Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3

-His widespread Activity-The Scope of his Art-Vitality-Composition-Colour-Naturalism-Healthiness-Frescoes at Assisi and Padua-Legend of S. Francis-The Giottesc

a della Pace at Siena-Religious Art in Siena and Perugia-T

ay endeavour to seize the more general outlines of the subject. He need not weigh in balances the claims of rival cities to priority, nor hamper his review of national progress by discussing the special merits of the several schools. Still there are certain broad facts about the distribution of artistic gifts in Italy which it is necessary to bear in mind. However much we may desire to treat of painting as a phase of national and not of merely local li

due the really creative forces of Italian painting; and these three districts were marked by strong peculiarities. In art, as in politics, Florence and Venice exhibit distinct types of character.[121] The Florentines developed fresco, and devoted their genius to the expression of thought by scientific design. The Venetians perfected oil-painting, and set forth the glory of the world as it appeals to the imagination and the senses. The art of Florence may seem to some judges to savour over-much of intellectual dryness;

ntially from that of Parma and Cremona, does not invalidate the importance of this fact about its origin. The name of Roman School, again, has been given to Raphael and Michael Angelo together with their pupils. The truth is that Rome, for one brief period, during the pontificates of Julius and Leo, was the focus of Italian intellect. Allured by the patronage of the Papal Curia, not only artists, but scholars and men of letters, flocked from all the cities of Italy to Rome, where they found a nobler sphere for the exercise of their faculties than elsewhere. But Rome, while she lent her imperial quality of grandeur to the genius of her aliens, was in no sense originative. Rome produced no first-rate master from her own children, if we except Giulio Romano. The title of originality is due rather to

ecame more secular. Mysticism gave way to realism. It was felt that much beside religious sentiment was worthy of expression. At the same time, about the year 1440, this process of secularisation was hastened by the influences of the classical revival, renewing an interest in the past life of humanity, and stirring a zeal for science. The painters, on the one hand, now aimed at accurate delineation of actual things: good perspective, correct drawing, sound portraiture, occupied their attention, to the exclusion of more purely spiritual motives. On the other hand they conceived an admiration for the fragments of the newly discovered antiques, and felt the plastic beauty of Hellenic legends. It is futile to attempt, as M. Rio has done, to prove that this abandonment of the religious sphere of earlier art was for painting a plain decline from good to bad, or to make the more or less of spiritual feeling in a painter's style the test of his degree of excellence; nor can we by any sophistries be brought to believe that the Popes of the fifteenth century were pastoral protectors of solely Christian art

now values as Italian painting. In this public act of joy the people of Florence recognised and paid enthusiastic honour to the art arisen among them from the dead. If we rightly consider the matter, it is not a little wonderful that a whole community should thus have

the great plague; nor far, again, from where the solitary woman, beautiful beyond belief, conversed with Machiavelli on the morning of the first of May in 1527.[125] We who can call to mind the scenes that picture has looked down upon-we who have

ample, a distinctly fresh endeavour to express emotion and to depict life. The outstretched arms of the infant Christ have been copied from nature, not merely borrowed from tradition. The six kneeling angels display variety of attitude suited to several shades of devout affection and adoring service. The head of the Madonna, heavy as it is and conventional in type, still strives to represent maternal

fected zeal of a good craftsman to his art, Giotto in the course of his long career filled Italy with work that taught succeeding centuries of painters. As we travel from Padua in the north, where his Arena Chapel sets forth the legend of Mary and the life of Christ in a series of incomparable frescoes, southward to Naples, where he adorned the convent of S. Chiara, we meet with Giotto in almost every city. The "Passion of our Lord" and the "Allegories of S. Francis" were painted by him at Assisi. S. Peter's at Borne still shows his mosaic of the "Ship of the Church." Florence raises his wonderful bell-tower, that lily among campanili, to the sky; and preserves tw

on of the Middle Ages. And this they achieved without ascetic formalism, energetically, but always reverently, aiming at expressing life and dramatising Scripture history. The tale told about Giotto's fi

estion of movement or the play of living energy. He first knew how to distribute figures in the given space with perfect balance, and how to mass them together in animated groups agreeable to the eye. He caught varied and transient shades of emotion, and expressed them by the posture of the body and the play of feature. The hues of morning and of evening served him. Of all painters he was most successful in preserving the clearness and the light of pure, well-tempered colours. His power of telling a story by gesture and action is unique in its peculiar simplicity. There are no ornaments or accessories in his pictures. The whole force of the artist has been concentr

nter, working with rapid decision on a large scale, aiming at broad effects, and willing to sacrifice subtlety to clearness of expression. The health of his whole nature and his robust good sense are everywhere apparent in his solid, concrete, human work of art. There is no trace of mysticism, no ecstatic piety, nothing morbid or hysterical, in his imagination. Imbuing whatever he handled with the force and freshness of actual existence, Giotto approached the deep things of the Christian faith and the legend of S. Francis in the spirit of a man bent simply on realising the objects of his belief as facts. His allegories of "Poverty," "Chastity," and "Obedience," at Assisi, are as beautiful and powerfully felt as they are carefully constructed. Yet they conceal no abstruse spiritual meaning, but are plainly painted "for the poor laity of love to read." The artist poet who coloured the virginal form of Poverty, with the briars beneath her feet and the roses blooming round her forehead, proved by his well-known ca

to have worked there, painfully continuing or feebly struggling to throw off the decadent traditions of a dying art. In their school Giotto laboured, and modern painting arose with the movement of new life beneath his brush. Here, pondering in his youth upon the story of Christ's suffering, and in his later manhood on the virtues of S. Francis and his vow, he learned the secret of giving the semblance of flesh and blood reality to Christian thought. His achievement was nothing less than this. The Creation, the Fall, the Redemption of the World, the moral discipline of man, the Judgment, and the final state of bliss or misery-all these he quickened into beautiful and breathing forms. Those were noble days, when the painter had literally acres of walls given him to cover; when the whole belief of Chri

of Arezzo, Andrea Orcagna, Domenico Veneziano, and the lesser artists of the Pisan Campo Santo, were either formed or influenced by him. To give an account of the frescoes of these painters would be to describe how the religious, social, and philosophical conceptions of th

en travel became for them a black and polished mirror reflecting with terrible luminousness the events of the present and the past. So familiar had the Italians become with the theme of death artistically treated, that they did not shrink from acted pageants of the tragedy of Hell. Giovanni Villani tells us that in 1304 the companies and clubs of pleasure, formed for making festival throughout the town of Florence on the 1st of May, contended with each other for the prize of novelty and rarity in sports provided for the people. "Among the rest, the Borgo S. Friano had it cried about the streets, that whoso wished for news from the other world, should find himself on Mayday on the bridge Carraja or the neighbouring banks of

the Inferno he strove to delineate the whole geography of Dante's first cantica, tracing the successive circles and introducing the various episodes commemorated by the poet. Interesting as this work may be for the illustration of the "Divine Comedy" as understood by Dante's immediate successors, we turn

r deliverance, while she descends in her robe of woven wire to mow down with her scythe the knights and ladies in their garden of delight; again in those horses snuffing at the open graves, those countesses and princes face to face with skeletons, those serpents coiling round the flesh of what was once fair youth or maid, those multitudes of guilty men and women trembling beneath the trump of the archangel-tearing their cheeks, their hair, their breasts in agony, because they see Hell through the prison-bars, and hear the raging of its fiends, and feel the clasp upon their wrists and ankles of clawed hairy demon hands; in all this terrific amalgamation of sinister and tragic ideas, vividly presented, full of coarse dramatic power, and intensified by faith in their material reality, the Lorenzetti brethren, if theirs be indeed the hands that painted here, summed up the nightmares of the Middle Age and bequeathed an ever memorable picture of its desolate preoccupations to the rising world. They have called to their aid poetry, and history, and legend. Boccaccio supplies them with the garden scene of youths and damsels dancing among roses, while the plague is at their gates, and death is in the air above. From Petrarch they have borrowed the form and mystic robe of Death herself[131]. Uguccione della Faggiuola has sat for the portrait of the Captain who must quail before the terrors of the tomb, and Castruccio Castracane is the strong man cut off in the blossom of his age. The prisons of the Visconti have disgorged their victims, cast adrift with maiming that makes life unendurable but does not hasten death.[132] The lazar houses and the charnels have been ransacked for forms of grisly decay. Thus the whole work is not merely "an hieroglyphical and shadowed lesson" of ascetic

lla.[135] Dogmatic theology is here in the ascendant. While S. Francis bequeathed a legend of singular suavity and beauty, overflowing with

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ardinals, the Emperor with his Council, represent the two chief forces of Christendom, as conceived by the medi?val jurists and the school of Dante. Seated on thrones, they are ready to rise in defence of Holy Church, symbolised by a picture of S. Maria del Fiore. At their feet the black and white hounds of the Dominican order-Domini canes, according to the monkish pun-are hunting heretical wolves. Opposite this painting is the apotheosis of S. Thomas Aquinas. Beneath the footstool of this "dumb ox of Sicily," as he was called, grovel the heresiarchs-Arius, Sabellius, Averroes. At again a lower level, as though supporting the saint on either hand, are ranged seven sacred and seven

on the edge of which are placed the four evangelists, together with Moses and S. Paul.[137] At his side, within the burnished sphere, Plato and Aristotle stand upright, holding the "Tim?us" and the "Ethics" in their hands. Christ in glory is above the group, emitting from His mouth three rays upon the head of S. Thomas. Single rays descend in like manner upon the evangelists and Moses and S. Paul. They, like Plato and Aristotle, hold open books; and rays from these eight volumes converge upon the head of the angelical doctor, who becomes the focus, as it were, of all the beams se

site delicacy by Renan,[141] who shows that his name became a rallying point for freethinkers. Scholars like Petrarch were eager to confute his sect, and artists used him as a symbol of materialistic disbelief. Thus we meet with Averroes among the lost souls in the Pisan Campo Santo, distinguished as usual by his turban and long beard. On the other hand, the frank acceptance of pagan philosophy, insofar as it could be accommodated to the doctrine of the Church, finds full expression in the art of this early period. On the walls of the Palazzo Pubblico at Siena were painted the figures of Curius Dentatus and Cato,[142] while the

stic giant of the Commune towers above them all in bulk and stature, as though to indicate the people's sovereignty. The virtues are his assessors and inspirers-he is King. Beneath the da?s occupied by these supreme personages, are ranged on either hand mailed and visored cavaliers, mounted on chargers, the guardians of the State. All the citizens in their degrees advance toward the throne, carrying between them, pair by pair, a rope received from the hands of Concord; while some who have transgressed her laws, are being brought with bound hands to the judgment-seat. Concord herself, being less the virtue of the government than of the governed, is seated on a line with the burghers in a place apart beneath the throne of Civil Justice, who is allegorised as the dispenser of rewards and punishments, as well as controller of the armed force and the purse of the community. The whole of t

ll-governed town. The burghers of the happy commune follow trade or pleasure, as they list; a beautiful winged genius, inscribed "Securitas," floats above their citadel. It should be added that in both these pictures the architecture is the same; for the painter has designed to teach how different may be the state of one and the same city according to its form of government. Such then were the vivid images whereby Ambrogio Lorenzetti expressed the medi?val curse of discor

his immediate successors. It must, however, be observed that painting had an independent origin among the Sienese, and that Guido da Siena may claim to rank even earlier than Cimabue.[149] In the year 1260, just before engaging in their duel with Florence, the Sienese dedicated their city to the Virgin; and the victory of Montaperti, following immediately upon this vow, gave a marked impulse to the

he magistrates of the Commune, and the chief men of the Monte de' Nove. These great folk crowded round their Lady; after came a multitude of burghers bearing tapers; while the rear was brought up by women and children. The bells rang and trumpets blew as this new image of the Sovereign Mistress of Siena was borne along the summer-smiling streets of her metropolis to take its throne in her high temple. Duccio's altar-piece presented on one face to the spectator a Virgin seated with the infant Christ upon her lap, and receiving the homage of the patron saints of Siena. On the other, he depi

cised his art in many parts of Italy. Siena, Pisa, Assisi, Orvieto, Naples, and Avignon can still boast of wall and easel pictures from his hand; and though it has been suggested that he took no part in the decoration of the Cappella degli Spagnuoli, the impress of his manner remains at Florence in those noble frescoes of the "Church Militant" and the "Consecration of S. Dominic."[153] Simone's first undisputed works are to be seen at Siena and at Assisi, where we learn what he could do as a frescante in competition with the ablest Florentines. In the Palazzo Pubblico of his native city he painted a vast picture of the Virgin enthroned beneath a canopy and surrounded by saints;[154] while at Assisi he put forth his whole power in portraying the legend of S. Martin. In all his paintings we trace the skill of

he Virgin, the motive of which is marked by great originality.[155] Our Lady is seated in an open loggia with a company of holy men and women round her. Descending from the sky and floating through the arches are three of the Apostles, while one who has just alighted from his a?rial transit kneels and folds his hands in adora

e battle-caps of that godlike pair-the knightly saint and the Archangel Michael-breaking by the irresistible force of their onset and their calm youthful beauty through the mailed ranks of the Sardinian pagans. Spinello was essentially a warlike painter; among the best of his compositions may be named the series of pictures from the history of the Venetian campaign against Frederick Barbarossa.[158] It is a pity that the war of liberation carried on by the Lombard communes with the Empire should have left but little trace on Italian art; and therefore these paintings of Spinello, in addition to their intrin

ur or of carnal violence. Yielding at one moment to the preachings of S. Bernardino, at another to the persuasions of Grifonetto degli Baglioni, the Perugians won the character of being fiends or angels according to the temper of their leaders; while Siena might boast with equal right of having given birth to S. Catherine and nurtured Beccadelli. The religious feeling was a passion with them on a par with all the other movements of their quick and mobile temperament: it needed ecstatic art for its interpretation. What was cold and sober would not satisfy the men of these two cities. The Florentines, more justly balanced, less abandoned to the frenzies of impassioned impulse, less capable of feeling the rapt exaltation of the devotee, express

the Middle Ages. But by their method and their spirit they anticipated the Renaissance. In executing their work upon the walls of palaces and churches, they employed a kind of fresco. Fresco was essentially the Florentine vehicle of expression. Among the p

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ing in Italy, by Messrs

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memorable, though Genoa was well placed for receiving the influences of Pisa, and had the command of the marble quarries of Carrara, while R

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ertosa of Pavia is a monument of her spontaneous artistic genius. But

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al characteristics of Florence and Venice; and Vol. II., Revival o

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different from that of Florence-exercised an important influence over the schools of Umbria, and gave a peculiar quality to Perugian painting. Through Piero della Francesca, a native of Borgo San Sepolcro, the Florentine tradition was extended to Umbria and the Roman States. Perugia might be even geographically claimed for Tuscany, i

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it, and the old belief that the Borgo Allegri owed its name to the popular rejoicing at that time is now somewhat discredited. See Vasari, Le Mon

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ion of the gay and courteous living of the Flor

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zione della Pe

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, pp. 11, 12, describing the contrast between the landscape of Valdarno and the landscape of the hill

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ie Italiane Inedi

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ve, pp.

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gious paintings, but also the incomparable loveliness of their types. How great the Trecentisti were as draughtsmen, how imaginative was the beauty of their conception, can be best appreciated by thus artificially separating their design from their colouring. The semblance of archaism disappears, and leaves a vision of pure beauty, delicate and spiritual. The collection to which I have alluded was made some years ago, when access to the wall-paintings of Italy for the purpose of tra

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question. They incline to the authorship of Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzett

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involta in

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giganti fos

lla Morte,

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hese wretches is wr

peritade ci

edicina d'

darne omai l

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nst the Lorenzetti hypothesis; for the

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other motive used by any painter to suggest the terror of the Dies Ir?. Simplicity and trut

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Sienese character; but recent critics are inclined to assign it to a certain Andrea, of Florence. See Crowe and Cavalcaselle, vol. ii. p. 89. The same critics doubt the hand of Taddeo Gaddi in the "Triumph of S. Thomas," vol. i. p. 374, and remark that "these productions of the art of the fourteenth century are, indeed, second-class works, executed by pupils of the Sienese and Florentine school

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faith, the holy athlete, gentle

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heavens. S. Thomas and the Greeks are inside the golden sphere of science, and below on earth are the

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; and wickedness is an abominat

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ouvre. I think Guillaume de Saint

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iv.

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l'Averro?sme

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earned lessons of civility and government as willingly from classical tradition, as they deduced the lessons of piety and godly living from the Bible. Herein

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his wor

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zzo, where the discord of the city is represented by an old man of gigantic stature, throned and maltreate

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s the ensign of Sien

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y with patriotic spirit and equity, and had not yet become a forceful oligarchy. The power of the Visconti was still in its cradle; the great plague had not devastated Tuscany. As early as 13

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lian art savours of the Renaissance, depreciates thi

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e passage translated by me in Vo

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r a full discussion of Guido da Siena's date,

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as Virginis." It will be remembered how the Florentines, two cen

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known; date of d

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th and 50th sonnets of the "Rime in Vita di Madonna Laura." In another place he uses these words about Simone: "Duos ego novi pictores egregios, nec formosos, Jottum Florentinum civem, cujus inter m

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to me, the tradition that Simone painted the frescoes of S. Ranieri in the Campo Santo at

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o Fogliani de' Ricci, on horseback, in the Sala del Consiglio. This

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ancesco

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led from Florence, who settled at Arezzo about 1308. He died

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po Santo, on the left

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lia of the public

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itarra, Poeti del Primo Secolo, vol. ii. pp. 196-207; the epithet

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, gum, and other vehicles dissolved in water, and laid upon a dry ground. In fresco painting the colours, mixed only with wate