The analogy of style observable in the figures impressed on Tuscan coins
of the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth century, and those found in the
miniatures that decorate the manuscripts of the contemporary periods,
proves that Tuscany had its artists long before the epoch which Vasari
and his copyists fix for the importation of Greek art with Greek
artists: whether those paintings be all pure Tuscan, or here and there
interspersed with Greek ones, none will venture to decide, who knows the
impossibility of drawing a limitary line sufficiently severe to
distinguish the last spasms of an expiring art from the first
stammerings of an infant one. Of the still surviving monuments of
painting during those epochs, it may be sufficient to mention the famed
Christ, painted on canvass and glued to a wooden cross, of a date
anterior to 1003.
In subsequent times, the earliest and least unsuccessful essays in art,
were made by the Pisano. Whilst a Greek sarcophagus at Pisa, storied
with the incidents of Hippolytus and Phædra, furnished some elements of
form to the sculptors Niccolo and Giovanni Pisano, painting made some
progress with Giunta Pisano: his composition of Christ on the Cross at
the Angeli of Assisi, though defective in design, possesses life and
expression.[44]
A similar progress was made by his contemporary Guido or Guidone of
Sienna; a name not mentioned by Vasari, though in his frequent
excursions to Sienna, he could not remain unacquainted with the works of
Guido, at least one which still exists in the chapel of the Malevolti
in S. Dominico, with the following often repeated inscription and
date:--
Me Guido de senis diebus depinxit amenis
Quem Christus lenis nullis velit agere penis.
A.D. M.CCXXI.
This Madonna, twenty years anterior to the birth of Cimabue, is superior
to his Madonna in expression, and nearly equal in taste and colour,
though inferior in style.
Duccio di Boninsegna, probably of his school, was celebrated as the
restorer of that inlaid kind of Mosaic, called "Lavoro di Commesso." His
works are from 1275, the year in which he received a commission for
Sta. Maria Novella at Florence, to 1311, the period at which he was
employed in the Domo of Sienna. If these dates be genuine, he can
scarcely have lived till 1357, the year at which Fiorillo fixes his
death. It is not probable that he should have stretched his span beyond
a century, which must have been the case, if we suppose that he was
twenty at the time he painted in S. Maria Novella; it is not probable
that he should have chosen, or been suffered, to remain idle with the
celebrity he had acquired in the labours of the Domo; and it is still
less probable, that, if he was employed, what he produced in the
interval, between that period and his death, should have perished or
been destroyed, whilst we are still in possession of the paintings in
the Domo, which made nearly an epoch in art, at which he laboured three
years, for which he was paid upwards of 3000 scudi d'oro, the expense of
gilding and ultramarine included. That part of it which faced the
audience, represented in large figures the Madonna and various saints;
that which fronted the choir, divided into many compartments, exhibited
numerous compositions of Gospel subjects in figures of small proportion;
it cannot be denied, that with all its copiousness, the whole savours
strongly of the Greek manner.
Andrea Taffi, born 1213, the scholar of Apollonius, a Greek painter, and
his assistant in some mosaics at S. Giovanni of Florence, is not
mentioned out of that line by Vasari and Baldinucci: but the discovery
of a picture with his name by Ignazio Stugford adds another legitimate
name to the predecessors of Cimabue.
Buonamico di Cristofano, or Buffalmacco, of facetious memory, was the
pupil of Taffi. His best works are lost, but from the remains it may be
suspected that he owes at least as much to the tales of Boccaccio and
Sacchetti, for the preservation of his name, as to his own powers. There
still exists in Campo Santo at Pisa, a fresco of the Creation with a God
Father five ells high, supporting Heaven and the elements; and three
other stories of Adam, Noah and his Sons; a Crucifix, a Resurrection,
and an Ascension. We must not look here for much symmetry of design or
Giottesque elegance; his heads have little variety, and less beauty;
sameness of features, a vulgar cast, and a gaping deformity of mouth,
characterize his women; but now and then attention rests on the vivacity
or physiognomy of some male countenance, especially that of Cain.
Sometimes he snatches some movement from nature, such as that of the
terrified man who flies from Calvary: he overflows in particoloured
drapery, and delights in laboured ornaments of flowers and lace. A St.
John the Baptist of his, yet existing, deserves to be mentioned as an
instance of the utility of comparing works in painting and sculpture
with contemporary coins, in order to ascertain their dates; for the
same figure is exactly repeated on the Florentine scudo d'oro of that
age. A jocular host of artists, scholars of this school, we pass over,
as more important to the reader of the Decamerone and the Novelle, than
to the student of art.
Lucca, about 1235, possessed Bonaventura Berlingieri, whose St. Francis
still exists in the castle of Guiglia, near Modena, and is described as
a work of considerable merit for its time: Margaritone of Arezzo, a
pupil and follower of the Greeks, appears to have been several years
anterior to Cimabue. He painted on canvass, and was the first, according
to Vasari, who found the method of giving a more solid texture to
pictures. Some crucifix of his is still seen at Arezzo, and another at
Santa Croce in Florence, facing one of Cimabue. The style of both is
antiquated, but not so different in merit to make us refuse a painter's
name to Margaritone if we grant it to Cimabue.
Giovanni Cimabue,[45] of noble lineage, was an architect and painter. He
is considered as the father of Italian art, because with him legitimate
history and a less interrupted series of dates, begin; because he
succeeded better than his predecessors in disentangling himself from the
shackles of Greek barbarity, and chiefly because he discovered and
called forth the genius of Giotto. Vasari may be right in making him the
scholar of those Greeks whom the Florentine Government had employed to
paint the Church of Santa Maria Novella; but he errs in placing them in
the Chapel Gondi, which, with the body of the church, was not erected
till the subsequent century; he should have assigned them another chapel
under the church, where time has discovered some vestiges of ancient
painting. It seems, however, more probable, that Giunta Pisano gave
Cimabue instruction, if it be ascertained, as Fiorillo asserts, that he
worked in the great church of Assisi, 1253, when he was in his
thirteenth year, and Giunta superintended the decorations of that
fabric.
The pompous visit which Charles of Anjou paid to Cimabue in passing
through Florence, sufficiently proves the celebrity he enjoyed, if it
has not been sanctioned by the authority of Dante, who calls him the
unrivalled champion of his day. Cimabue was then painting the Madonna
with the Infant adored by six angels; the picture when finished was
carried in procession from Borgo Allegro to Santa Maria Novella, and
placed in the Chapel Rucellai, where it still exists. The heraldic
arrangement of the figures, their physiognomic monotony, the exility of
the detail and barbarous execution, contrast strangely with the
elevation and novelty of the artist's conception. Cimabue lost the
female and the mother in the Queen of Heaven. Insensible to the
blandishments of beauty, fierce like the age in which he lived, he
excelled in male, especially aged characters; these he impressed with
something of a stern grandeur, not often surpassed since. Vast and
comprehensive in his ideas, he seized on subjects of numerous
composition, and expressed them in large proportions; those features of
prophetic grandeur which surprise in his frescoes at the Dominicans and
Santa Trinità of Florence, are still excelled by the features which he
displayed in the upper church of Assisi--meteors of the age in which he
lived. They still exist, nor is it easily conceived how works of so
different style, against the testimony of Vasari, and the uniform
tradition of five centuries, could, as they were of late, be ascribed
to the more regulated hand and gentler spirit of Giotto.
Giotto's year of birth has been disputed; Vasari fixes it to 1276,
Baldinucci to 1265. He was the son of a cottager at Vespignano, and bred
to be a shepherd; but, a painter born, he amused himself from infancy
with attempts to draw whatever object struck his fancy. A sheep which he
had copied on a flat stone caught the eye of Cimabue, who was in the
neighbourhood, happened to pass by, demanded him of his father, and
carried him to Florence to instruct him; but he soon rivalled, and in a
short time eclipsed his master by a grace and an amenity of execution
which remained unequalled to the time of Masaccio.
For the rapidity of this progress, unless we were to ascribe it to
inspiration, we must account from the happy coincidence of external
advantages with the genius of the man. A period so obscure, admits of
little more than conjecture, but there is no improbability in supposing
that Giotto outstripped his master and the times by the same means which
rendered Michael Agnolo so soon superior to Ghirlandaio,--modelling
and the study of the antique. We know that he was a sculptor, and that
his models still existed in the time of Lorenzo Ghiberti. Good originals
he could find among the fragments of antiquity discovered before his
time, and scattered over Florence and Rome: from what other source could
he derive the character of his male heads, and that squareness of form
so different from the exility and indecision of all contemporary styles?
The few majestic natural folds of his draperies, and the composure and
unaffected air of his figures, breathe the spirit of the antique. His
very defects are the consequences of such a study. His manner has been
charged with a kind of _statuine_ precision (del statuino), unknown to
other schools, and unknown to artists who do not form themselves on the
antique.
If to these conjectures it be objected, that the want of uniformity,
dryness of design, extremities either faulty or hid under a preposterous
length of drapery, rather betray a nurseling of Pisa than a pupil of the
ancients; it ought to be considered that uniformity is the result of
settled principles; that he who had to remove the rubbish could not be
expected to give the polish; that he who had to teach eyes to look,
hands to move, and feet to stand, could not be supposed to make them do
it with all the correctness, propriety or elegance, they were capable
of; that a certain gymnophobia equally attends the infancy and the
decrepitude of taste, and that the approbation of a public and an
artist's flattery are always reciprocal.
And no artist commanded more of public favour than Giotto. Legislator of
taste, not in Tuscany alone, but at Rome, Naples, Bologna, and the
Venetian State, he excelled his master as much in celebrity as he had
excelled him in grace and method. How soon he did this may be seen on
comparing his earliest works at Assisi with those of his master in the
same place. Genuine elements of composition, expressions inspired by
Nature, accuracy of design, progressively appear. It is no hyperbole to
affirm, that in certain characters no artist ever went nearer the source
of expression than Giotto, and that in the maiden airs of untainted
virginity none ever excelled, and perhaps, Raphael and Domenichino
excepted, few ever approached him.
Though not the inventor, Giotto was the restorer of portrait-painting;
resemblance, with character of face and attitude, date from him. He gave
us Dante, Brunetto Latini, Corso Donato, &c. Mosaic was improved by him,
and his powers in it shown by the celebrated Navicella, or boat of Saint
Peter, in the portico of the Basilica at Rome; though restoration has
transformed it to a work of shreds and patches, and reduced his claim on
it to the mere name. Missal painting likewise owes him some gratitude;
and in architecture the grand steeple of the Domo at Florence is the
work of Giotto.
Implicit imitation checks progress; the numerous school of Giotto were
for the greater part content to walk behind their master. Taddeo Gaddi,
the most familiar and most favoured of his pupils, is said by Vasari,
whom time still suffered to judge with some competence, to have excelled
him in colouring and mellowness. The works of Taddeo in Sta. Croce
are inferior in originality and execution to his compositions in the
Capitolo degli Spagnuoli, where, in the ceiling, he represented some
Gospel subjects, and in the Cenacolo the Descent of the Holy Spirit, one
of the beautiful relics of the fourteenth century. On the sides he
painted the Sciences, with their most eminent professors under each, no
unfair specimen of poetic conception; here is what remains of vivacity
and brightness in his tints. Taddeo outlived the period assigned him by
Vasari; we find him mentioned as late as 1352, which still might not be
the ultimate date of his life.
Another conspicuous name among his pupils is Stefano of Florence,
(Fiorentino,) whom Vasari, without hesitation, in every part of the art
prefers to his master. He was the son of one Catharina, a daughter of
Giotto; an ardent and inquisitive spirit, quick to discover and eager to
overcome difficulties; the first who ventured on foreshortening, and if
success did not fully second his efforts in that, it favoured him in
perspective, which he much improved, and in the attitudes, variety and
vivacity of heads. Landino fancied to compliment his memory by repeating
the silly epithet of "Scimia della Natura," "Ape of Nature," which, from
the resemblance of his portraits, was given him by the vulgar and the
dilettanti of his day. His works in Ara Cœli at Rome, at S. Spirito of
Florence, and elsewhere, perished, and nothing can safely be stamped
with his name, if it be not a Madonna in Campo Santo at Pisa, grander in
style than those of his master, but retouched.
Of Tommaso, his son and reputed scholar, a Pietà, which might be taken
for a work of Giotto, exists at S. Remigi of Florence; and still some
frescoes at Assisi. They entitle him to the surname of "Giottino," given
him by his fellow-citizens, who used to say that the spirit of Giotto
had passed into him and animated his hand.
Without embarrassing ourselves with conjectures on Ugolino da Sienna, we
pass to the more celebrated name of Simone Memmi, or Simon di Martino, a
native of the same place, the painter of Laura, and the friend of
Petrarca, who in two affected sonnets has transmitted him to posterity.
Whether Simone were the pupil of Maestro Mino as the Siennese, or of
Giotto as the Florentine writers pretend, is a point beyond decision: he
restored a picture of the first, and his style has some analogy to that
of the second, though with more suavity of colour, and more poetry of
conception. He was the first who dared to fill a spacious façade with
one composition without dividing it into compartments. Such is that in
the Capitolo degli Spagnuoli of Santa Maria Novella at Florence, where
Vasari discovered every beauty of his own time, and where, in the crowd
of introduced portraits, many have fancied, in spite of chronology, to
discover the portraits of Laura and her friend; whom probably he did not
become personally acquainted with till four years after the completion
of that work, 1336, when he was sent to the Pope at Avignon, became
familiar with Petrarca, painted Laura, and, strange to tell, reached the
expectation of the lover, who saw
"Il lampegiar dell' angelico riso."
Miniature, though the last object of this work, was not the least of
Memmi's powers. Lanzi has noticed one which fronts a MS. Virgil with the
commentary of Servius, now in the Ambrosiana at Milan, but formerly
possessed by Petrarca, who probably dictated the subject, and added the
following lines:-
Mantua Virgilium qui talia carmina finxit,
Sena tulit Simonem digito qui talia pinxit.
The painting represents Virgil in a sitting attitude ready to write,
with his face turned upwards as invoking the Muse. Æneas, in martial
vest and attitude, stands before him, and pointing to his sword, alludes
to the subject of the Æneis, "Arma Virumque." A shepherd and a
husbandman, symbols of the Pastorals and Georgics, placed somewhat
lower, listen to the theme; whilst Servius draws a transparent curtain,
to denote his labours in unveiling the beauties and removing the
obscurities of the poet. In this miniature, the originality of
conception, the beauty and harmony of colour, the varied and appropriate
drapery, are, however, balanced by rudeness of design, vulgarity of
character, and deformed extremities.
It was a barbarous singularity of Simone, promiscuously to admit
different proportions on the same plane: to flank or cross figures of
natural size with figures a third less than nature.
Lippo, or Filippo Memmi, was the relative, scholar, and imitator, of
Simone: assisted by his designs, Lippo often executed works, which, had
he not marked them with his name, would be ascribed to the master: when
left to his own invention, he rose in nothing above mediocrity, but in
colour. Sometimes they were partners in the same picture, as in that at
S. Ansano di Castel Vecchio, at Sienna; sometimes the second finished
what the first began, as in some works at Ancona and Assisi; and at
Sienna there remains still something entirely executed by Lippo.
Simone co-operated in the works of S. Maria Novella with Taddeo Gaddi,
who, with his son, Angelo Gaddi, left a number of pupils, imitators
through him of Giotto, inferior to both, not much distinguished by
tradition, and less favoured by time. Of Jacopo di Casentino, the most
conspicuous, what vestiges remain in the church of Orsanmichele at
Florence, are in conformity with the style of Taddeo; barriers soon
overleaped by the vivid fancy of his scholar, Spinello the Aretine, whom
his own conception of a demon is said to have terrified into insanity
and death. His son, Parri Spinelli, with barbarous incongruities of
line, possessed exquisite colour; and his pupil, Lorenzo di Bicci, has
been compared to Vasari, for the number, dispatch, and opinion of his
works. Antonio, surnamed Veneziano, whether he were a Venetian or a
Florentine, is, against evidence of dates and style, supposed to have
been a pupil of Angelo Gaddi, and to have educated Paolo Uccello, the
first master of perspective, and Gherardo Starnina, an artist of gay
style, whose relics live still a chapel of Sta. Croce. They are
numbered among the last productions of Giotto's expiring epoch, and the
verge of the fourteenth century, in which we have still to mark, though
pupils of some other school, the family of Orcagna; Bernardo, a painter;
Jacopo, a sculptor; but chiefly Andrea, conspicuous for writing,
painting, sculpture, and architecture, in a degree little inferior to
Giotto himself. Architects date from him the abolition of the acute
angle and restoration of semicircular arches, as in the Loggia of the
Lanzi, which he likewise decorated with sculpture. Some, without
attention to time, have supposed him the pupil of Angelo Gaddi, but he
was probably trained to the art by his brother Bernardo, jointly with
whom he painted in the Capella Strozzi of Sta. Maria Novella, in the
Campo Santo at Pisa, and alone and better in Sta. Croce, Death,
Judgement, Paradise, and Hell, placing with Dantesque licence his
friends among the elect, his enemies with the damned.
The downfall of Pisa had raised Florence to the metropolis of Tuscany,
and the spirit of its citizens to render its appearance worthy of that
pre-eminence. Cosmo, styled the father of his country, who tuned the
public affairs, might with better right have been called the father of
distinguished talents: never was tyranny meditated on a less suspicious
plan, or approached by more popular means. The house of the Medici, in
the quaint Italian phrase, became the Lyceum of Philosophers, the
Arcadia of Poets, the Academy of Artists. Dello, Paolo, Masaccio, the
two Peselli, both the Lippi, Benozzo, Sandro, the Ghirlandai, were the
clients of the family, and emulated each other in their homage. Their
pictures, according to the usage of the age, full of portraits,
perpetually presented to the people likenesses of the Medici, and often
in the characters of the Magi royally robed, the sceptre firmly held in
the gripe of the Medici, to prepare the public eye gradually for what it
was soon to witness, the firm establishment of sovereignty in that
House. The competition of rival citizens, and still more the
wide-extended influence of religion, diffused Taste and beckoned Talent
to Florence as to its centre, from every part of Italy. At her call
Donatello, Brunelleschi, Ghiberti, Filarete, the Rossellini, Verrocchio
arose, and with their works spread the Elements of Art.
Poetry, that supplies the real features and materials of expression when
it inspires the thought, arrives at the full display of its powers long
before its sisters have disentangled themselves from the impediments of
infancy; and of these, Sculpture, whose aim is infinitely less complex,
raises the vigorous fabric of forms, whilst Painting is still impotently
struggling with the rudiments of line, perspective, keeping,
chiaroscuro, colour; which to unite in an equal degree has hitherto been
found above the lot of humanity. The imitators of Giotto were in this
state of struggle; they saw little in chiaroscuro, and less in
perspective and line; their figures still slip from their planes, their
fabrics have no true point of sight, their fore-shortenings depended
solely on the eye: Stefano dal Ponte rather saw than overcame; the rest
either avoided or palliated these difficulties. The Umbrian Pietro della
Francesca seems to have been the first who called geometry to the
assistance of painting, and taught by his works at Arezzo the
principles of perspective; Brunelleschi formed it into system for
architecture, and the mathematician Manetti roused the attention of
Paolo Uccello, who owes the perpetuity of his name nearly exclusively to
the study of that science. His immoderate attachment to perspective is
become proverbial;[46] and almost equalled his fondness for birds, from
which he got his surname. He applied it, from grounds and buildings, to
the human body, which he foreshortened with a skill unknown to his
predecessors: and some proofs of it still exist in the figures of God
and Noè among the chiaroscuroes in the chiostro of Sta. Maria
Novella, and in the equestrian colossus of Gio. Aguto (John Montacute),
which he painted in chiaroscuro of terra verde, and which is still in
the duomo. The art, since its revival, perhaps for the first time showed
that, if it had dared much, it had dared well: nor did he fall short of
it in the gigantic imagery of the House Vitali at Bologna; he was,
however, more employed in painting private furniture: the triumphs of
Petrarch on some small presses in the gallery of Florence are supposed
to come from his hand. That he was a master of expression, the instances
adduced by Vasari leave no doubt; and in describing the flying drapery
of some friar in the series of pictures relative to S. Benedetto, the
same writer tells us, that it served as a model to all succeeding
artists: to such powers, praise of variety is added by the truth and
diligence with which he copied trees, plants, birds and animals, and for
which some critic styles him the Bassano of the first epoch. In the
nearly general wreck of Paolo's works, it is difficult to form a
judgment of his technic character independent of tradition: but,
comparing what remains with what we are told, it is evident that he
reached from one extreme of the Art to the other; and that, if he was
blameable for frequently playing with a tool instead of using it,
mistaking an instrument of the Art for Art itself, and means for the end
of execution, he has been deprived by partiality of the praise due to
powers which he appears to have possessed in a degree unknown to the
times that preceded Masaccio.
Masolino da Panicale cultivated chiaroscuro: he was enabled to treat it
with more truth than his predecessors, by a long practice of modelling
under the tuition of Lorenzo Ghiberti, the master of design and grouping
in those days, but whose animation he did not attain. Starnina
instructed him in colour; and thus by uniting the characteristics of two
schools, he produced that new style, which, though still infected by
dryness and clogged by inelegance, possesses grandeur, union and
breadth: the proofs still remain in the chapel of S. Pietro al Carmine,
where, besides the Evangelists, he painted several subjects from the
story of that Apostle. The remaining ones, which he did not live to
finish, were some years afterward added by his scholar Tomaso Gisioli,
celebrated by the name of Masaccio from his careless way of living.
Historians, biographers, and poets, unite in dating a new period from
Masaccio. The compass of his mind led him to uniformity of pursuit, and
the introduction of style; he had formed his principles on the works of
Ghiberti and Donatello; perspective he had learnt of Brunelleschi, and
in an excursion to Rome, it is unreasonable to suppose that he did not
improve himself on the antique. Gentile da Fabriano and Vittore
Pisanello were then at Rome, and the high opinion which they are said to
have expressed of him[47] as the first painter of the age has been
recorded: it is, however, difficult to say on what that opinion could be
founded: they were too far advanced in life to see more of Masaccio than
his juvenile essays, perhaps such as the S. Anna in S. Ambrogio at
Florence, or what he painted in the chapel of St. Catherine, in the
church of St. Clemens of Rome, the figures of the ceiling excepted, all
retouched, and though fine works for the time, of doubtful authority,
and in no manner to be compared to the pictures del Carmine. Here appear
the virility of his powers and the legitimacy of his superior claim:
here the figures, however varied by attitude, pose or are foreshortened
with that truth and uniformity of success which the less established
principles of Paolo Uccello did not always reach. In expression,
sublimity distinguishes Donatello; he always aims at, and sometimes
succeeds in personifying a sentiment or a passion.[48] Masaccio, more
dramatic, poises expression by character and propriety; hence he has
been said, and truly said, to resemble Raffaello.
To be praised immoderately for what, with regard to judgment, deserved
it least, has, as of others, been likewise the lot of Masaccio: the
introduction and masterly execution of the man who, in the baptism of
St. Peter, appears to shiver with cold, is extolled by Vasari, and
makes, by the verdict of Lanzi, an epoch in art. Had the apostle
immersed the race of a Northern clime, a man frost-bitten, (_assiderando
di freddo_,) or impatient of cold, might have been admitted without
impropriety, but under an Asiatic sun he is worse than superfluous. This
either Masaccio did not consider, or if he did, fondly sacrificed
propriety to the expression of an incident, which, had it even been
admissible, had in itself less dignity, and incomparably less pathos,
than that of the sick monk on whose eyes and lips the hope of recovery
seemed to tremble, introduced among the series of pictures from the life
of St. Benedict, by Paolo Uccello.[49]
A higher and more legitimate praise of Masaccio's expression is, that
Raffaello not only imitated its general character, but in the same or
similar subjects sometimes individually adopted it, as in the gesture of
Paul in the Cartoon of the Areopagus, and that of Adam dismissed from
Paradise, in the Loggia; and that, if he improved the taste and added
elegance to the Tuscan's drapery, he closely adhered to its principles,
simplicity, propriety, and breath.
Of Masaccio's colour, what remains possesses truth, variety, delicacy,
union, and great relief. He lived not to finish the whole of the Chapel,
some stories still remaining to be added in 1443, the reputed year of
his death,[50] which was not without suspicion of having been hastened
by poison. His other frescoes at Florence have been destroyed by time,
and perhaps no gallery can produce an authentic picture by his hand, if
we except the portrait of a youth in the Pitti palace, a work that
breathes life.
Ghiberti and Donatello had taught Masaccio to find style by selection
from nature; his followers for half a century, content to look at him
without adhering to his method, gradually shrunk back to the exility and
meagreness of the preceding age: without embarrassing ourselves with the
angelic prettinesses of Frà Giovanni da Fiesole, a name dearer to
sanctity than to art, and whom both his age and missal-taste prove the
nursling of another school, we pass to Benozzo Gozzoli, his pupil, who
strove to forget his puny lessons in the bolder dictates of Masaccio.
That he could not soon do it, is evident from the profusion of
ornamental glitter and tinsel colouring in the frescoes of the Chapel
Riccardi. He succeeded better at Pisa, where his Scripture stories cover
an entire wing of Campo Santo. This enormous enterprise, which, in the
phrase of Vasari might smite with fear a legion of painters,[51] he is
said to have completely achieved in two years. Everywhere inferior to
his model in composition, design, and expression, he often goes beyond
him in vastness and amenity of scenery, a certain play of ideas and
picturesque exuberance. After all, perhaps more than one hand shared in
the execution. Benozzo lived long, and lies buried near his work, where
public gratitude had placed his sepulchre, and inscribed it with an
eulogy.[52]
Filippo Lippi, a Carmelitan friar, studied and imitated the works of
Masaccio, especially in compositions of small proportion, with great
success. Suavity of conception and colour animates his angels and
Madonnas: in the large historic frescoes at Pieve di Prato, he
introduced proportions exceeding the natural size, praised as his
masterpieces by Vasari, who has related Lippi's escape from the convent;
his captivity among the Moors; the pictures which he painted at Naples,
Padoua, and elsewhere; his premature death by poison from the relatives
of the female by whom he had a natural son, Filippino Lippi. Frà Filippo
died at Spoleti, 1469, on the point of finishing his great work in the
dome, where Lorenzo de' Medici, who had demanded but not obtained his
ashes from the citizens, entombed them under a stately monument
inscribed by Angelo Poliziano. His scholars and imitators were F.
Diamante of Prato, the partner of his last work; F. Pesello of Florence,
and Pesellino his son, whom, if we believe Vasari, shortness of life
alone intercepted from superior excellence.
About this period the first attempts of painting in oil were made at
Florence, by Andrea dal Castagno, of detested memory, who had improved
himself by looking at Masaccio. Domenico, called Veneziano, to whom
Antonello of Messina had communicated the novel mystery of Johan Van
Eyk, after practising it with success at home, Loretto, and other parts
of the Papal State, came to exercise it at Florence: caressed and
encouraged, he excited the envy and cupidity of Castagno, who under the
mask of submissive attachment, wheedled himself into his confidence,
obtained the secret, and then assassinated the hapless donor. The
treacherous but complete acquisition added lustre to his practice during
life, but time has swept the sacrilegious produce of his hand, and left
nothing to the memory of "Andrea degli Impiccati," but the execration of
posterity.[53]
The farther we leave Masaccio behind, the nearer we approach the golden
epoch, the more lurid becomes the atmosphere of art. Mediocrity, tinsel
ostentation, and tasteless diligence mark the greater number of that
society of craftsmen whom Sixtus IV. conscribed (1474, Manni,) to
decorate or rather to disfigure the panels of the grand Chapel which
took its name from him (La Sistina): one of its sides was to be occupied
by subjects from the Pentateuch, the other by Gospel stories. Pietro
Perugino excepted, the artists convoked were nearly all Florentines or
Tuscans; viz. Sandro Botticelli, Domenico Bigordi, Cosimo Rosselli,
Luca, Signorelli of Cortona, and Don Bartolomeo of Arezzo, with their
assistants. The superintendence of the whole the Pope, with the usual
vanity and ignorance of princes, gave to Sandro, the least qualified of
the group, whose barbarous taste and dry minuteness palsied, or
assimilated with his own, the powers of his associates, and rendered the
whole a monument of puerile ostentation, and conceits unworthy of its
place. Nor is it from what there remains of either, that the names of
Luca Signorelli and Domenico Bigordi claim that attention which history
owes to the first as the real precursor of Michael Angelo, and to the
second as the master of his rudiments.
Luca Egidio Signorelli, of Cortona,[54] less to be considered as the
reviver of Masaccio's style than as the founder of that which
distinguished the succeeding epoch, might have led its banners, as his
life stretched beyond that of Raphael and Lionardo, had his principle
been more uniform. The greater part of his works exhibit the evident
struggle of his own perceptions with the prescriptive ones of his time,
and a kind of coalition between the barbarity of the expiring and the
emancipated taste of the rising æra. The best evidence of this is in the
Duomo of Orvieto, where in the mixed imagery of final dissolution and
infernal punishment, he has scattered ideas of original conception,
character and attitude, in copious variety, but not without numerous
remnants of Gothic alloy. The angels who announce the impending doom or
scatter plagues, exhibit with awful simplicity bold foreshortenings,
whilst the St. Michael presents only the tame heraldic figure and
attitude of a knight all cased in armour. In the expression of the
condemned groups and dæmons, he chiefly dwells on the supposed perpetual
renewal of the pangs attending on the last struggles of life with death,
contrasted with the inexorable scowl or malignant grin of fiends
methodizing torture: a horrid feature reserved by Dante for the last pit
of his Inferno, and far beyond the culinary abominations of Sandro
Botticelli.[55]
Though Luca's style of design was no more that of Masaccio than Michael
Agnolo's that of Raphael, less characteristic than grand, and fit to be
the vehicle of those conceptions and attitudes which furnished hints of
imitation to the painter of the Last Judgement in the Sistina, yet he
was master of a grace in celestial scenery and angelic attitudes
unapproached by his contemporaries, seldom equalled and never surpassed
by his successors.
Luca Signorelli was a painter of much popularity. Urbino, Volterra,
Florence, Rome, his native and many other towns, possess or possessed
works of his. He was related to the family of the Vasari of Arezzo, and
caressed and encouraged to the art his infant biographer.[56]
Another of the artists employed in the Sistina, inferior to Luca, but
of no despicable (though, if we look at Masaccio, too highly rated)
powers, was Domenico Bigordi, commonly called Del Ghirlandajo;[57] this
is he under whose auspices not only his son Ridolfo, but even Bonaroti
and the best artists of the succeeding epoch, began their course.
Precision of outline, decorum of countenance, variety of ideas, facility
and diligence, distinguish his works. He is the first of Florentines,
who gave depth and keeping to composition: if gold and tinsel glitter
are not entirely banished from his colours, they appear at least less
often. He was fond of introducing portraits among his actors, but with
selection and of distinguished characters; though hands and feet had no
part in his attention to physiognomy. The churches Degli Innocenti,
Santa Trinità, and Sta. Maria Novella at Florence, possess his most
celebrated productions, and many are scattered over Tuscany and the
Ecclesiastic State. Of the two which he painted in the Sistina, the
Resurrection of Christ perished; the Vocation of Peter and Andrew to the
Apostolate Survives.
Cosimo Rosselli and Pier di Cosimo likewise employed at the Sistina,
inferior in all essential parts to their competitors, owe the perpetuity
of their names less to their parti-coloured glare and immoderate display
of gold and azure, which attracted the vulgar eye of their employer the
Pope, than to the luck of having been the masters of Bartolomeo della
Porta, and Andrea del Sarto.
Piero and Antonio Pollajuoli, though employed only as statuaries in the
same Chapel, possessed no inconsiderable powers as painters. Piero's
pictures at S. Miniato discover the scholar of Castagno, austere
countenances and deep and massy colour; but in novelty of composition
and design he yields to his brother and pupil Antonio, whose Martyrdom
of St. Sebastian in the Chapel Pucci of that church, though humble in
style, crude in colour, and oddly rather than originally conceived, has
been numbered with the first productions of the age, because with the
earliest traces of legitimate anatomy it exhibits its application, and
subordinates enumeration to function. Both the Pollajuoli died at Rome.
Don Bartolomeo of Arezzo, having nothing to add of his own to the works
of the Sistina, is mentioned here only as the helper of Luca Signorelli
and Pietro Perugino; nor is Filippino Lippi, the natural son of Frà
Filippo, numbered among the companions of Sandro his master, though the
perpetual recurrence of antique customs and dresses in his works makes
it probable that he formed his juvenile studies at Rome. Inferior in
real capacity to his father, he may be praised rather for the accessory
than the substantial parts of his works: he filled with an unequal hand
the remaining panels left by Masaccio al Carmine; and in the Minerva at
Rome, yields the palm in expression and amenity of ideas to his own
scholar Raffaelino del Garbo, whose early works at Monte Oliveto of
Florence, and elsewhere, give sufficient evidence that he might have
raised himself to the first artists of his day, had not the cravings of
a numerous family crushed his powers, and poverty and dejection hastened
his death. His contemporary Andrea Verocchio, though a celebrated
statuary, and a designer of style, has deserved our notice as a
painter, only because he was the master of Lionardo da Vinci, the first
name in the annals of Tuscany's golden epoch.
Vinci, a burgh of Lower Valdarno, had the honour of giving a surname to
Lionardo, the natural son[58] of one Ser Piero, a state notary at
Florence. Elevated by nature above the common standard of men, born to
discover, he joined to boundless inquiry intrepidity of pursuit, and
lofty conception to minute investigation, nor only in the arts connected
with his own, music and poesy, but in science, philosophy, mathematics,
mechanics, hydrostatics: this wide mental range, supported by equal
vigour and gracefulness of body, was commended by every accomplishment
of a gentleman. Such was the genius whom Nature had destined to
establish art on elements, to open the realms of light and shade, to
inspire the subject with its tone, and to poise expression between
insipidity and caricature.
Notwithstanding the distractions of so many diverging inclinations, for
powers they could not yet be called, an innate attachment to the art
appears to have predominated at the earliest period to such a degree
that Ser Piero determined to place Lionardo under his friend Verocchio,
whom he soon excelled in painting,[59] and in modelling equalled.
The obscurity which involves the life of Lionardo from his boyish years,
through the bloom of youth, to the vigour of manhood, can only be
accounted for by that independence of mind which made him prefer
indulgence of his own various inclinations to a decided, steady, and if
more confined, more lucrative pursuit of art. By what means he, whom
Vasari describes as possessing "nothing,"[60] was enabled to gratify
studies and fancies equally expensive, no where appears; it appears not
that he was patronized by the great and rich; he escaped the eye of the
Medici;[61] it was reserved for Lodovico Sforza to discover and to
conduct the first citizen of Florence to Milano, and for aught we are
told, rather from expectation of amusement than motives of homage.
Lodovico was a dilettante in music, and wished to increase the harmony
of his concerts with the silver tones of the lyre, invented and
constructed by Lionardo, who, we are told, soon distanced all rival
performers, and by the aid of his powers as an "Improvisatore," became
the object of general admiration: it was then, and perhaps not till
then, that the Duke cast a steadier eye on his superior accomplishments,
and allowed the musician to become a benefactor to the public in
adopting his plans for the establishment and direction of an academy;
and granting the means for carrying into effect the still more important
ones of conducting the Adda to Milano, and a navigable canal from
Martisana to Chiavenna, and the Valteline, &c. plans and effects only
interrupted by the fall of the Sforzas and the captivity of Lodovico.