Page:Bryan's dictionary of painters and engravers, volume 1.djvu/240

 BONCONSIGLIO. See Buonconsiglio.

BONCUORE, Giovanni BArnsTA, was born at Abruzzo in 1643. and studied at Rome under Fran- cesco Albani. He painted historical subjects with considerable success, and his pictures are distin- guished by great force and vigour of effect, though sometimes heavy in the execution. One of his most esteemed works is an altar-piece in the Chiesa degli Orfanelli, at Rome. He died in 1699.

BOND, JonN Daniel, a landscape painter of Birmingham, flouri.<3hed. in the latter half of the eighteenth century. He died near Birmingham in 1803, nged 78.

BOND, R. Sebastian, landscape painter, was born at Liverpool in 1808. He was educated in his native city, and practised there for the greater part of his life, settling finally at Bettws-y-Coed. He occasionally exhibited in London between 184(5 and 1872, but most of his works appeared at Liverpool and in the midland counties. He died in February 1886.

BOND, William, was one of the engravers of the portraits of Sir Joshua Reynolds. His talents are well exemplified in the portraits which he executed for Yorke's ' Royal Tribes of Wales,' pub- lished in 1799, It is believed that he died early in the nineteenth century. He was Governor of the Society of Engravers, founded in 1803.

BONDONE, Giotto di, commonly called Giotto, the founder of the noble line of Italian painters, was the son of a peasant named Bondone, and was born in the little village of Colle in the commune of Vespignano, not many miles to the north of Florence. Vasari gives 1276 as the date of his birth, but Antonio Pucci in his ' Centiloquio ' speaks of him as being seventy years of age at the time of his death in 1336, which would make the date of his birth 1266. This latter date is accepted, not without reason, by several modern writers, who prefer to trust certain internal evidence regarding the master's life and works, rather than the oft-times uncertain testimony of Vasari. The pretty story, also, that tells how the famous painter Cimabue first saw the shepherd boy Giotto drawing one of his sheep upon the smooth surface of a rock, is relegated by modern authorities to the realms of fable. It was Ghiberti who first told this pastoral anecdote in his ' Commentario,' and it was merely repeated by Vasari ; but an anonymous commentator on the ' Divina Cominedia,' who wrote at the end of the fourteenth century, gives a dilferent account. This writer states that Giotto was apprenticed by his father to a dealer in wool, but that on the way to his work he always went into Cimabue's bottega, and finally, being missed for some time by his master, he was found there painting busily, whereupon, following the advice of Cimabue, his father took him from the wool trade and placed him as a pupil with Cimabue. Whatever truth there may be in this or other legends touching Giotto's boyhood, it is fairly probable that he did study, for a time at least, under the guidance of Cimabue, although it is the op nion of some modern critics that much of his earlier training was acquired at Rome and even at Assisi. In the absence, how- ever, of any recognizable work belonging to this more youthful period of his career, all set opinions regarding his early artistic education must remain more or less matters of conjecture. Whoever may have been his first masters, he soon began to follow a far greater teacher than any of these, no other, indeed, than Nature herself, who had been so long neglected for Tradition. Traditionary types soon failed to satisfy the daring young innovator. His genius led him at an early stage to look at nature for and by himself, and in so doing he effected a total change in the spirit of the painting of his time — a change similar to, although in its after- workings far more complete than that which had been already initiated in the field of sculpture, some years before, by the Pisani. It is more than probable that Giotto himself owed no small d^bt to the example of these great sculptors — and more especially to that of his contemporary Giovanni — in the right direction of his own ideals, and even in the formation of his style and taste. The influence of Giovanni's art upon Giotto is distinctly to be traced in many of the latter's works, and there is every reason to believe that the sculptor's power- ful personality acted as an incentive of no small account in first pointing out to the young painter the right road to the free expression of his latent artistic impulses. Once upon the right path, Giotto's great powers of naturalistic expression evidently developed themselves with wonderful rapidity, enabling him to break, almost at once, the bonds of tradition which bound so many lesser men, and to open the way to an entirely new and original school of painting. In estimating the value of his work we must therefore regard not oidy that which he individually accomplished, but also the influence of his example upon those who came after him. He led the way, and all the great naturalistic artists of the next two centuries but followed in the path that he pointed out. In his unswerving fidelity to the naturalistic ideal, he soon surpassed those very Pisan stone-cutters from whom he had probably received his first inspiration, and so powerful and lasting was the influence which he left behind him, that it was directly felt by sculptors, as well as painters, long after the school of Pisa had died a natural death.

As has already been said, it is difficult to trnce satisfactorily Giotto's development, so many of his early works having perished. Some of his earliest, according to Vasari, were undertaken for the Badia of Florence, and he mentions especially an 'An- nunciation,' wherein fear and astonishment were most wonderfully depicted on the face of the Virgin. All the paintings in the Badia have been destroyed, although the 'Annunciation' that called forth Vasari's admiration is supposed by some to have been a work by Lorenzo Camaldolense, now in the Accademia at Florence. Other paintings, in Arezzo, have shared a fate similar to that uf those in the Badia.

Opinions now differ widely regarding the chronological sequence of Giotto's remaining works, recent criticism having considerably altered the generally accepted arrangement of the master's paintings. The prevalent opinion, still upheld by the great majority of critics, which places the famous frescoes of the Life of St. Francis, in the upper church at Assisi, first on the list, appears to be based on tradition rather than upon any critical study of the works themselves, and it is undoubt- edly to Rome that we must look for the oldest of the master's recognizable productions. We know for a f ict that Giotto was present in the latter city in 1298, that he executed in that year, for his patron Cardinal Stefaneschi, nephew of Boniface VIII., the famous mosaic of the " Navicella," and that he also finished, at about this same period, at