Page:The painters of Florence from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century (1915).djvu/70

48 sank into monotony and formality, and art seemed once more in danger of becoming purely conventional. Yet these Giottesque painters interest us by their earnestness and sincerity, their simple and naïve feeling. They are, as a rule, excellent illustrators, who can tell a story gracefully and add pleasing details to the picture, if they lack the convincing power and dramatic sense of their great master, and never succeed in producing the same vivid and life-like effect.

Political conditions may have had their share in the general stagnation from which art and letters both suffered in the fourteenth century. The great schemes of Pope Innocent III. for the Church's regeneration, the dream of brotherhood and religious equality which St. Francis had held up to his countrymen, had ended in failure and disappointment. Civil troubles in Rome led to the exile of the popes to Avignon, and the Babylonian Captivity, as this period of banishment was termed, did not come to an end until 1377. Florence was torn in twain by the perpetual warfare of contending factions, the wars with Pisa and the revolt of the Ciompi. In 1345, great misery was entailed on countless families by the colossal failure of the Peruzzi and Bardi houses, which was partly caused by our king Edward the Third's repudiation of a debt of more than a million of florins, advanced by these merchants for the expenses of his French wars. This calamity was followed by the famine of 1347 and the terrible plague of 1348, which carried off as many as 600 victims a day, and was reckoned to have destroyed three-fourths of the whole population. In these circumstances it is wonderful that painting should