Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 21.djvu/455

Rh 433 SCHOOLS OF PAINTING leaning HP HE word " school " as applied to painting 1 is used with f JL various more or less comprehensive meanings. In school." fa widest sense it includes all the painters of one country, of every date, as, for example, "the Italian school." In its narrowest sense it denotes a group of painters who all worked under the influence of one man, as, for example, " the school of Raphael." In a third sense it is applied to the painters of one city or province who for successive generations worked under some common local influence, and with some general similarity in design, colour, or technique, as, for example, "the Florentine school," "the Umbrian school." For many reasons the existence of well-defined schools of painting is now almost wholly a thing of the past, and the conditions under which the modern artist gains his education, finds his patrons, and carries out his work have little in common with those ledircvnl which were prevalent throughout the Middle Ages. Painters aethod in the old times were closely bound together as fellow- f work- mem b ers of a painters' guild, with its clearly defined set of rules and traditions; moreover, the universal system of apprenticeship, which compelled the young painter to work for a term of years in the bottega or studio of some estab- lished freedman of the guild, frequently caused the impress of the genius of one man to be very clearly stamped on a large number of pupils, who thus all picked up and fre- quently retained for life certain tricks of manner or peculi- arities of method which often make it difficult to distinguish the authorship of a special painting. 2 The strong similar- ity which often runs through the productions of several artists who had been fellow-pupils under the same master was largely increased by the fact that most popular painters, such as Botticelli or Perugino, turned out from their bottegJie many pictures to which the master himself contributed little beyond the general design, the actual execution being in part or even wholly the work of pupils or paid assistants. It was not beneath the dignity of a great painter to turn out works at different scales of prices to suit rich or poor, varying from the well-paid-for altar- piece given by some wealthy donor, which the master would paint wholly with his own hand, down to the humble bit of decorative work for the sides of a wedding cassone, which would be left entirely to the 'prentice hand of a pupil. In other cases the heads only in a picture would be by the master himself or possibly the whole of the principal figures, the background and accessories being left to assistants. The buyer sometimes stipulated in a carefully drawn up contract that the cartoon or design should be wholly the work of the master, and that he should himself transfer it on to the wall or panel. It will thus be seen how impossible it is always to decide whether a picture should be classed as a piece of bottega work or as a genuine production of a noted master ; and this will explain the strange inequality of execution which is so striking in many of the works of the old masters, especially the Italians. Among the early Flemish and Dutch painters this method of painting does not appear to have been so largely practised, probably because they considered minute perfection of workmanship to be of paramount importance. 1. Italian. Byzan- In Italy, as in other parts of Europe, the Byzantine tiue in- scnO ol of painting was for many centuries universally lce> prevalent, 3 and it was not till quite the end of the 13th 1 For classical painting, see ARCHAEOLOGY, vol. ii. p. 343 sq. ; see also FRESCO, MURAL DECORATION, TEMPERA, and the articles on separate painters. 2 This is especially the case with the numerous pupils of Perugino. 8 See MURAL DECORATION, vol. xvii. p. 43 sq. century that one man of extraordinary talent Giotto broke through the long-established traditions and inaugu- rated the true Renaissance of this art. According to Vasari, it was Cimabue who first ceased to work in the Byzantine manner ; but the truth is that his pictures, though certainly superior to those of his predecessors, are thoroughly charac- teristic specimens of the Byzantine style. Ghiberti, in his Commentary (a century earlier than Vasari's work), with greater accuracy remarks that both Duccio of Siena and Cimabue worked in the Byzantine manner, and that Giotto was the first who learnt to paint with naturalistic truth. In the 1 2th and the early part of the 1 3th century Pisa Lucca and Lucca were the chief seats of what rude painting then ex- and Pisa, isted in Italy. A number of works of this date still exist, chiefly painted Cruci- fixions treated in the most con- ventional By- zantine manner. Giunta Pisano, who was paint- ing in the first half of the 13th century, was a little superior to the otherwise dead level of hieratic conven- tionalism. He is said to have been Cimabue's master. In the 14th century painting in Pisa was either Flor- FJ(J L _ Centre of a triptych, by Duccio di Buouin- entine or bien- segna, the Madonna with Angels, and, above, ese in Style. David and six Prophets. (National Gallery, No city, not London.) even Florence, was so fertile as Siena in native painters during the 13th and 14th centuries. The earliest, work- ingbef ore 1300, did not emanci- pate themselves from the old Byzantine man- nerism; Guido da Siena, Duc- cio (see fig. 1) and Segna di Buoninsegna possessed many of the peculi- arities of the old school, its rigid attitudes, its thin stiff folds, and its greenish sha- dows in the flesh tints. In the first half of thel 4th century FIG. 2. Madonna, by Cimabue. (National Gallery.) a number of very able painters were carrying on at Siena a parallel development to that which Giotto had inaugurated XXI. 55