of the sculptor, Niccola Pisano, rather than that of
Cimabue, that Giotto owed his study of nature, &c., vol. ii. p. 82.
CHAPTER V.
GIOTTO.
"Where Cimabue found the shepherd boy,
Tracing his idle fancies on the ground."
ROGERS's _Italy_.
Giotto was born[37] at the small village of Vespignano, about fourteen
miles from Florence, amidst surroundings, the chief characteristics of
which are very beautifully described by Mr. Ruskin in the following
paragraph:--
"Few travellers can forget the peculiar landscape of that district of
the Apennines. As they ascend the hill which rises from Florence to
the lowest peak in the ridge of Fiesole, they pass continually beneath
the walls of villas bright in perfect luxury, and beside cypress
hedges inclosing fair terraced gardens, where the masses of oleander
and magnolia, motionless as leaves in a picture, inlay alternately
upon the blue sky their branching lightness of pale rose colour and
deep green breadth of shade, studded with walls of gleaming silver;
and shining at intervals through their framework of rich leaf and
rubied flower, the far-away bends of the Arno beneath its slopes of
olive, and the purple peaks of the Carrara mountains tossing
themselves against the western distance, where the streaks of
motionless clouds hover above the Pisan sea. The traveller passes the
Fiesolan ridge, and all is changed. The country is on a sudden lonely.
Here and there indeed are seen the scattered houses of a farm grouped
gracefully upon the hill-sides; here and there a fragment of tower
upon a distant rock; but neither gardens nor flowers, nor glittering
palace exists. Only a gray extent of mountain-ground tufted
irregularly with ilex and olive; a scene not sublime, for its forms
are subdued and low; not desolate, for its valleys are full of sown
fields and tended pastures; not rich nor lovely, but sunburnt and
sorrowful, becoming wilder every instant as the road winds into its
recesses, ascending still, until the higher woods, now partly oak and
partly pine, dropping back from the central crest of the Apennines,
leave a partial wilderness of scathed rock and arid grass, withered
away here by frost, and there by strange lambent tongues of earth-fed
fire."[38]
Giotto's name is, according to Lord Lindsay, a contraction of
Ambrogiotto. In the modern sense of the word, he appears to have had
absolutely no education, for we find him when ten years old engaged in
tending sheep upon the hill-side. It is noticeable that for one who
was to effect the change in art which Giotto subsequently produced, no
amount of early training could have been so beneficial, as the silent
undogmatic one, that he received amongst the fresh meadows, and under
the blue skies. The native genius within him grew gradually in
strength, unhelped save by the influences of rustic life, and
unhindered by tradition or example. It was no doubt to these early
shepherd days, that he owed the strong sympathy with nature that he
retained during his whole career, and his power of representing simple
facts of animal life. Throughout all his pictures, even those of
his latest period, whenever he got a chance of introducing an animal
he always seized it eagerly, and the little touches of dog, donkey,
and ox nature which may be found scattered here and there in his
works, form one of its most peculiar and pleasing features; especially
when we consider that this was to artists an absolutely virgin soil.
Thus in the fresco at Assisi[39] representing the birth of Christ,
perhaps the most remarkable portion of the picture is the manner in
which the two donkeys are poking their heads over the manger to
examine the child, with that expression of happy placid stupidity, so
well known to all who have ever had to do with these animals. And
again, in the sculpture of the shepherd, forming one of the series
round the base of the Campanile at Florence, the expression of the
puppy's face, (grave consideration mixed with a sense of
responsibility) as he watches the sheep filing past the shepherd's
tent, is wonderfully natural, and worthy of Sir Edwin Landseer, except
that it is in one way much too good for him, in its thorough
dogginess; Landseer always intensified his animals' feelings to the
very verge of caricature. Hence one reason why he was so commonly and
universally popular.
[Illustration: PASTORAL LIFE. BAS-RELIEF DESIGNED BY GIOTTO.
_On the Campanile, Florence._]
At any rate, such was Giotto's early life, spent in simple rural
duties, and untroubled by school-boards and science primers; but when
he was about ten years old, a strange event occurred which changed the
whole current of his history. For there came riding through the valley
the famous painter of Florence, Cimabue, then at the height of his
reputation, and passed close to where the boy shepherd was sitting
neglectful of his duties, trying to draw one of his flock with a piece
of sharp slate upon the surface of rock.
We may suppose that there was something in the work which the painter
knew to be genius, for according to all the legends, he does not
appear to have hesitated in the least, but after asking the boy if he
would like to go with him, and receiving a glad answer in the
affirmative, he obtained the father's permission, took him to
Florence, and installed him in his own studio.
It must be remembered that an artist's studio was a very different
place in 1286, from what we call by the same name at the present time.
It resembled a workshop, in which the pupils prepared and ground the
colours under the master's direction, deriving what instruction they
might from seeing him work and hearing him talk; nor were they allowed
to touch brush or pencil till they had rendered themselves thorough
masters of the preparation of the various colours, temperas, &c. A
mastery which, as we have seen, was supposed at that time to take
about six years to acquire.
So the boy lived with his master in Florence, and worked, much as a
house painter's apprentice works now; drawing, no doubt, at every odd
minute in the meantime, in fear and trembling, and thinking art was a
very much longer business than he had bargained for, when he left his
home to become a painter.
Many days no doubt he looked out from the rough building where he and
his fellow pupils were grinding the master's colours, and saw Cimabue
standing in the shady garden, before a great glory of crimson drapery
and golden background, and many a time his heart sank within him as he
looked, and he thought it impossible that he could ever acquire that
marvellous skill. But on these early days all the biographies are
alike silent, there is not even an apocryphal anecdote of Vasari's to
enliven the darkness; and whatever we may fancy, we know absolutely
nothing.
The next point of Giotto's life where history takes up the record is
at the incident of the O. Briefly told, this is as follows. About
1296,[40] according to Lord Lindsay, Boniface VIII.[41] was desirous
of adding to the decorations of St. Peter's, "and sent one of his
courtiers from Treviso to Tuscany to ascertain what kind of man Giotto
might be, and what were his works." On his way the messenger received
designs from various artists in Siena, and then came to Giotto, told
him of his mission, and no doubt showed him the elaborate designs
which he had received from the Sienese artists. Whereupon Giotto drew
with one sweep of his arm a circle in red ink, of perfect accuracy,
and gave it to the messenger, refusing to send any other design,
"whereby," says Vasari, "the Pope and such of his courtiers as were
well versed in the subject, perceived how far Giotto surpassed all the
other painters of his time."
Whatever truth there may be in the details of this incident, it is, as
Ruskin points out,[42] significant in showing the manner in which the
Pope and his counsellors judged of art: _i.e._, that the best workman
was the best man, which for a rough and ready test is not altogether a
bad one.
The date of Giotto's visit to Rome is still further fixed by an
assertion of Baldinucci's that there is a record in the Vatican in a
register, to the effect that the mosaic of the _Navicella_ (which is
still in the portico of St. Peter's though enormously damaged), was
executed at Rome in 1298. If this be true, and though quoted by Crowe
it is not contradicted, it fixes the date of Giotto's visit as at all
events not later than that year. Of the works of Giotto at Rome I
shall speak in a subsequent chapter, in which I shall endeavour to fix
upon the analogy of style, the order in which Giotto painted at
Florence, Padua, and Assisi. It should have been noticed that Crowe
and Cavalcaselle make the incident of the O occur in the time of
Benedict XI, by supposing that that Pope sent from Avignon "at the
request of Petrarch, to seek out the best artists of Italy for the
purpose of restoring and adorning the churches and palaces of Rome
which were falling into decay." This, however, leaves Giotto's first
visit to Rome in 1298 unaccounted for, and contradicts Vasari and
Lindsay, apparently without sufficient cause, for it seems highly
improbable that if the painter had been already engaged in painting
and designing mosaics for St. Peter's, that in after years the Pope
should have thought it necessary to have a proof of his skill.
However, the date of this visit to Rome is of little importance, as
the whole of the works of Giotto in that city have been long
destroyed, with the exception of the mosaic of the _Navicella_, and
some small panel pictures in the Sacristy of St. Peter's.[43]
About the year 1300 it seems probable that Giotto returned to
Florence, and in the following year painted in the Chapel of the
Podesta--commonly called the Bargello. It was here that Giotto
introduced (I believe for the first time in the history of mediæval
Italian art) accurate portraits of living people into his picture of
_Paradise_. It is here that the famous portrait of Dante in his early
manhood was discovered after having been covered with whitewash for
two hundred years.
It was with the greatest difficulty that an American named Kirkup, and
Signor Bezzi obtained permission from the Italian government to remove
the whitewash from this fresco of _Paradise_ at their own expense.[44]
All the frescoes in this chapel are very greatly injured by time and
neglect, whitewash and restoration, and especially the Dante portrait,
which has suffered most of all from the last-mentioned cause. As I
shall have little occasion to refer to the works in this chapel in
subsequent chapters, I may here say that in my opinion Crowe and
Cavalcaselle have erred in attributing all of them to Giotto.[45]
There are many which show little, if any, trace of the master's hand,
and others which are apparently imitations by pupils; as, however, the
frescoes are all exceedingly defaced, it is not worth while to dwell
minutely on this point.[46]
In less than two years from the date of this picture of the
_Paradise_, Dante was exiled to Verona, and for three or four years
Giotto did not see him again. In the year 1306, when Giotto went to
Padua to paint the Arena Chapel, Dante also settled in that town.[47]
Within a year from the painting of the Bargello, Giotto married a
lady, of whom, no matter what may have been her virtues or
attractions, posterity knows little or nothing, save that she bore the
painter several children, and that her name was Ciuta di Lapo. It was
shortly after this period of his life that he produced what must on
the whole be considered the greatest work of his life--the decoration
of the Scrovegni Chapel at Padua. This was a small barn-like edifice
of perfectly plain exterior, which had just been built by Enrico
Scrovegni on the site of an old Roman amphitheatre, and dedicated to
the Madonna.
According to some accounts, Giotto himself was its architect; but this
has only been surmised from the fact of his decoration being so
admirably suited to the building. The fact probably being that had the
building been of a different or more elaborate shape, he would have
treated it in a different manner. As it was, the extreme simplicity of
the arrangement of the frescoes, is most happily in harmony with the
simplicity of the architecture. Here he seems to have lived for
several years, and here as we have said came Dante in 1306, having
passed the intervening years of his exile at Bologna. According to
Baldinucci, our painter had no less than six children, all of whom
were of a surpassing ugliness; and it is recorded that Dante remarked
upon this circumstance to him, pretending to be surprised that one who
could paint such beautiful figures should have such ugly sons; to
which Giotto replied by a jest more suited to his own times, than to
ours. Indeed, all that the biography of Giotto amounts to after this,
is an account of his various jokes and eccentricities, most of which,
I must confess, seem to me of very poor quality, somewhat akin to the
pleasantries told at the tea-table of a humorous schoolmaster, or to
those which are murmured between the pauses of the work, at the weekly
meetings of a Dorcas society. However, all the historians agree in
asserting that he was a man of infinite jest, and the humour of these
anecdotes may well have evaporated in the course of six hundred years.
The following, which I give as it occurs in Vasari, derives a certain
interest from the quaint simplicity with which the biographer tells
it, and the naïve way in which justice is depicted as of course being
on the side of the best speaker, is not without a certain amount of
significance, even in our enlightened nineteenth century.
"Giotto, as we have said before, was of an exceedingly jocund humour,
and abounded in witty and humorous remarks, which are still well
remembered in Florence. Examples of these may be found not only in the
writings of Messer Giovanni Boccaccio, but also in the three hundred
stories of Franco Sacchetti, who cites many amusing instances of his
talent in this way. And here I will not refuse the labour of
transcribing some of these stories, giving them in Franco's own words,
that my readers may be made acquainted with the peculiar phraseology
and modes of speech used in those times, together with the story
itself. He says there in one of these, to set it forth with its proper
title:--
"'_To Giotto, the great painter, is given a buckler to paint by a man
of small account. He, making a jest of the matter, paints in such sort
that the owner is put out of countenance._'
"Every one has long since heard of Giotto, and knows how greatly he
stood above all other painters. Hearing the fame of the master, a rude
artisan, who desired to have a buckler painted, perhaps because he was
going to do watch and ward in some castle, marched at once to the
workshop of Giotto, with one bearing the shield behind him. Having got
there he speedily found Giotto, to whom he said, 'God save thee,
master! I would fain have thee paint me my arms on this shield.'
"Giotto, having observed the man and considered his manner, replied
nothing more than--'When wilt thou have it finished?' which the other
having told him, he answered, 'Leave the matter to me;' and the fellow
departed. Then Giotto, being left alone, began to think within
himself, 'What may this mean? Hath some one sent this man to make a
jest of me? However it be, no man before ever brought me a buckler to
paint; yet here is this simple fellow who brings me his shield, and
bids me paint his arms upon it as though he were of the royal family
of France. Of a verity, I must make him arms of a new fashion.'
Thinking thus within himself, he takes the said buckler, and having
designed what he thought proper, called one of his scholars and bade
him complete the painting. This was a tin scullcap, a gorget, a pair
of iron gauntlets, with a cuirass, cuishes, and gandadoes, a sword, a
dagger, and a spear. Our great personage, of whom nobody knew
anything, having returned for his shield, marches forward and
inquires, 'Master, is the shield painted?' 'To be sure it is,' replied
Giotto; 'bring it down here.' The shield being brought, our wise
gentleman that would be, began to open his eyes and look at it,
calling out to Giotto, 'What trumpery is this that thou hast painted
me here?' 'Will it seem to thee a trumpery matter to pay for it?'
answered Giotto. 'I will not pay five farthings for it all,' returned
the clown. 'And what didst thou require me to paint?' asked Giotto.
'My arms.' 'And are they not here,' rejoined the painter; 'is there
one wanting?' 'Good, good,' quoth the man. 'Nay, verily, but it is
rather bad, bad,' responded Giotto. 'Lord, help thee, for thou must
needs be a special simpleton; why, if a man were to ask thee, "Who art
thou?" it would be a hard matter for thee to tell him; yet here thou
comest and criest, "Paint me my arms!" If thou wert of the house of
the Bardi, that were enough; but thou! what arms dost thou bear? Who
art thou? Who were thy forefathers? Art thou not ashamed of thyself?
Begin at least to come into the world before thou talkest of arms, as
though thou wert Dusnam of Bavaria at the very least. I have made thee
a whole suit of armour on thy shield, if there be any other piece,
tell me, and I'll put that too.' 'Thou hast given me rough words, and
hast spoiled my shield,' declared the other; and going forth, betook
himself to the justice, before whom he caused Giotto to be called. The
latter forthwith appeared, but on his side summoned the complainant
for two florins, the price of the painting, and which he demands to
be paid.
"The pleadings being heard on both sides, and Giotto's story being
much better told than that of our clown, the judge decided that the
latter should take away his buckler, and should pay six livres to
Giotto, whom they declared to have the right. Thus the good man had to
pay and take to his shield; whereupon he was bidden to depart, and not
knowing his place had it taught to him on this wise."
In 1307, Giotto appears to have finished his work at the Scrovegni
Chapel, and removed to Florence, where he ultimately settled down. Of
this period of his life little, if anything, is known. He went to
Assisi some time after this, when I have found it impossible to
discover.[48] He painted during these latter years at Florence, in
four chapels of the Santa Croce, at Ravenna (and at Ferrara and
Verona, according to Vasari); probably also he made excursions from
Florence into many of the neighbouring towns, but no certain traces of
his work exist. In 1328 he was commissioned to paint the portrait of
Charles of Calabria, the son of Robert of Naples, and in 1330 was sent
for by the latter to adorn some of the Neapolitan churches. On his way
back to Florence, he painted at Gaeta and Rimini some frescoes which
have quite perished. These were his last works in painting, with the
exception of some produced during a brief visit to Milan in 1335, for
which he obtained the permission of the government to absent himself
from the superintendence of the Cathedral and Campanile. The year
previous he had been made master of the works of the Cathedral, and
chief builder to the city of Florence; and while he was still engaged
upon his bell tower and the cathedral façade, before his eyes had lost
their lustre, or his hand its cunning, he died suddenly in 1336.
Such is the life of our old master as far as we can gather it from the
scanty materials before us: to what does it amount? That a boy showed
signs of genius; that a man fulfilled his early promise; that a great
painter was for once a prophet in his own country and in his own time;
and that all history can tell us of him, is that he made bad jokes,
and had six ugly children. Such, I say, is the history of Giotto as I
have gathered it from the chronicles of Vasari, Baldinucci, and Lanzi,
Kugler, Rumohr, Crowe, and Jameson; but there is another history of
the man, of greater worth and fuller meaning than can be found in
these musty records; there is that which the painter has written with
his own hand, in colours which yet retain much of their pristine
brightness. The best record of the artist is neither his questionable
witticisms, nor these rough outlines of his life, but that which
shines forth clearly still on the walls of Santa Croce and the arches
of Assisi. What that record means to us, I will try to explain.
FOOTNOTES:
[37] "The date is disputed. Crowe now gives 1266, but I have,
throughout, followed Vasari and other writers who give 1276. All the
chronology of Giotto, except the date of his death, is highly
uncertain."--H. Q.
[38] "At Pietro Mala. The flames rise two or three feet above the
stony ground out of which they spring, white and fierce enough to be
visible in the intense rays even of the morning sun."--J. R.
[39] This fresco is, I think, the work of one of Giotto's pupils, but
probably executed from the master's design, or under his
superintendence, or in any case is an imitation of Giotto's method of
introducing animal life into his compositions.
[40] After working at Assisi and Pisa, according to Vasari, who is
followed by Kugler. It is quite clear that Kugler is wrong in
supposing that when Giotto visited Rome in 1298, he had previously
executed the frescoes on the ceiling of the Lower Church at Assisi,
for those works are evidently later than those of the Upper Church,
and even in point of time it is impossible that both series could have
been painted prior to 1298, when the painter was but twenty-two.
[41] Vasari says Benedict XI., but Rumohr shows it was Boniface who
invited Giotto to Rome. Schorn, in note to Vasari.
[42] _Giotto and his Works in Padua._ Published for the Arundel
Society.
[43] Portions of what is called the Stefaneschi altar piece; I am
informed very fine in quality, but cannot speak from experience.
[44] It was subsequently defrayed by the Tuscan government.
[45] Crowe considers them to be undoubtedly his.
[46] That the large fresco of _Paradise_, in which the portraits of
Dante and Corso Donati occur is by Giotto, is, I think, quite certain.
[47] The house where Dante lived is still shown to strangers.
[48] I may here say once for all that owing to my ignorance of the
Italian language, and the small amount of time at my disposal, it has
been out of my power to undertake that research amongst the MSS.
stored in the public libraries of Italy by which alone could the
accurate chronology of Giotto's life be determined.
CHAPTER VI.
THE CHIEF FUNCTION OF PAINTING.
"All honour and reverence to the divine beauty of form! Let us
cultivate it to the utmost in men, women, and children--in our
gardens and in our houses. But let us love that other beauty
too, which lies in no secret of proportion, but in the secret
of deep human sympathy. Paint us an angel if you can, with a
floating violet robe and a face paled by the celestial light;
paint us yet oftener a Madonna, turning her mild face upward
and opening her arms to receive the divine glory; but do not
impose upon us any æsthetic rules which shall banish from the
region of art, those old women scraping carrots with their
work-worn hands, those heavy clowns taking holiday in a dingy
pot house, those rounded backs and stupid weather-beaten faces
that have bent over the spade and done the rough work of the
world."--GEORGE ELIOT.
Before I speak in detail of Giotto's pictures, it will be well to
consider very shortly what are the chief characteristics of good
painting, and in what proportion the beauty of form, of colour,
sentiment and thought, should be combined, in order to give us work of
the highest order. And such a preliminary inquiry is the more needful,
since the whole history of art is the history of the development of
one or more of these characteristics, rather than the development of
their just combination. If we look back at the greatest schools of the
fifteenth century, we find that each of them had one main object in
their art, which they pursued to the detriment of the others. However
much, for instance, we may admire the feeling of Raphael, we perceive
the lack of the qualities which we find in Titian--however much we
delight in Titian or Tintoretto, we feel that there is something
lacking which we had in Raphael. And so on with every school, till at
last we discover that the deficiency is not one in the individual
painter, but is rather owing to the end which he and those of his
school proposed to themselves; and whether it be the Florentine
striving after expression of emotion, or the Venetian after expression
of the truths of shade and colour, each is alike defective. In later
times this becomes still more evident in the works of the Dutch
painters, and it may be seen at its utmost height in the works of the
majority of modern artists, whose aim is commonly restricted not only
to one phase of feeling, but to one special manifestation of such
phase; not to the seeking of colour, say, as the main object, but to
the seeking of one particular colour.
If then every art school which the world has hitherto known, has been
in some way partial in its choice of subject and the aims it has
proposed to itself, let us think which partiality is the least
blameable, and, in fact, what is the best thing that a painter can
give us. Is it perfection of form, or of colour, intensity of feeling,
or depth of meaning? If we can't have all, what should we choose first
and cling to most securely?
Now, at the present day, there is amongst those who care for art, a
rapidly-increasing class who give a most decided answer to this
question; one, which if we can at all accept its reasoning, will
settle the matter for ever. "Art," they say, "has but one real
province, that of the simply sensuous; in whatever degree you admit
other elements you so far weaken the art." To use the expression of a
member of this school, what is wanted is "a solid sensuousness."
Now whatever else is true, this is false--"falser than all fancy
painted;" and, should it once come to be believed, will reduce art to
a worse slavery than the one from which Giotto rescued it. It would
really be hard to conceive that such a notion was really abroad did we
not read it in book, essay, and article, and see the consequences of
its prevalence in the works of our painters. Just think: here we have
an influence notoriously one of the most powerful in the world, one
that appeals equally to both sexes, to all classes, ages, and nations
of men; and we are asked, or rather told, with the true _sic volo, sic
jubeo_ accent, that we must use it for but one thing, and that is the
encouragement of sensuous pleasure. It is so utterly contrary to
truth, and productive of such evil results, that I really lack the
patience to speak of it and its exponents with common courtesy. But
leaving on one side the injurious effects of such a doctrine, it is
worth while to observe that it is really destructive of art itself.
The one vital principle of all art is its freedom; its concern with
every fact of nature or humanity, whether it be the form of a cabbage
or the sufferings of a Christ. Take your solid sensuous feeling and
welcome, but don't forget that that's but one, and a comparatively
unimportant, fragment of men's nature; and give us also their power of
endurance, their moments of rapture, their deeds of heroism, their
every-day sufferings, and their rarer joys. I put that quotation from
George Eliot at the top of the chapter, because it expresses far more
clearly and beautifully than any words that lie in my power, this
essential fact, that art is concerned with no one phase of human
feeling or external nature, but finds adequate material in whatever is
connected with men's lives.
Well, then, leaving on one side this pestilential heresy of art for
art's sake, this talk about gracious curves, and sensuous images,
secrets, twilights, silences, and all the rest of the jargon; we find
on thinking over the subject carefully, that there is one truth, which
art from its very nature is more fitted to express than any other, and
indeed that it is a truth which can and should enter into every work
of art, and that is the truth of beauty. The more we see of the world
and its varying actions and interests, the more certainly do we
discover one fact, that there is a kernel of beauty beneath almost the
roughest husks and rinds of human nature, and that in the natural
world there is also a beauty far superior to that which lies on the
surface, a subtle essence of loveliness only to be perceived by
earnest students, after long and patient study. All the subtler and
rarer manifestations of this beauty, are necessarily disregarded by
the mass of men engaged in the hard struggle of life, and it is these
which form the great province of the artist. His work is to say to us
in his picture "Look at this subject! It is beautiful, not only as you
would have thought, for its arrangement of line and colour and the
interest of its composition, but because I have penetrated into the
depth of the meaning involved; I have seen something which you would
not have seen, but yet something which was there, and if you think,
you will see that it must have been so." Every picture worthy of the
name of great, is thus a record of penetrative insight as well as mere
skill of painting; and the greater it is, the nearer it approaches in
the complexity of its meaning to the personality of a human being, and
receives a different interpretation from every one who sees it.
Again, of landscape painting, why is it that a picture of any natural
scene will move hundreds of people who would have derived little or no
enjoyment from the scene itself? Why, for instance, could Fred Walker
paint a street at Cookham or a country lane in a shower, so as to give
an amount of pleasure quite incommensurate with the importance or
loveliness of his subject? It is because he saw in it a beauty which
cannot be seen, except through him; for it is a beauty made up of the
scene itself and his actual feelings about it. Could you photograph
instantaneously lane and figures, and rain clouds, in the very colours
of nature, you would not gain a picture which would affect you in as
powerful a way. Who ever derived real pleasure from a photograph of a
landscape? Nature is beautiful always, but representations of nature
made by machinery have little beauty, and no interest. I cannot dwell
upon this theme--it would lead me too far from my subject--suffice it
to say, that in landscape, no less than in figure painting, it is the
spiritual insight of the painter which gives the highest value to his
work.[49]
To sum up shortly--truth of form, and colour, and expression, will
make a fine, perhaps even an impressive picture, but hardly a great
one; in order to do that the artist must be possessed of the power of
seizing the essence of the scene, of penetrating beneath the first
commonplace view of the subject, and finding every element of true
meaning and beauty which lies in his subject. If he once does this, he
is a true artist, and his errors of detail will become fewer and fewer
with time; if he fails in this first requisite, if he has no story to
tell except one that every one of his spectators could tell equally
well, then, no matter what may be his technical perfection, he will
never be a great artist to the end of time. To close this somewhat
long, but, I think, necessary digression, just remember what art was
when Giotto's work began. It was in a condition of double bondage,
first to the service of the Catholic Church, and second to itself, in
the perpetuation of traditional methods of work.
Always representing the same thing in the same way, its records had
become little more than variations in the arrangement of coloured
draperies. Every detail of the composition was executed upon a given
plan; the very position of the Virgin's head and the Saviour's hands
were absolutely conventional. The study of animals was almost unknown;
that of landscape nature absolutely so; all attempt at expression of
any feeling but resignation, devotion, or divine peacefulness was
perfectly discontinued; laughter, curiosity, or scorn, might have had
no existence, for any trace of them which can be found in the pictures
of the time. A picture was then nothing but a composition of
traditionally graceful lines and pleasant colours, set against a gold
background, and offered generally to the service of the Church, in
much the same spirit as the coloured German prints of the Madonna are
hung up at the little road-side shrines in Italy to this day.
In fact, art was very much in the way to which some good people of the
present day would reduce it, and represented nothing save in a partial
and symbolical manner. It was wholly unconnected with all the varying
incidents and emotions of real life, and existed only to give form to
certain traditions, and fulfil certain prescriptive offices. Its aim
was not to become of real use to man, to enter into his joys and
griefs, to console, and to enlighten him, but only to serve as a
faithful servant to the Church. Painting had gazed so long at things
heavenly, as to have almost forgotten there was an earth at all, and
so to the very ordinary-minded people who fortunately compose
nine-tenths of the world's population, its influence was too remote to
have much significance. It might represent saints, martyrs, and angels
faithfully, but what was wanted were true representations of men and
women.
Bearing this well in mind, let us examine Giotto's works, and see what
change, if any, he effected in the popular practice, and what is the
peculiar merit of his works at this day, when we are six hundred years
further on the march of progress.
FOOTNOTE:
[49] Those who are interested in this subject will find an article
discussing it in the _Spectator_ of November 10th, 1877, entitled "The
Human Element in Landscape Painting."
CHAPTER VII.
THE EARLY WORK OF GIOTTO AT FLORENCE AND ROME.
But little remains to us of the work of Giotto's student days, and
those years immediately following; but sufficient is known to show
that his first works were, as we should naturally expect, executed in
Florence itself.
The following description of some of these frescoes is taken from
Vasari. "The first pictures of Giotto were painted for the Chapel of
the High Altar in the Abbey of Florence, where he executed many works
considered extremely fine. Among these an _Annunciation_ is
particularly admired; the expression of fear and astonishment in the
countenance of the Virgin, when receiving the salutation of Gabriel,
is vividly depicted;[50] she appears to suffer the extremity of
terror, and seems almost ready to take flight. The altarpiece of that
chapel is also by Giotto; but this has been, and continues to be,
preserved,[51] rather from the respect felt for the work of so
distinguished a man, than from any other motive."
The large _Madonna Enthroned_, of which we speak at length a little
further on, was also executed at this period. This was painted for the
altar of the church of the Ognissanti, and is probably the first
quite certain work which now remains of this master. There is a
Madonna in the Brera Gallery at Milan which, if Giotto's work,
probably belongs to an early period, but is (according to Professor
Dobbert) of a less formal character; but I have not seen this work,
and cannot speak as to its authenticity or character.
Giotto also painted at this time in the church of the Carmine,[52]
which was burnt in 1771, but a few of these frescoes were rescued and
engraved by Thomas Patch;[53] according to Waagen, two of these
fragments are in Liverpool, one in the collection of Mr. Rogers, and
others in the Campo Santo of Pisa. The picture in the National Gallery
attributed to Giotto is a fragment of one of these frescoes, and
represents the heads of two of the apostles. Whether these two heads
are by Giotto's own hand is almost impossible to say, but they are in
any case works of his school, and of an early period. Judging by the
type of face, I should think it less probable of the two uncertainties
that they were executed by Giotto; but the matter is of little
importance, as the qualities they possess chiefly are not those we
find in Giotto's work. The two heads are genuine early fresco at all
events. There are several other works in the refectory, Pisa,
attributed to Giotto by Vasari, amongst which are a _Tree of the
Cross_, a Last Supper, and scenes from the life of St. Louis, a figure
of the Virgin, and a St. John and the Magdalene at the foot of the
cross; the last three of which are now concealed by whitewash, and the
authorship of any of the pictures in the refectory is considered
doubtful by Rumohr. Of the two series of panels illustrating the
lives of Christ and St. Francis, I have spoken at length below; it is
sufficient here to say that Vasari assigns them to Giotto.
Vasari makes Giotto execute various paintings, amongst them the whole
Assisi series, and the frescoes (since discovered not to be by this
master) in the Campo Santo of Pisa, between these early works and his
visit to Rome. This, however, is impossible, from the date of that
visit being fixed by strong evidence between the years 1296 and 1298,
which leaves the young painter the barest time possible to execute his
numerous early works in Florence after his six years' apprenticeship
to Cimabue. In 1296, however, occurred the incident of the O related
elsewhere, and in that or the following year Giotto visited Rome at
the invitation of Pope Boniface VIII.[54]
According to Vasari, he here executed a large picture in the sacristy
of St. Peter's, "with five others in the church itself--these last
being passages from the life of Christ; all of which he executed with
so much care, that no better work in distemper ever proceeded from his
hands.... The Pope having seen these works of Giotto, whose manner
pleased him infinitely, commanded that he should paint subjects from
the Old and New Testaments entirely around the walls of St. Peter's;
and for a commencement the artist executed in fresco the angel seven
toreccecia high, which is now over the organ: this was followed by
many other pictures, of which some have been restored in our own days,
while more have been either destroyed in laying the foundations of the
new walls, or have been taken from the old edifice of St. Peter's and
set under the organ, as is the case with a Madonna that was cut out of
the wall that it might not totally be destroyed, and being supported
with beams and bars of iron was thus carried away and secured for its
beauty in the place wherein the pious love which the Florentine
doctor, Messer Nicolo Acciainoli, has ever borne to the excellent in
art, desired to see it enshrined, and where he has richly adorned the
work of Giotto with a framework composed of modern pictures and of
ornaments in stucco. The picture in mosaic known as the _Navicella_,
and which stands above the three doors of the portico in the vestibule
of St. Peter's, is also from the hand of Giotto--a truly wonderful
work, and deservedly eulogised by all enlightened judges; and this not
only for the merit of the design, but also for that of the grouping of
the apostles, who labour in various attitudes to guide their boat
through the tempestuous sea, while the winds blow in a sail which is
swelling with so vivid a reality that the spectator could almost
believe himself to be looking at a real sail. Yet it must have been
excessively difficult to produce the harmony and interchange of light
and shadow which we admire in this work, with mere pieces of glass,
and that in a sail of such magnitude--a thing which even with the
pencil could only be equalled by great effort. There is a fisherman
also standing on a rock and fishing with a line, in whose attitude the
extraordinary patience proper to that occupation is most obvious,
while the hope of prey and his desire for it are equally manifest in
his countenance."
The above must be taken for what it is worth, as all the works named
in the quotation have perished, with the exception of the _Navicella_
and one other.[55] I have preferred to quote Vasari's description of
the _Navicella_ to any more elaborate one, for its simplicity, and a
certain strain of honest enthusiasm rare in contemporary criticism.
The remark about the extraordinary patience of the fisherman, and his
mingled hope and desire for prey, is delightful in its unconscious
satire. This mosaic still remains, but so defaced by restoration as to
have little traces of the original which roused Vasari's enthusiasm.
The production of these various works in Rome occupied Giotto six
years, at the end of which he returned to Florence in the year 1302,
and was employed to paint frescoes in the hall of the Podesta, or as
it is now more commonly called the Bargello. I found it impossible, as
I have said above, on examining these frescoes carefully, to believe
that the greater portion of them were executed by Giotto;[56] and
owing to damp and restoration the majority have suffered so severely,
as to render it a question of little but antiquarian interest whose
work they originally were. The large fresco of the _Paradise_ at the
end of the chapel, in which are the famous portraits of Dante and
Corso Donati, has been greatly restored, especially the Dante head,
which has been wholly re-painted. The portrait, nevertheless, is one
of great interest, and the spirit of the composition has been
preserved by the restorer, though the painting itself is hard and
heavy compared with the untouched work of our master.
It was shortly after the execution of this work, that Giotto prepared
the designs for the façade of the Duomo, which were executed by Andrea
Pisano; and in the succeeding year Giotto married, and shortly
afterwards removed to Padua.
The large _Madonna Enthroned_, by Giotto, bears the greatest
resemblance to the manner of Cimabue of any of this master's work.
Before the throne, which is raised on two high steps, and surrounded
with a canopy and pillars crowned by Gothic arches, kneel two angels
in white, each bearing a vase of flowers in her hand; on either side
of the throne appear six saints and angels. The Madonna is heavily
painted, and clothed in a white under-robe, with a long blue-green
mantle covering the lower portion of the figure. The Virgin gazes
straight out of the picture with something of the peculiar lack-lustre
gaze so invariably found in the pictures of the Byzantine masters, and
which was seldom absent from the faces of Cimabue himself. The two
front angels on the east side of the throne are in green, and offer to
the Virgin a model of the church (in which the picture was to serve as
an altarpiece) and a crown. The infant Christ has his hand raised as
if to address the spectator; in his face there is little of the
infantine playfulness or expression which is to be found in Giotto's
later work, as, for instance, in the fresco of the _Presentation in
the Temple_ in the Arena Chapel, where the infant Christ is struggling
to escape from the high priest to the Virgin, who stretches her arms
towards him. Indeed, throughout this picture, there is hardly to be
found a trace of the characteristic merits of Giotto's later work, and
it must have been executed in the early days of his apprenticeship to
Cimabue, whose method of arrangement has been almost slavishly copied.
The type of face, however, both of the Virgin and the Christ, are of a
broader, heavier type than in the Byzantine model, the chin fuller and
less retreating, the eye less elliptical, and the expression, though
somewhat blank, has not that drooping, half-dreamy look of the older
schools. If we turn from this Madonna, to the gigantic one by Cimabue
which hangs on the opposite side of the entrance in the Accademia, we
can see clearly the advance made by Giotto even in this early work.
Besides the differences above mentioned, there is a fresher, more
life-like air about the whole picture; the figures are arranged less
for graceful lines, and more in accordance with nature; the drapery is
not so severely conventional in the arrangement of its folds, there
is a nearer approach to the sweeping curves of nature than to the
formal vertical lines which had grown common from the imitation of
Byzantine mosaics.
When, however, all these differences are noted and allowed their full
value, we can only conclude that this work of Giotto's is one of his
earliest and least spontaneous productions, and that the colour in it
must have suffered great deterioration. Like nearly all the pictures
painted upon panel of this period, the colour has probably darkened
and lost much of its original beauty, and this will perhaps account
for the work having little of that purity of tint that is so
noticeable in Giotto's frescoes. Of the ten small scenes from the life
of St. Francis, which are generally attributed to Giotto, the same
remarks apply as to the series of scenes from the New Testament spoken
of below, and the assertion must be reiterated that there is no reason
to attribute either of these series to the hand of Giotto, the
colouring especially being contrary to the general work of that
master. There is a crude vermilion tint employed in almost every one
of these panels that may be sought for in vain in any of the frescoes
at Padua, Assisi, or in the Santa Croce at Florence.
With regard to the twenty-two small designs on panel which are in the
Accademia under the title of being portions of the great altarpiece at
Santa Maria Novella, it scarcely admits of doubt that they are bad
imitations of the master rather than specimens of even his earliest
work. If we take the slightest of the drawings in the Arena Chapel and
compare them with one of these panels, we shall find a total
dissimilarity, both in colour and design. These works do not err on
the side of incompleteness of design or a tentative method of
execution. They rather belong to a school which carries its execution
farther than its thought, and is in fact a complacent imitation of the
work of Giotto. I see in these no traces of Giotto's work, though
many traces of his manner, and feel sure that if these designs belong
in any way to Giotto, they must have been utterly spoilt in the
re-painting. They do not, however, seem to me to have been his
designs, as even in the sadly-spoilt frescoes in the Bargello, can the
traces of the master's handiwork be clearly seen, despite damp,
whitewash, and restoration, and it is excessively improbable that
these smaller panels should have needed or received equal alteration.
They are in all probability the work of Taddeo Gaddi, or one of his
pupils; but this is hardly the place to enter upon the discussion of
their authorship, further than to explain it not to belong to the hand
of Giotto.
In the chapel of the Castellani, in the Santa Croce, is the crucifix
generally ascribed to Giotto by Lord Lindsay and other writers, but it
is difficult to discover any ground, save such as is derived from
popular tradition, for such an assumption. The lines of the figure are
stiff and formal, the colour lifeless and heavy, and the whole work
seems to belong to the Sienese school in the character of the design.
It should be noted that this work is set far back behind a double row
of huge pewter candlesticks, and great branches of artificial flowers,
and is placed immediately beneath the only window that lights the
chapel, so that it is impossible to speak with certainty of the merits
of the colouring. A curious instance of the difficulty of deciding a
work to be by Giotto on account of the merit or originality of the
design is to be seen in this very chapel, where there are seven
frescoes on the right of the crucifix, by Agnolo Gaddi, which are full
of so-called Giottesque traits. Very evidently Giotto's influence was
in the air, and the very winds of heaven seem to have carried the
matter. In the Baroncelli Chapel we have an opportunity of comparing
undoubted works by Taddeo Gaddi with those frescoes in the Upper
Church at Assisi, which I have refused to consider as Giotto's; but
if these Florentine ones be by the same hand it has undoubtedly
advanced in skill; the architecture, especially, is of a considerably
more elaborate character, and is more akin to that of the Lower Church
at Assisi. It must be noticed too that there is in these Gaddi
frescoes, more observation of nature than in those of the Upper
Church; in one composition alone are there no less than four different
species of trees introduced into the background; orange, palm, a
species of laurel, and a round-topped tree, which might be anything
from a sycamore to a cedar. Various characteristics of Giotto's works
are to be traced in these frescoes; the colouring is evidently an
unsuccessful imitation, and gesture and action are used somewhat
overmuch, without helping to tell the story, as we can fancy would be
done by one trying to follow Giotto's method.
FOOTNOTES:
[50] How a certain reviewer would have scoffed at Giotto for
representing the Virgin in this manner!
[51] It has been removed since, and its whereabouts is not now known.
[52] There is a dispute about the period when these frescoes were
executed, but the weight of evidence is in favour of their having been
done at the earliest period of Giotto's artistic career.
[53] Mr. Thomas Patch does not seem to have appreciated the master
much, for he can see little difference between his work and that of
the other painters of the same period, _e.g._ the Sienese and Pisan
schools.
[54] According to Baldinucci, Vasari says Benedict IX., and Crowe and
Cavalcaselle, Benedict XI (1303). _Vide supra_, p. 35.
[55] Portrait of Boniface VIII. preserved under glass in the church.
Ed. Flor.
[56] I may perhaps mention that Mr. Fairfax Murray, who accompanied me
to the Bargello, and gave me his valuable opinion as to the authorship
of the frescoes, also felt certain of Giotto only having painted one
or two of the number.
CHAPTER VIII.
GIOTTO AT PADUA.
"These temples grew as grows the grass:
Art might obey, but not surpass;
The passive master lent his hand
To the vast soul that o'er him planned,
And the same power that built the shrine
O'erspread the tribes that knelt therein."--_Emerson._
Fancy a wet, cloudy, spring day in an old Italian town; the only
objects visible in the little grass-grown square where the hotel
stands, being two or three mournful carriages, with the sorriest
steeds harnessed to them, that even Italian feeding can produce, and
surrounding these, houses of mildewed stone, faced occasionally with
brown plaster, large flakes of which are peeling off in every
direction. The drivers have long since given up all hope of even a
stray tourist, and ensconced themselves in the low wine-shop that you
may see at the corner of the square, whence the sound of their voices
and the smoke of their cigars, break forth occasionally into the heavy
atmosphere.
Every now and then a slippered figure, with white stockings down at
heel, and black stuff petticoat wrapped carefully over its head,
hurries by on some domestic errand, or a stray dog limps dejectedly in
and out of the carriage wheels, in search of stray scraps of sausage
or cheese, which might indeed well be there, since the drivers eat
both, pretty well all day long. To close the picture, an Englishman
in a tweed suit, staring contemplatively at the prospect from the
doorway of the principal hotel, and wondering whether it was really
worth while to travel half across Europe, in order to reach such a
resting-place: wondering also whom he shall get to direct him to the
Arena Chapel, for this is Padua, once most learned of universities,
and now dullest of cities, and it is here that Giotto painted the
Scrovegni Chapel from floor to ceiling.
After more or less contradictory directions and several fruitless
attempts, I discovered the entrance to the enclosure wherein the
chapel stands, and being by this time wet, tired, dirty, and
considerably out of temper, immediately resolved to leave it to the
next day to see the pictures, and returned to my hotel depressed in
spirit, but trying to look forward to the morrow. All was unchanged in
the square, save that the dog had departed, and the vetturini grown a
trifle more noisy; so after a solitary dinner, wherein the landlord
figured as sole attendant, and macaroni formed the principal dish, I
turned into my room, and consoled myself with concocting an imaginary
leader to the _Times_ on the fallacy of believing that Italian weather
was better than English, and so to bed.
Never was change more complete than that I woke to the next morning. A
blazing sun, such as we see in July only, shone in the midst of a blue
sky, and streamed brightly in upon the paved bedchamber, and a fresh
little breeze rattled cheerfully to and fro the big window-shutters,
and hinted at its being time to get up. A glance into the square
revealed my vetturino friends cheerfully cracking their whips at
imaginary flies, and, seated by the side of the fountain, a
brown-skinned maiden in the whitest of linen and heaviest of earrings,
was amicably partaking of a chunk of sausage, with the youngest of the
party. The very dog had turned up again, and looked at least twice the
size that he did yesterday, and was sitting at a respectful distance
from the last-named couple, watching for scraps with cheerful
confidence.
Now, if ever, it appeared to me was the time for a first favourable
impression of a great artist, and so, hurrying through dressing and
breakfast, I started for the chapel. Venting the content of my soul as
I went along, in the solitary Italian phrase I was master of, I waved
my hand to the young coachman, and said, _ché bel' tempo_. He looked
down at his dark-eyed damsel; she was sitting on the step of the
carriage by this time, and if ever a coachman agreed with any one,
which is doubtful, that young fellow did with me; though I gathered
his assent merely from his eloquent looks, for of what he said I have
not the faintest conception.
So, like Æneas, with hope and fortune favouring me, I drew near to the
great wooden gate which marks the entrance to the Arena. The large
gates are immovable, but a little lattice door opens if you push it
deftly at the right moment after having rung the bell, and on
entering, you see a long garden, where currants and apple-trees,
acacias and vines, almonds and poplars, are all mixed together in a
confusion of greenery. At the end of the narrow gravel walk rises a
house, not unlike an English suburban villa, much out of repair, in
front of which two or three small children are tumbling about in
perilous proximity to an old well, while at what should be the
dining-room window, stands a girl twisting up her long, black hair,
with the most perfect composure. Anything more delightfully unlike the
usual aspect of a show place could hardly be imagined, and at first
(not being able to see the chapel at all) I thought I had mistaken my
direction for the third time, but there was the servant evidently
getting ready to receive me, and, as I had undoubtedly rung the bell,
I walked boldly up to the house.
[Illustration: PADUA.
_From a drawing by the Author._]
A few steps explained the matter. The chapel stands to the right of
the house, at the edge of the orchard, and the servant was doing up
her hair previous to bringing out the keys. The chapel outside is
simply a barn-shaped building, with a gable roof, absolutely
undecorated in any way whatever, unless a round-arched door, with the
remains of a very small fresco above it, can be called decorative. The
entrance is at the west end of the building, which is lighted from the
south side only, by six long narrow windows. The gable roof hardly
projects at all beyond the walls. The whole appearance of the chapel
being somewhat like those box-like constructions drawn by children, to
represent a house. If it be a proper criticism to call a thing ugly
which has only been constructed for a certain purpose, and which has
fulfilled that purpose fairly well for six hundred years, the
Scrovegni Chapel may fairly be called by that name; but personally I
must confess to a feeling of gratification at finding there was
absolutely no attempt at architectural embellishment in the whole
building, and many will probably share this feeling. Knowing that the
interior was absolutely covered with frescoes, each of which was
almost priceless, it seemed to me appropriate, both to the pictures,
and the simplicity of style in the master who executed them, that
their covering should be not sculptured marble or vaulted stone, but
simply plain, honest building.
After all the chapel was hardly more to the frescoes than is the
canvas to the picture, and it afforded a refreshing contrast to the
way in which things are done nowadays, to remember that Enrico
Scrovegni,[57] wishing to build a temple to the honour, and for the
service of, the Virgin, thought it more necessary to give her the work
of genius within her shrine, than to adorn its exterior with costly
materials and sculptured ornament. Given that it was a choice between
Giotto's frescoes and elaborate architectural design (and we may
suppose that a plain citizen could not afford both), then we can look
at this homely building with pleasure rather than repulsion, as we do
at the rough coating of some precious stone. And if we do not grumble
at the plainness of the building, still less will we do so at its
position in the quaint garden-close, where flickering shadows from the
bright leaves of the acacias dot the gravel path, and where from
behind the chapel rises the humming of the custodian's bee-hives.[58]
Is not this such a surrounding as we might best desire for our
painter's work? In front of his masterpieces, an orchard green and
gay, with trembling leaves and flashing sunshine, and human with the
soft voices of laughing children; and behind, a rich meadow, where a
few cattle doze lazily through their time, and long ranges of
bee-hives stand in the very shadow of the chapel; and if the eye lifts
its gaze from meadow and orchard, with a sense of something wanting to
the full agreement of the surroundings and the painter's mind, it
meets the great dome of the neighbouring church rising against the
cloudless sky, as it might in one of Giotto's own frescoes, and is
satisfied. So with the rustling of the leaves, and the murmur of the
bees in our ears, and something of the bright sunshine in our hearts,
we enter the chapel where the custodian waits patiently enough, having
had experience of many tourists and their foolish ways.
A long vaulted chamber plainly divided by a high arch into nave and
chancel, lighted by six high narrow windows, all on the right hand
wall, the entire interior surface covered with frescoes, three tiers
of which run from the ceiling to within about eight feet of the
ground; at intervals, below this lowest tier, there are other frescoes
of smaller size in monochrome, symbolical of the various Christian
virtues and vices, surrounded by craftily painted borders, imitating
mosaic of coloured marbles.
Wherever the eye turns it meets a bewilderment of colour pure and
radiant, and yet restful to the eye; tints which resemble in their
perfect harmony of brightness the iridescence of a shell, and seem to
be possessed of something of the same strange quality of imprisoned
light. From the blue ceiling, with its medallions and golden stars, to
the lowest range of mosaic, there is literally not a spot where the
eye cannot rest with pleasure; and the whole interior, owing perhaps
to its perfect simplicity of form, and the absence of all other
decoration than the frescoes, presents less the aspect of a building
ornamented with paintings, than that of some gigantic opal in the
midst of which the spectator stands.
It is difficult to speak without seeming exaggeration of the effect
produced, or to attempt to convey to those of my readers who are not
familiar with the spot, the peculiar qualities of the colouring in
these paintings. In England, and to the majority of Englishmen, pure
colour, bright colour, and _staring_ colour, are almost
interchangeable terms, and depth of colour is but too frequently
understood to mean depth of _shadow_. Now you must quite get rid of
the idea that the colouring of these frescoes is crude or violent,
because I call it "pure."
If there is one quality of our master's work which is more certain
than another, it is the general harmony of his tints, the absence of
any discordant effect from his paintings. The great difference between
his system of colouring and that of later masters is, that his harmony
is gained by means of the combination of broad masses of comparatively
simple tints, while later artists discovered that by paying greater
attention to the gradation of colour, its subtle variations of light
and shade, and its enhancement by means of complementary tints, they
could produce a greater truth to nature, as well as a greater amount
of colour beauty, than in any other way--and one, moreover, which was
applicable to all the varying conditions of nature. Giotto's system
was one which he would have been the first to discard, had it occurred
to him to paint a picture save in full daylight, for its beauty is
incompatible with any other effect. It must always be remembered in
thinking of his work, that he was the successor of men who absolutely
banished shadow from their pictures; for the gloomy hues of the older
Byzantine pictures were not representative of shadow, any more than
their rich tones represented light; and Giotto's master, Cimabue, had
revolted from the darkness of his predecessors' pictures to
comparatively light tints.
It was, of course, impossible for Giotto to work out an entire system
of chiaroscuro for himself (as a matter of fact it took another two
hundred years to accomplish that advance); the marvel is that by his
exquisite arrangement of tint he was able to compose pictures which
are to this day comparable in colour beauty to those of the great
masters of succeeding ages, though they are not comparable in subtlety
of colour, nor is there ever such beauty of a special colour gained as
in the work of the later artists.[59]
[Illustration: PARADISE.
_FRESCO BY GIOTTO._
IN THE CAPPELLA DELL' ARENA, PADUA.
(_Greatly restored._)]
The series of paintings comprises illustrations of the apocryphal
history of Joachim and Anna, the Virgin's parents, the life of the
Virgin up to the period of the Annunciation, and finally, a set of
illustrations of the life and passion of Jesus Christ, culminating in
a fresco above the choir showing Him enthroned in glory. Thus the
series forms one connected history, supplementing which there is on
the great wall above the door a representation of the last judgment.
Every fresco is surrounded by a frame, painted in imitation of
coloured mosaic, and at intervals, beneath the lowest row of the
scenes from the life of Christ, there are representations of the
Virtues, each of which has its corresponding Vice facing it upon the
opposite side of the chapel. In the arrangement it should be noticed
that each Virtue has its head turned to the portion of the Last
Judgment fresco representing Heaven, or to the fresco of Christ in
Glory; each Vice looks towards the portion representing Hell. These
symbolical figures are in greyish green, with occasionally a
background of dull red; the historical works are in various colours.
This arrangement is probably due in some measure to the rules of
Byzantine art, but here the resemblance ends; nothing can be more
original, owing less to tradition, than the composition of the various
pictures in this series. They are not so much an improvement upon
Byzantine art, as a wholly new departure; the difference is something
like that between the gallop of a horse, and the fierce rush of a
locomotive, not only a greater pace, but a changed mode of
progression. It is difficult to see how the one could have ever
developed into the other, and there is no clue left, save such as may
be found in that lonely shepherd life led by the young artist, amidst
the olive groves and grey hills of Vespignano. I subjoin a table of
the subjects of these series in the order in which they here occur;
but I do not propose to weary my readers with a description of the
composition of each picture; it will be sufficient if I indicate the
main features of a few of the most important.[60]
The order of the drawings in the Arena Chapel is as follows:--
1. Joachim's Offering rejected by the High Priest.
2. Joachim retires to the Sheepfold.
3. The Angel appears to Anna.
4. The Sacrifice of Joachim.
5. The Angel appears to Joachim.
6. The Meeting of Joachim and Anna.
7. The Birth of the Virgin Mary.
8. The Presentation of the Virgin.
9. The Rods are brought to the High Priest.
10. The Watching of the Rods at the Altar.
11. The Espousal of the Virgin Mary.
12. The Virgin Mary returns to her Home.
13. The Annunciation--the Angel Gabriel.
14. The Annunciation--the Virgin Mary.
15. The Marriage of the Virgin.
16. The Salutation.
17. The Nativity.
18. The Wise Men's Offering.
19. The Presentation in the Temple.
20. The Flight into Egypt.
21. The Massacre of the Innocents.
22. The Young Christ in the Temple.
23. The Baptism of Christ.
24. The Marriage in Cana.
25. The Raising of Lazarus.
26. The Entry into Jerusalem.
27. The Expulsion from the Temple.
28. The Hiring of Judas.
29. The Last Supper.
30. The Washing of the Feet.
31. The Kiss of Judas.
32. Christ before Caiaphas.
33. The Scourging of Christ.
34. Christ bearing His Cross.
35. The Crucifixion.
36. The Entombment.
37. The Resurrection.
38. The Ascension.
39. The Descent of the Holy Spirit.
The first of this series which deserves especial attention is that
numbered two in the above table, the representation of Joachim's
retirement to the sheepfold, after his offering has been rejected by
the high priest. This is especially remarkable as being the first of
his series of the Arena frescoes in which Giotto's early training
shows itself. Nothing can be more marked than the evident delight of
the painter in depicting any form of this shepherd life. Throughout
his works every opportunity of introducing animal nature, especially
sheep nature, is eagerly seized and made the most of, and, as in this
fresco, the animals have invariably a character of their own, and are
by no means walking gentlemen in the scene represented. Look, for
instance, at the varied action of the sheep in this composition,
and the eager welcome that Joachim's dog is giving to his master. In
the third and fourth pictures, too, of the _Sacrifice of Joachim_, and
the subsequent appearance of the angel, is the delight of the painter
in animal idiosyncrasies apparent, as in the two rams butting at one
another, and the air of quiet watchfulness in which the dog lies down,
with a sense of responsibility strong upon him.
[Illustration: JOACHIM RETIRES TO THE SHEEPFOLD. BY GIOTTO.
_In the Cappella dell' Arena, Padua._]
The _Meeting of Joachim and Anna_, chiefly remarkable for the grace
and beauty of the two leading figures; it is somewhat curious to
notice how the position of Anna's head suggests that of a famous
modern picture, perhaps the most celebrated ever painted in England,
the _Huguenots_, by Mr. J. E. Millais, R.A. _A propos_ of this fresco,
Mr. Ruskin remarks, that the artist has heightened the effect of the
leading figures by wilfully coarsening the features of the subordinate
characters, and that the horizontal lines of the architecture enhance
by contrast the beauty of the curved draperies. I am, however,
inclined to think that the first of these contrasts is accidental, as
the type of face of the servants in this composition, is found
throughout the minor characters in Giotto's pictures; indeed, it may
be noticed that, whether from his own uncomeliness, or some other more
recondite reason, the painter had a curious difficulty in depicting
beautiful faces, that belongs to him alone of contemporary masters.
This does not apply to beauty of gesture or line, to which he was
excessively sensitive.
8. The _Presentation of the Virgin_--the Virgin represented not as a
child, but, as Lord Lindsay remarks, a dwarf woman. The figure of Anna
in this picture is one of the least graceful in Giotto's works.
10. The _Watching of the Rods at the Altar_.--Chiefly characteristic
as showing Giotto's power of seizing the expression in the simplest
actions, which is most characteristic of the subject; in this fresco
the eagerness of the watchers is shown with a quite unmistakeable
plainness, especially in the three centre figures, though all of these
have their backs more or less turned to the spectator.
11. The _Espousal of the Virgin_.--Some of the figures in this
composition are very fine, such, for instance, as those of Joseph, the
high priest, and the youth behind, who is in the act of breaking the
rod over his knee. Mr. Ruskin remarks of this last figure that in
Perugino's treatment of the same subject (at Cannes) there is "nothing
in the action of the disappointed suitors so perfectly true and
touching as that of the youth breaking his rod in this composition of
Giotto."
12. The _Return of the Virgin Mary to her Home._--The figure of the
violin-player in this composition is remarkable, not only for its
beauty, but for being identical with that of one of the attendants in
the fresco of the _Daughter of Herodias dancing before Herod_, in the
Santa Croce at Florence. It is a very quiet picture, full of slow
movement and dignified grace, but a little wanting in the variety of
action which is generally characteristic of Giotto's work, and more
severe in the lines of the drapery.
13. The _Annunciation_--the Angel Gabriel and the Virgin Mary. These
are two single figures which together encircle the arch above the
entrance to the choir of the chapel, and are as beautiful as any of
the compositions; especially fine is the attitude of the lines of
drapery of the angel's figure. Giotto seems not to have attempted to
render the Virgin's face beautiful either in expression or feature.
16. The _Salutation_--almost the first fresco where Giotto's full
powers are seen. I know no two figures more finer in their way than
those of the Virgin and Elizabeth. Here the plainness of Mary's face
seems quite obscured by the beauty of its expression, and every line
of the two figures helps to tell the story. This picture is smaller
than the others, owing to its place beneath the figure of the Virgin
in the _Annunciation_, and is nearly bare of all background.
17. The _Nativity_.--This Nativity is doubly interesting from the fact
of the subject being repeated at Assisi in the lower church[61] in the
series generally attributed to Giotto. The one at Padua is as
beautiful as any of the Arena frescoes, and in every way finer than
the Assisi rendering, which latter is almost certainly the work of one
of Giotto's pupils, and is as stiff and mechanical in its general
arrangement as the former is easy and natural.
I need not enter into the reasons which have convinced me of Giotto
not having personally executed the Assisi Nativity, as they are given
at length in a subsequent chapter.[62] The varied action of the
angels, the natural gestures of the Virgin and the shepherds and the
quiet harmony of blue and grey colour (in which this fresco is almost
entirely painted), are especially worthy of notice. Very noticeable
too are the attentive animals, and the natural manner in which the
Virgin turns half round in her bed to place the child in its
attendant's arms. On the right are the shepherds listening to the
angels, who fly hither and thither above the mountain background; on
the left, the ox and ass stretching their heads towards the Virgin's
couch.
18. The _Adoration of the Magi_.--The composition of this fresco in
its leading figures is very fine, and somewhat more elaborate than
customary in this series. The artist has tried very hard to get some
expression of interest in the camel, who is being held by an attendant
on the left of the picture, and has actually succeeded to some extent,
despite the Noah's-ark-like appearance of the animal, caused no doubt
by Giotto's insufficient acquaintance with its shape.
19. The _Presentation in the Temple_.--There are two incidents in this
scene, for the right interpretation of the latter of which I am
indebted to Mr. Ruskin. The first of them is the naturalism of the
child, which is evidently struggling to leave the high priest's arms
and get back to its mother, who holds out her arms to receive it; the
second being the approach of an angel to Simeon, who is supposed by
Mr. Ruskin to typify the angel of death, "sent in visible fulfilment
of the thankful words of Simeon: 'Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant
depart in peace.'" The drapery of the Virgin in this fresco, though
simple, is very fine.
20. The _Flight into Egypt_.--One of the simplest of the series. The
colour in several places completely gone, as, for instance, in the
Virgin's robe, which, originally blue, is now a yellowish white, the
dark shadow of the drapery alone remaining. The patient pace of the
tired ass on which the Virgin is seated, if contrasted with that of
the one on which Christ is riding in the fresco of the _Entry into
Jerusalem_, will show how minute was Giotto's observation and
appreciation of animal life.
21. The _Murder of the Innocents_.--Perhaps the least pleasing of the
series, though no doubt much of its lack of beauty is owing to the
change of colour which this fresco has sustained, a change which, from
some unknown cause, has been much more radical than in most of this
series. The composition could, however, have been at no time a
beautiful one, and the heap of stiff wooden dolls (for such they seem)
that represents the slaughtered innocents is simply ugly. The fresco,
however, is full of action, and the figure of the leading executioner,
who stands drawing back his sword to pierce the child, whom he holds
head downwards in his left hand, is one of the most vigorous Giotto
ever conceived.
22. The _Teaching of Christ in the Temple_.--This fresco is so much
injured by damp as to be practically destroyed.
23. The _Baptism of Christ by John_.--Wholly Byzantine in its
arrangement, especially in the water, which is depicted as a heavy
green wall, reaching half way up the fresco and covering Christ's body
as high as the chest. Mary and Joseph stand on the right bank,
attendants on the left, Christ in the centre of the picture, with a
glory streaming down upon him. It is somewhat curious to observe that
Giotto has made a compromise in the garments of the Apostle John, and
while clothing him in a pink robe, for the sake of the fresco's
colour, has allowed a little bit of the camel's-hair garment to be
seen beneath the long drapery.
24. The _Wedding in Cana_.--A touch of nature in the fat butler in the
foreground, who is swigging away at the wine before taking it to the
table; otherwise this fresco is one of the most commonplace of the
series. It is worthy of notice that in all cases where Giotto has to
represent a scene in which the actors are seated, the artist seems to
lose much of his attractiveness; to become more commonplace. It is as
if the dramatic instinct in him refused to work freely except when he
could depict varied actions.
25. The _Raising of Lazarus_.--This is another fresco full of the
various attitudes of surprise and energy in which Giotto delighted so
much. The pose of the principal figure of the disciples should be
noticed, as it is very characteristic of our artist, and occurs in
many of his frescoes where surprise or grief has to be indicated. The
body is bent slightly forward with the arms thrown abruptly back, the
hand hollowed with the palm towards the ground, the fingers held
together and the thumb as much spread out as possible. The figures of
the two attendants in this fresco, who are raising the heavy slab
which covered the tomb of Lazarus, are of very marked action; the one
on the right trying to raise the slab to his shoulder, while the
left-hand one, with feet planted firmly wide apart, is just bending to
the strain of lifting his end of the stone from the ground, or as a
rowing man would say, is just "getting his weight on."
26. The _Entry into Jerusalem_.--Greatly injured by damp but still
interesting. Notice the figure of the woman, whose cloak has tumbled
over her head in her excitement, and the haste with which the two boys
in the background are climbing the palm-trees to get a good view.
27. The _Expulsion of the Money-changers_.--Like the last this
composition is one of varied interest, but the left-hand portion of it
having been considerably damaged by damp is scarcely intelligible. The
attitude of Christ is energetic, and there is a fine contrast in
feeling between the two money-changers on the right hand of the
picture, one of whom shrinks away, while the other seems inclined to
stand his ground, while the precipitation with which the goat is
leaping out of the little pen is one of those little semi-burlesque
touches of animal life which Giotto introduces whenever he gets a
chance.
[Illustration: THE ENTOMBMENT OF CHRIST.
_FRESCO BY GIOTTO._
IN THE CAPPELLA DELL' ARENA, PADUA.]
28. The _Hiring of Judas_.--A small composition of four figures,
placed on the wall beneath the arch of the choir, immediately beneath
the _Angel of the Annunciation_. Judas has already received the bag of
money, and the high priest, with one finger raised, like a sort of
ecclesiastical Dogberry, is just giving him his last instructions. The
Devil, too, in the shape of a black hobgoblin, with claws and tail, is
also giving the apostate advice, whispering it into his ear. The small
fresco beneath this and in the corresponding place on the other side
of the choir is simply painted with a representation of an arched
ceiling, wall, and window, apparently intended to give the impression
from a distance of there being a side transept to the choir.
29. The _Last Supper_.--In this, as in all his frescoes of seated
figures, Giotto is less at home than usual. It is curious to notice
that the attitude of John in this fresco is the same as was adopted in
all the later renderings of this scene. The moment chosen is the usual
one of the Saviour's speech--"He that dippeth his hand in the dish
with me, the same shall betray me."[63]
30. The _Washing of the Feet_.--Very characteristic of Giotto and
wonderfully true to life in the positions and actions of all
concerned. Notice the apostle tying his sandal on the left of the
picture, and the one who is about to have his feet washed, holding up
his long robe lest it should get wet.
31. The _Betrayal_.--This composition is much more thickly filled with
figures than most of the series, and is one of the finest, though
hardly one of the most beautiful. The figures of Christ and Judas are
both grand in their respective ways, and stand out vividly from the
crowd that surrounds them. There is no mistake about what is
transpiring; one does not have to look for the action in a middle of
graceful lines, but it presents itself strongly and at the first
glance. The figure of the high priest who points out Christ to the
soldiery is also very fine, dignified and yet eager in action, and
with a mixed expression of triumph and anxiety. In colour this fresco
bears comparison with any in the chapel.
32. The _Trial_.--"And Pilate rent his garments," &c. Chiefly
interesting for the very beautiful figure of Christ, who stands with
hands tied and body slightly bent, half turned away from his judge,
the face expressing resignation, but in an even greater degree
removedness from the scene around, possessed by some over-mastering
idea.
33. The _Crown of Thorns_.--Here Giotto is again in a somewhat
burlesque humour: the delight of those who are here mocking, tickling,
pinching, and smiting Christ is evidently the ruling motive of the
picture. It is noticeable that here there are only servants engaged in
the derision and tormenting, not soldiers, according to the commoner
rendering.
34. The _Bearing of the Cross_.--In this fresco the figures of both
Christ and Mary are fine, that of Christ being similar to the attitude
at the trial above referred to.
35. The _Crucifixion_.--One of the most beautiful of the series. The
Magdalen kneels at the foot of the cross, weeping bitterly; St. John,
half fainting, is supported by two disciples on the left of the
picture; on the right the soldiers squabble over the division of
Christ's robe; the Saviour looks down upon the Magdalen, and above the
cross fly here and there angels.
36 and 37. The _Entombment_ and the _Resurrection_.--These are the two
most beautiful frescoes in the chapel, so beautiful that they throw
all the others into comparative shade, and fortunately they are both
little injured by damp. In the first, Christ is being prepared for
burial by the disciples and the two Maries. The Magdalen supports his
feet upon her knees; the Mother lays one arm upon his breast, whilst
she raises his head towards her with the other in a last embrace. St.
John bends over the body in Giotto's usual attitude of grief and
horror; other disciples and attendants stand round weeping and
watching; in the background are mountains, and above them a choir of
angels.
In the _Resurrection_, the soldiers sleep beside the red porphyry tomb
where Christ was laid, and on which, at head and foot, sit the
white-winged, white-robed angels. Nearly in the centre kneels the
Magdalen in a long robe of crimson, which shrouds her form from head
to foot all but her face; to the extreme right of the picture stands
Christ, half turning away from the kneeling woman, one arm
outstretched as though warning her "_noli me tangere_."
38 and 39. The _Ascension_, and the _Descent of the Holy Spirit_.--The
former of these two frescoes, which form the concluding ones of the
series, is very formal in its arrangement--the Christ being in the
centre of the picture, with hands raised to the choir of angels, who
hover on both sides. Below, the disciples are also in two groups, nor
is there very much to dwell upon in their expression or gestures. The
whole fresco seems as if Giotto had felt himself more fettered by the
traditional manner of representing the scene, or less at liberty to
treat it in his own peculiar fashion, than in the preceding scenes of
the series. The _Descent of the Holy Spirit_ is very similar in the
arrangement of the seated figures to that of the _Last Supper_, and is
only remarkable for its very delicate colouring.
[Illustration: "NOLI ME TANGERE."
_FRESCO BY GIOTTO._
IN THE CAPPELLA DELL' ARENA, PADUA.]
This picture of the _Descent of the Holy Spirit_ completes the series
of the history of the Virgin and our Saviour, and we have only now to
mention the symbolical figures in monochrome, which are painted at
intervals beneath the lowest row of frescoes, and which it is probable
were an after thought of Giotto's, possibly suggested to him by Dante,
who, as I have said, was living at Padua during the time when Giotto
was occupied in painting the Arena Chapel.
Be that as it may, it is the fact that in no other place does Giotto
show much tendency towards symbolical representation; these are the
only figures of the kind that we know to have been executed by his
hand. In this arrangement all the Virtues are painted upon the right
side of the chapel, and have their faces turned to the heavenly side
of the great fresco above the door; the Vices are on the left, and
look in like manner to the part of that fresco representing hell. The
list is as follows:--
VIRTUES.
1. Hope.
2. Charity.
3. Faith.
4. Justice.
5. Temperance.
6. Fortitude.
7. Prudence.
VICES.
8. Folly.
9. Inconstancy.
10. Anger.
11. Injustice.
12. Infidelity.
13. Avarice.
14. Despair.
This list is in the order in which the frescoes are placed round the
chapel, beginning on the right hand of the doorway and returning to
the left of the entrance; it will be seen, therefore, that the
corresponding Virtue and Vice face each other throughout the series.
Some of these allegorical figures are very beautiful; especially there
should be noticed _Charity_, holding a basket of fruit in one hand and
stretching forth the other to the _Almighty_, who bends down from
heaven to place some fruit in her hand. As Mr. Ruskin has remarked,
the figure is made to trample upon money-bags, as if in contempt.
_Hope_ also is a very beautiful figure flying upward with outstretched
arms, and an expression of rapture and longing upon her face. After
these _Justice_ and _Temperance_ are the finest. Of the Vices,
_Injustice_ is perhaps the most interesting, if it is only for the
sake of giving a clear example of how far Giotto understood the nature
of trees. The foreground of this fresco being a wood, behind which
sits _Injustice_ in a cave, with a sword in his left hand and a
grappling-hook in his right, to catch the unwary traveller, who is
represented in a small predella to the picture, being robbed and
stripped of his clothes. _Anger_ too is a fine figure, rending her
garment apart in futile wrath, and so is _Despair_, with clenched
fists and downcast head. On the whole, this series of Virtues and
Vices is a remarkable one for the plainness with which the thing
symbolised is shown, and the penetration which has led Giotto in
almost every case to the real root of the Virtue or Vice. For a full
description of these most interesting frescoes the reader cannot do
better than refer to the little book written for the Arundel Society
by Mr. Ruskin, entitled _Giotto and his Works in Padua_.
* * * * *
NOTE.--"This chapel, built in, or about, the year 1303, appears
to have been intended to replace one which had long existed
upon the spot; and in which from the year 1278 an annual
festival had been held on Ladyday, in which the Annunciation
was represented in the manner of our English mysteries (and
under the same title: 'Una sacra rappresentazione di quel
_mistero_'), with dialogue and music, both vocal and
instrumental. Scrovegni's purchase of the ground would not be
allowed to interfere with the national custom; but he is
reported by some writers to have rebuilt the chapel with
greater costliness, in order, as far as possible, to efface the
memory of his father's unhappy life. But Federici, in his
history of the Cavalieri Godenti, supposes that Scrovegni was a
member of that body, and was assisted by them in decorating the
new edifice. The order of Cavalieri Godenti was instituted in
the beginning of the thirteenth century, to defend the
'existence,' as Selvatica states it, but, more accurately, the
'dignity' of the Virgin against the various heretics by whom it
was beginning to be assailed. His knights were at first called
'Cavaliers of St. Mary;' but soon increased in power and riches
to such a degree that from their general habits of life they
received the nickname of the 'Merry Brothers.'
"Federici gives powerful reasons for his opinion that the Arena
Chapel was employed in the ceremonies of their order; and Lord
Lindsay observes 'that the fulness with which the history of
the Virgin is recounted on its walls, adds to the plausibility
of his supposition.'
"Enrico Scrovegni was, however, towards the close of his life
driven into exile, and died at Venice in 1320. But he was
buried in the chapel he had built, and has one small monument
in the sacristy as the founder of the building, in which he is
represented under a Gothic niche, standing with his hands
clasped and his eyes raised, while behind the altar is his
tomb, on which, as usual at this period, is a recumbent statue
of him. The chapel itself may not unwarrantably be
considered as one of the first efforts of Popery in resistance
to the Reformation; for the Reformation, though not victorious
till the sixteenth, began in reality in the thirteenth century;
and the remonstrances of such bishops as our own Grossteste,
the martyrdom of the Albigenses in the Dominican crusades, and
the murmurs of those 'heretics,' against whose aspersions of
the majesty of the Virgin this chivalrous order of the
Cavalieri Godenti was instituted, were as truly the signs of
the new era in religion, as the opponent work of Giotto on the
walls of the Arena was a sign of the approach of a new era in
art."--From _The Arena Chapel at Padua_, by JOHN RUSKIN.
[Illustration: JUSTICIA.
_FRESCO BY GIOTTO._
IN THE CAPPELLA DELL' ARENA, PADUA.]
FOOTNOTES:
[57] See note at the end of this chapter for Ruskin's account of the
chapel's use and its founder.
[58] I beg the custodian's pardon, for on going to the chapel again
this year, I find that it is the Royal Society of Api-Culture who are
responsible for the dozen or so of hives.
[59] It would take me at least a page to justify and define this
assertion. I must trust my readers to understand that it is written in
no depreciation of later artists, and that it only refers to colour as
seen in light, scarcely modified at all by shade.
[60] Throughout this book I have purposely avoided, wherever it was
possible, long descriptions of the subject matter of the pictures
mentioned. The almost inevitable tendency of such description, unless
it is done with the greatest reticence as well as skill, is to
withdraw the reader's attention from the artist, either to the author
or the subject spoken of, and as my main endeavour in writing this
book has been to bring the peculiarities of the artist into constant
prominence, it would have defeated my purpose to enter into
descriptive writing.
[61] See Lower Church of Assisi, Chapter X.
[62] See Chapter on the Lower Church of Assisi, p. 111.
[63] Almost the only artist who ever thoroughly vanquished the
difficulty of representing the Last Supper, without stiffness of
arrangement, was Tintoretto in his great picture in the Scuola San
Rocco. The celebrated Leonardo fresco at Milan of this subject suffers
in a measure from the same difficulty as Giotto's work, though in a
less degree.
CHAPTER IX.
GIOTTO'S STYLE.
"There is in truth a holy purity, an innocent _naïveté_, a
child-like grace and simplicity, a freshness, a fearlessness, a
yearning after all things truthful, lovely, and of good report,
in the productions of this early time which invest them with a
charm peculiar in its kind, and which few even of the most
perfect works of the maturer era can boast of; and hence the
risk and danger (which I warn you of at the outset) of becoming
too passionately attached to them, of losing the power of
discrimination, of admiring and imitating their defects as well
as their beauties, of running into affectation in seeking after
simplicity, and into exaggeration in our efforts to be in
earnest; in a word of forgetting that in art, as in human
nature, it is the balance, harmony and co-equal development, of
sense, intellect, and spirit, which constitutes
perfection."--LORD LINDSAY'S _Christian Art_.
I feel my inability to convey to my readers any adequate idea of the
general style of Giotto's painting, and this not so much because it is
a complicated one or difficult to understand, as because of its very
simplicity. A few points may be mentioned in which it differed from
that of his predecessors in Italy, from the pictures of the
Renaissance period, and lastly from those of our own time; but when
all is said, the peculiar beauty of the colouring, the simplicity and
purity of the feeling, the strength and directness of the painter's
aim, and the unstudied grace of his compositions will remain to baffle
any description that can be given.
First let me note that previous to the time of Giotto (since the
decay at least of Greek art) colour in painting meant almost
exclusively the arrangement of gorgeous hues on a golden background.
The tints used being little, if at all, gradated, but laid on more in
the manner of a mosaic than a modern picture. Derived, as were the
traditions of painting, from manuscripts of Mount Athos and mosaics of
Byzantium, they were almost wholly confined to the composition of pure
colours in pleasing juxtaposition, and these colours were almost
invariably full and deep. It may, perhaps, make my meaning clearer if
I take an antithetical example from the art of the present day.
Everybody knows the characteristics of French landscape painting, a
beautiful tone of grey and black, and perhaps a few other tertiary
tints, and no form or colour whatever, depending entirely on the
gradation for its beauty. Well, before Giotto there was no such thing
as tone, save in pure colours; and gradation of colour was practically
unknown. The colours used were dark and rich, purples and crimsons and
deep blues, and here and there orange and green and heavy blue-blacks.
These, laid upon a gold ground, more or less ornamented with chased
designs, formed the chief portion of the pictorial art of the
centuries preceding Giotto. Looking into one of these pictures was
like looking into a decaying fire, where amidst masses of dark shade
there still burnt gloomily here and there, patches of glowing cinders
and bright flame. Hung in the dim recess of a chapel or an oratory,
lighted by the faint glimmer of the silver lamps, these works of
Christian art may well have harmonised with the dark ages of
superstition which gave them life, but they were essentially
unsuitable for having any real effect upon men's minds, apart from
their religious uses. They had no connection with the real life of the
world, full of varying emotions and conflicting passions; they had no
affinity with the times when the hardbound earth cracked at the close
of winter, and the sun shone once more in a blue sky, and all men's
"pulses throbbed together with the fulness of the spring."
This was the first change that Giotto made in artistic method. "Away
with the gold background," he said; "let us have the blue sky," and,
as in the days of creation, "it was so." This we may fancy was the
first step, but with it came many others. With the introduction of the
sky came a corresponding lightening of the tones used throughout the
picture, a corresponding increase in the amount of light depicted in
the composition.
And, as over the whole of Byzantine art, there had brooded a gorgeous
gloom, through which the tints only revealed themselves dimly and
slowly, as we may see at the present day, the hues of tropic sea-weed
glow faint beneath the waves of the China Sea, so over Giotto's
frescoes there shone a calm, full light, not bathed in sunshine or
enhanced by contrasted shade, but a plain clear breadth of day,
sufficient to reveal clearly each object in the picture.
Just think what a change this one alteration in tone must have brought
about! what an instrument it was for the correcting of the absurd
traditions which then governed the practice of painting. It must have
been like that produced by a _Times_ leader upon the iniquities of
local boards of guardians; namely, delight and amazement to the world
at large, horror and consternation to the idiots who had done ill by
stealth (though strictly in accordance with rule), and blushed to find
it fame.
So keep this fact well in view, that the great change effected by
Giotto was the change from rush-light to daylight, and it was only
after this that further advance became possible. Do not run away with
the idea that he gained thereby the whole truth; far from it. There
were two centuries and a half of painters to come after him before
the whole truth of light and shade was mastered, for Giotto may be
said to have practically ignored shade altogether.
Nor did he advance much further in the _gradation_ of colour than his
predecessors had done; his paint is generally put on in broad flat
washes, with little attempt at gradation; its beauty depends chiefly
upon the exquisite manner in which these washes are combined with one
another. Thus he never reaches to the utmost beauty of colour, which
is only obtainable with the utmost gradation of light and shade; but
his work presents itself like a landscape, ere the sun rises, on a
fine summer's morning, when each object lies clearly and a little
coldly defined, in the shadowless air.
It must be remembered that with the attempt to master the intricacies
and gradation of light and shade, came also the use of secondary and
tertiary tints, to an extent unknown in the time of Giotto, who may
almost be described as the last of the pure colourists, taking pure in
the sense of primary. Chiaroscuro went on gradually advancing in
importance, relatively to colour and subject, till in the times of
Rembrandt we find it absolutely thrusting colour and subject out of
the field altogether, and making the flash upon a tin pannikin, or the
obscurity of a cottage kitchen, of equal importance with the grandest
traditions of our race.
What is perhaps best known as the special quality of Giotto's art is
his study of nature; and it is right that I should say a few words
upon this somewhat indefinite phrase, and try to show in what Giotto's
study of nature consisted, and wherein it differed from that of
preceding painters.
If we were able to return in reality to the old times when our painter
lived, I do not fancy we should find--as many good people
suppose--that the folk of that day were ignorant that there were such
things as domesticated animals and birds, trees and flowers, clouds
and sunsets. You may be very sure that mediæval Florentines on the
ridge of Fiesole, have often paused to watch the sun gilding the
spires of Florence, much as the English traveller does; and young
lovers wandering idly amongst the almond-trees by the Arno, plucked
the blossoms, and admired their loveliness, as we do to-day. It was
only that somehow the idea had never occurred to any one that these
things were suitable for pictures; there was a notion that it would be
a sort of irreverence to put such vulgar details into religious
scenes--arising perhaps from a similar feeling to that which makes
many well-trained Christians dislike to pray for any specially desired
object. Perhaps it was owing to Giotto's early training, or rather no
training, in the midst of a wild mountain country, perhaps only to his
rough humorous, anti-reverential character, but probably to the
combination of circumstance and individuality, that made him introduce
into his compositions all sorts of extraneous matter. That to the last
he entertained a strong sympathy with his early shepherd life, it is
impossible to doubt, and in the designs for the decoration of the base
of the Campanile, only two of which he lived to execute with his own
hand, there is a singularly beautiful bas-relief, illustrating the
pastoral life, in which the sheep, and the puppy watching them, are as
fine as anything we have from his hand.
The great difficulty of accounting for Giotto's introduction of
hitherto unused matter into his pictures, lies in the fact that it
does not seem to have been due especially to any partiality on his
part for this or that branch of nature, as to a principle of getting
to the bottom of his subject, whatever it was. He appears to have had
a power of grasping the spirit of whatever scene he was engaged upon,
and illustrating that appropriately, which is, as far as I know,
unequalled in the records of painting. And it is noteworthy that this
spirit is with him always the reverse of eclectic: no painter can be
more entirely free from all principles of aristocracy; his sympathies
are always with the people; the view he takes of any subject is the
plain, common-sense view, such as plain, common-sense people can
understand.
Connected with this is the third great characteristic of Giotto,
perhaps the strongest in his whole nature, and certainly the one which
was least in accordance with the spirit of his time. This is his
strong dramatic power.
This power shows itself in almost every work of the master's we have
left us, and even survives his death, and lives in the work of his
pupils. His pictures are not alone scenes, they are SITUATIONS, on
each the curtain might fall without any sense of incongruity. Besides
their appropriateness of gesture and oneness of feeling, they possess
the great characteristic of dramatic art, in making the scene live
before you, subduing its various incidents into one strain of meaning,
yet keeping each incident complete and individual, as well as making
it help the main purpose. In most of Giotto's pictures there will be
found a diversity of action and expression, all of which lead up to
the main action, and help to enforce and illustrate it. A minor point
in which the same quality shows, is in the amount of emotion which
this painter is capable of expressing by a single gesture, an amount
so great that it occasionally runs some danger of lapsing into
caricature. This is especially plain in such pictures as the
_Betrayal_ and the _Entombment_, in the Arena Chapel. But where this
dramatic quality is most strongly marked is in the bas-reliefs on the
base of the Campanile; in all these Giotto has succeeded, not only in
choosing the most appropriate figures for illustrating his meaning,
but in seizing the very moment which is most significant.
To sum up these three main characteristics of Giotto's style, they
are--First, a lighter, purer tone of colour than had been in use
before the time of Cimabue, and a greater variety and purity of tint
than had been attained by that master, especially in the more distant
portions of the picture. Second, the introduction into his
compositions of a certain amount of natural detail which had been
before totally neglected, and the substitution of the portraits of
actual men and women for the imaginary beings that had formerly filled
up the backgrounds of the Byzantine pictures. Third, comes the power
of illustrating the real meaning of his subject, and not merely
suggesting it, as had formerly been the case, allied to which is the
dramatic quality of which I have just spoken.
I feel how barren is all this description to explain the progress in
art made by this artist--the progress from stagnation to movement,
from death to life, from symbolical types, to the things themselves.
It would appear unnecessary to dwell upon the few points in which his
work was technically deficient, or those in which he but repeated the
errors of his predecessors, but the following may just be mentioned.
The comparative dulness of the reds in use at that time, the lack of
depth of hue, and variation of colour in differing aspects of light
and shade; the comparative poorness of the drapery, as compared with
that of the later Venetian and Florentine masters; the deficiency in
the rendering of form, and the elementary amount of knowledge of
perspective and anatomy--on all these points might exception be taken
to his work with perfect justice, and yet when each had been given its
due amount of criticism, the wonder would still be that he
accomplished so much, and not so little. For two hundred years after
the death of Giotto the advance in the drawing of landscape was so
slight as to be almost imperceptible, and yet, compared with his
landscape, that of those that preceded him was as "moonlight unto
sunlight, and as water unto wine."
I have omitted in this description the main characteristic of Giotto's
style, and I have done so because it is so intangible that it can only
be felt, not described. This characteristic, hinted at by Lord
Lindsay in the quotation which is placed at the head of this chapter,
is the simple faith in which each of these compositions abounds; the
feeling conveyed to the spectator that thus, and no otherwise, did the
occurrence take place, and that the painter has not altered it a jot
or tittle for his own purposes. This must be felt to be believed, and
I only call attention to it here lest it should be supposed that it
has failed to impress me.
CHAPTER X.
GIOTTO AT ASSISI.--THE UPPER CHURCH.
Of all the minor disadvantages of travel which have accompanied the
substitution of the locomotive for the coach, perhaps none is so real
an evil as the very partial impression an ordinary traveller derives
from a short visit to some interesting land. When Rome and Florence,
for instance, are brought within the compass of a day's journey, the
tourist is little likely to care to break his journey for
comparatively obscure cities, much less villages, scurries past "reedy
Thrasymene" without recognition, and scarce notices the towers and
churches of Perugia, rising green and grey on the mountain side. Still
less likely is our tourist to arrest his comet-like progression at a
rough country station, some fourteen miles from the old Etruscan city,
a station where very obviously, neither guard nor porter expects him
to alight, and which he has some difficulty in identifying by the help
of a nearly illegible inscription, as Assisi. And yet there was a time
when this forgotten town played no inconsiderable part in the world's
history, and was the central seat of an Order that reckoned princes
among its followers, and practically divided with the Dominicans the
spiritual sovereignty of Europe.[64] And even now, if any very
strong-minded traveller should be able to defy the ominous silence of
Bradshaw,[65] and the neglect of Cook, and more regardful of what has
been, than what is, spend a few days in the home of poverty, he will
not regret, we think, in after years his deviation from the accustomed
routine of travel; nay, if he gain no other advantage, he will at
least have had a brief space in which to take quiet breath, ere the
red-books and the _valet de place_ are again in requisition, ere St.
Peter's becomes No. 17 in the often consulted plan, and Rome takes "at
least a week to see properly." For at Assisi there is _no hurry_, and
so strong is the spirit of the place that the most energetic tourist
quickly succumbs to it; even those who rush over here from Perugia for
a day's excursion, treading softly ere they have been a couple of
hours in the city of St. Francis. And now we will suppose that "our
uncommercial traveller" has safely escaped the clutches of the three
or four inn touts whom his arrival has roused into unwonted energy,
and consigning his bag to the least ill-favoured, has set out manfully
along the dusty road leading from the station to the town; for be it
noted that Assisi is not strong in equipages, and the solitary rough
wooden box denominated omnibus, is hardly an attractive conveyance at
first sight, though ere long the traveller begins to look upon it as
an old friend, as it is to be found during the greater part of the
day, standing about in various unexpected parts of the town, being
apparently left wherever it has taken a passenger. One further
violence we must do to the mind of the well-instructed tourist,
namely, to beg that he will not accept guidance, nor torment himself
with details, archæological or otherwise, but simply open his eyes to
all the quiet influences of past devotion and present beauty which he
will find around him. And first, he will see by the side of the road
a vast church, in the most uninteresting style of Renaissance
architecture, not unlike a small edition of St. Peter's. This is St.
Mary of the Angels, little notable, save for its size, and a small
chapel it contains, where St. Francis first assembled his few
followers. In it there is only to be seen--a spoilt fresco, by
Perugino; walls dark with age, save where, here and there, the dim
lamplight falls upon the silver offerings of penitence and
thanksgiving; and some carved doors, more curious than beautiful.
These need not delay us much from the steep ascent to the town.
Another dusty mile of road, and Assisi lies before and above us,
rising a confused mass of tiled roofs and massive walls, from the grey
depths of the olive-groves which surround it. Not only on a mountain,
but of the mountain, does the town seem to be built, the ponderous
blocks of dim red and dusty yellow stone, scarcely seeming to have
more the characteristics of houses than of the cliffs above, save
where, here and there, a square tower of church or fortification lifts
itself into clear pre-eminence of definition from the tumbled
confusion of roofs, walls, and buttresses. Another turn in the long,
winding road, and the great attraction of the few sightseers who visit
Assisi, the Convent of St. Francis--with what Bradshaw calls its
"three superb churches," which are, in fact, two--stands revealed.
Picture to yourself a long mass of building, standing upon a double
range of tall arches, and pierced with a multitude of small windows.
This is the convent building itself; beyond it, on a level with its
roof, rises the Church of St. Francis, with its square campanile. Of
the same dull-yellowish colour as the other buildings of the town,
there is little beauty in the church from this point of view, save
that of massive strength, and a certain simplicity of design which,
when carried out upon so large a scale, almost amounts to grandeur.
So, leaving the convent on our left, we enter beneath a massive
square tower the first street of the city. It is difficult to say
whence comes the sense of extreme desolation which oppresses us, not
from the absence of life certainly, for at this point there are
commonly a few of the villagers and townspeople chatting round an old
fountain, and on every side resounds the squeaking of the pigs, that
every well-to-do inhabitant of Assisi keeps tethered on the
ground-floor of his house. Nor is it that there are no signs of
commercial enterprise, for we notice the hammered brass and copper
jars and cauldrons glimmering dimly in the recesses of one of the dark
shops, and some strings of onions and other vegetables in another. Is
it something, we wonder, in the construction of the town itself, in
its rough-hewn blocks of dusty stone, its huge buttresses, its
blocked-up arches, its weather-beaten tiles, the defacement of its
ruined fountains, and the general appearance of enormous toil with
which the city must have been constructed? Or is it still more the
case, that even at the first glance we connect the appearance of the
town with the state of the superstition to which it owes its
existence; whose power changed the small Etrurian village into a
shrine of the deepest sanctity and proudest priesthood, and having
done its work for good and evil, faded gradually away, and now finds
voice only on the trembling lips of the half-dozen monks who are all
that remain at Assisi of the famous Brotherhood? For whatever reason,
the place is desolate--desolate as no place can be which has not once
been great; and as we ascend the street, the impression deepens. Few
of the houses have glass to their windows; the old arched entrances
are blocked up with rough stone, and low, square doorways supply their
place; the ground-floor of the house is commonly used as a store-room,
a stable, or a piggery. The upper windows show us nothing within that
we are accustomed to connect with ideas of domestic comfort. Even the
massive ironwork seems to partake of the general desolation, and is
coated with the grey dust of centuries. Here and there we pass a
fountain, generally situated in a small grass-grown open space, with a
couple of earthen pitchers left to fill themselves leisurely; and over
all there is still the sense of death in life, needing a vigorous
effort on our part to endure. We begin to think there was some sense
in that philistine American we met at Florence, who smiled so
scornfully at our determination to visit Assisi, and to have thoughts
of the next train to a more lively spot. However, food and wine at the
modest little hotel quickly dissipate our loneliness; our musings on
St. Francis and his monks assume a more pleasant complexion, and by
the time we find our way down the long street to the convent, we are
in a fit mood to appreciate any beauty or pleasure which we may chance
to find there. And indeed he would be hard to please who could be
discontented with the enjoyment here provided, for whether it be
Nature or Art for which his "thirsty soul doth pine," here he may
satiate himself at leisure.
[Illustration: ASSISI.
_From a drawing by the Author._]
Everything on our way seems to tell the same story of departed
grandeur; the city is almost as deserted as one of those we read of in
the _Arabian Nights_. A beautiful arcade, each capital of whose
pillars is carved to represent a different species of vegetation,
incloses nothing; the house of the poet Metastasio is falling into
ruins, and scarcely can one decipher his coat of arms sculptured above
the door. No dogs bark, nor children scream, nor loungers stare as the
unwonted stranger passes through the market-place; the very _café_ has
been fain to part with its chairs and little tables, and now is only a
gaunt, bare room, in a corner of which sits, in half obscurity, a
melancholy woman sewing slowly. The market-place is certainly the most
gloomy part of the town, were it only from its contrast to the
market-places we are accustomed to see; and so let us hurry down the
long, grass-grown street, till at last a sudden breadth of light
opens before us, and straight in front, across a patch of green
meadow, rises the Church of St. Francis, while a little to the left a
steep incline leads down to the entrance of the Lower Church, called
incorrectly, in some works, the crypt, as the real crypt is beneath
this lower edifice. The Lower Church stands upon a shelf of rock, the
side of which slopes abruptly upward, against which one end of the
church is built. The position of the two churches may perhaps be
understood by thinking of them as situated upon two successive steps
of a staircase, the floor of the Upper Church being merely a
continuation of the upper step, and being thus immediately above the
roof of the Lower Church.
Let us pause before entering the church, and cast our eyes over the
scene before us. We stand on a little terrace half-way up the town
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