Page:Biographical catalogue of the principal Italian painters.djvu/18

Rh good light and shade; and so efficient were the labours of these men, that for two hundred years, the painters of Europe, with rare exceptions, have been quite content to tread in their footsteps.

There have been three great, well-marked, epochs of Italian painting, which has followed the course of all other human institutions; it has had its rise, establishment, and decline, extending over the six centuries comprised in our review, as follows:—the rise, or gradual development, occupied three centuries—the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth; the establishment, one century—the sixteenth; and the decline, two centuries—the seventeenth and eighteenth. The Table will at once show the respective artists of these centuries or periods. The early period, gradually progressing during three centuries, has been called the Antico-moderno, by the Italians, and also the Quattrocento, or that of the fifteenth-century art; as that century was the period of its perfection. All masters from Giunta Pisano, Cimabue, and Giotto, to Pietro Perugino and Francia, belong to this period, which has been recently characterised with us as the Pre-raphaelite; in the Catalogue it is spoken of as the Quattrocento; the innovated term gives a false importance to Raphael, which he is in no need of, and is inaccurate and uncritical, as Leonardo da Vinci, Luca Signorelli, Michelangelo, and Giorgione, are all, strictly speaking, pre-raphaelite, and yet display in their works the very qualities of which the term is assumed to be a negation.

This quattrocento art is really characterised, and of necessity so, by its imperfection. The great predominance of one quality shows the deficiency of another; sentiment is perfectly rendered; but it is only in the works of the very latest masters, such as Francia or Perugino, that there is an approximation even toa perfect rendering of the physical. When this was attained, which was in the first decennium of the sixteenth century, then only art may be said to have reached perfection, so far as human arts can be perfect.

This consummation, then, as the work of the sixteenth century, has been termed the Cinquecento; that is, after 1500, or sixteenth century art: and the art of this period was great, not by virtue of the predominance of any particular quality, but because all were fairly balanced: we find a co-ordinate development of mind and matter, soul and body, the sentimental and the sensuous; in every sense a perfect art. In referring to the Table, the two sixteenth century divisions will show who were the great men of this period throughout all the Schools.

The third period, or that of decline, which occupies the two closing centuries, has been termed the Eclectic and the Academic, from