Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 1.djvu/44

86 beauty or for mere purposes of adornment, nor were those methods of painting then in use which have brought pictures into private homes and within private means. And so it happens that the schools of this period are not represented at Manchester in any fair proportion to the schools of the sixteenth century.

The two most important centuries of Art are not to be studied here. Of the six pictures, for instance, that profess to be by Giotto, the great head and master of Italian Art, there are but two from which even a faint impression of his style can be gained. There is nothing here which would enable one who had not seen his works in Italy to conceive a true idea of their character and merits. Giotto stands at the threshold of the fourteenth century, breaking open the door, so long barred up, that was to let men into the glories of the unseen world. The friend of Dante, he, as painter, stands side by side with the poet. In the midst of the tumults, the confusion, and violence of those bloody times, his soul rose above the discord of the world, his hand snapped the fetters of authority and tradition, and revealed by line and color the exalted visions of his imagination. Painting, with him, took its inspiration from religious faith, and spent itself in religious service. Whether at Padua, in the little withdrawn Arena chapel, or on the bare mountains at Assisi, in the great church of St. Francis, or at Naples, in the king's chapel, his frescos, though dimmed by the dust of five hundred years, blackened by the smoke of incense, abused by restorers, still show a power of imagination, a spirituality and tenderness of feeling, a simplicity and directness of treatment, which give them place among the most sacred and precious works that Art has yet produced. That quiet, solitary chapel of the Arena at Padua is one of the places most worthy of reverence in Italy; for in the pictures from the lives of the Virgin and the Saviour, that are painted upon its walls, there is the expression of such religious fervor, such faith and love, as Art has rarely or never reached in later times.

Nor is there at Manchester any picture by Duccio da Siena, the great, and, one may almost say, the worthy contemporary of Giotto, from which his power and feeling are to be well estimated. Like Giotto he struggled to free himself from the swathing-clothes in which the traditions of Byzantine Art had bound up the limbs and the imaginations of artists, and he succeeded in at last breaking loose. But the long restraint had impaired the power of all who were subjected to it; and as in the works of Giotto, so in the rarer works of Duccio, one often finds an effort after truth of expression, which is almost pathetic in its character, from its revealing the inefficiency of the hand to carry out the thought, and the resolute will striving half in vain to overcome the impediments of bad teaching and imperfect knowledge of the materials and limits of painting. It is this groping effort after truth which results often in the naïve rendering of details, and the quaintness of composition, which are so common in the works of these early masters; but the deep feeling of the artists penetrates through all, and thus even their awkward and imperfect drawing frequently produces a stronger effect, and seems a better rendering of nature, than the cold, unfeeling, academic accuracy of Bologna, or all the finished science of the eclectic schools.

In passing down through the century one finds lamentable omissions at Manchester. Fifty pictures, of which half at least have been restored, (that is to say, in part or wholly spoiled,) and half originally the work of inferior masters, do not represent the art of a century which was full of the glow of reawakening life, and which, as the spring covers the earth with flowers, covered Italy with cathedrals, campaniles, churches, baptisteries, and camposantos, and decorated their walls with sculpture and painting. Art was gaining gradually a knowledge of her own powers. Orgagna, the Michel