Page:EB1911 - Volume 20.djvu/515

Rh enthroned Madonna in the Rucellai chapel of S. Maria Novella at Florence, ascribed by Vasari to Cimabue, is now assigned by many to Duccio of Siena, and presents similar attractive qualities. Cimabue, a Florentine contemporary of Cavallini and Duccio, is famed in story as the chief representative of the painting of this period, but we possess no certain works from his hand except his mosaic at Pisa. His style would probably correspond to that of the painters just mentioned. His chief importance for our purpose resides in the fact that he was the teacher of the Florentine Giotto.

If the artists just referred to represent a revived classicism rather than a fresh and independent study of nature, Giotto is essentially a creation of the Gothic movement and his close association with the Franciscan cycle of ideas brings this fact into clearer rehef. Giotto is in no way dependent on the study of the antique, but rehes on his own steady and penetrating outlook upon man and upon nature. He is Gothic in his humanity, his sympathy, his love of truth, and he incorporates in his own person many of the most pleasing quahties of Gothic art as it had already manifested itself in France, while by the force of his own individual genius he raises these qualities to a higher level of artistic expression.

In the work of Giotto painting begins to enter on its modern era. The demonstrative element permanently takes the preeminence over the more decorative element we have called pattern-making. Though the pattern is always present, the elements of it become of increasing value in themselves as representations of nature, and the tendency henceforward for a couple of centuries is to exaggerate their importance so that the general decorative effect becomes subordinate. Giotto's greatness depends on the gift he possessed for holding the balance even among opposed artistic qualities. If he was interesting and convincing as a narrator, he had a fine eye at the same time for composition and balanced his masses with unerring tact. Neither he nor any of the Florentine frescoists had much sense of colour, and at this stage of the development of painting compositions of light and shade were not thought of, but in line and mass he pleases the eye as much as he satisfies the mind by his clear statement of the meaning and intention of his figures and groups.

In putting these together he is careful above all things to make them tell their story, and primitive as he is in technique he is as accomplished in this art as Raphael himself. Moreover, he holds the balance between the tendency, always so strong among his countrymen as among the Germans, to over-emphasis of action and expression, and the grace and self-restraint which are among the most precious of artistic qualities. He never sacrifices beauty to force, nor on the other hand does he allow his sense of grace of line to weaken the telling effect of action or grouping. A good example of his style, and one interesting also from the comparative standpoint, is his fresco of " Herod's Birthday Feast " in S. Croce at Florence (fig. 13, Plate IV.). We contrast it with the earlier wall-painting of the same subject in the cathedral at Brunswick (fig. 1 1, Plate III.). Giotto has reduced the number of actors to the minimum necessary for an effective presentation of the scene, but has charged each figure with meaning and presented the ensemble with a due regard for space as well as merely for form. The flatness of the older work has already been exchanged for an efl'ective, if not yet fully correct, rendering of planes. The justice of the actions and expressions will at once strike the observer.

The Florentine school as a whole looks to Giotto as its head, because he embodies all the characteristics that made it great; but at the same time the artists that came after him in most cases faOed by over-emphasis of the demonstrative element, and sacrificed beauty and sentiment to vigour and realism. The school as a whole is markedly intellectual, and as a result is at times prosaic, from which fault Giotto himself was saved by his Gothic tenderness and romance. His personality was so outstanding that it dominated the school for nearly a century. The " Giotteschi " is a name given to a number of Florentine painters whose labours cover the rest of the 14th century

among whom only one, Andrea di Cione, called Orcagna, hfted himself to any real eminence.

At Siena the Gothic movement made itself felt in the next artistic generation after that of Duccio. Its chief representative was Simone Martini. With him Sienese art takes upon itself a character contrasting markedly with the Florentine. It is on the demonstrative side less intellectual, less vigorous, less secular; and a dreamy melancholy, a tenderness that is a little sentimental, take the place of the alertness and force with which the personages in Florentine frescoes are endued. On the other hand, in decorative feeling, especially in regard to colour, Sienese painting surpasses that of the Florentines. Simone was followed by a number of artists who answered to the Florentine " Giotteschi " and carry on the style through the century, but as Florence produces an Orcagna, so at Siena about the middle of the 14th century there appear in the brothers Lorenzetti two artists of exceptional vigour, who carry art into new fields. Ambrogio Lorenzetti, the younger of the brothers, is specially represented by some frescoes in the Public Palace at Siena of a symbolical and didactic kind, representing Good and Bad Government, from which is selected a figure representing Peace (fig. 14, Plate v.). Sienese sentiment is here very apparent. Simone Martini's masterpiece had been a great religious fresco of an edifying kind on the wall of the chapel, and now in the rooms devoted to the secular business of the city Lorenzetti covers the waUs with four large compositions on the subject named.

The painters of the Sienese school were on the whole faithful to the style indicated, and later on in the century they extend the boundaries of their school by spreading its influence into the hill country of Umbria. In the cities of this region Taddeo di Bartoli, one of the best of the followers of Simone, worked about the end of the century, and early Umbrian art in consequence exhibits the same devotional character, the same dreaminess, the same grace and decorative charm, that are at home in Siena.

Elsewhere in Italy the art of the 14th century represents a general advance beyond the old medieval standard, but no outstanding personalty made its appearance and there was nothing that can be strictly termed a revival. At Rome, where on the foundation of the noble design of Cavallini there might have been reared a promising artistic structure, the removal early in the 14th century of the papal court to Avignon in France led to a cessation of all effort.

§ 15. The Fifteenth Century, and its Influence on the Development of Painting at Florence. — We come now to what was indicated in § 4 as the third of the main periods into which the history of painting may be divided. It is that in which, by the aid of the new agency of perspective, truth of form was for the first time perfectly mastered, and an advance was made in the rendering of the truth of space.

The opening of the 15th century in Italy is the most important epoch in the whole history of painting, for it was the real beginning of the modern era. Here Florence, the first home of Renaissance culture, unmistakably assumes the lead, and the new era is again opened by the agency of an individual of genius. The father of modern painting is the Florentine Masaccio. He not only advanced the art in those qualities in which Giotto had already made it great, but pointed the way towards the representation of the third dimension of objects and of space as a whole which had for so long been almost ignored. His short life course, for he died before he was thirty, only allowed him to execute one work of the first importance, the frescoes in the Brancacci chapel of the Carmine at Florence. There in the " Tribute Money " he told the story with all Giotto's force and directness, but with an added power in the creation of exalted types of human character, and in the presentation of sohd shapes that seem to live before us. In the " Expulsion from Eden " he rose to greater heights. In the whole range of demonstrative art no more convincing, more moving, figures have ever been created than those of our first parents, Adam veiling his face in his hands, Eve throwing back her head and wailing aloud in agony, while in the foreshortened form of the angel that hovers above we