"The early efforts of Cimabue and Giotto are the burning
messages of prophecy, delivered by the stammering lips of
infants"
(RUSKIN: _Modern Painters_, vol. i. pt. i. sec. i. ch. ii. § 7).
Give these, I exhort you, their guerdon and glory
For daring so much, before they well did it.
The first of the new, in our race's story,
Beats the last of the old; 'tis no idle quiddit.
BROWNING: _Old Pictures in Florence_.
On entering the Gallery from Trafalgar Square, and ascending the
main staircase, the visitor reaches the North Vestibule. What, he
may be inclined to ask, is there worth looking at in the quaint and
gaunt pictures around him here? The answer is a very simple one. This
vestibule is the nursery of Italian art. Here is the first stammering
of infant painting. Accustomed as we are at the present day to so much
technical skill even in the commonest works of art, we may be inclined
to think that the art of painting--the art of giving the resemblances
of things by means of colour laid on to wood or canvas--is an easy
one, of which men have everywhere and at all times possessed the
mastery. But this of course is not the case. The skill of to-day is
the acquired result of long centuries of gradual improvement; and the
pictures in this vestibule bear the same relation to the pictures of
our own time as the stone huts of our forefathers to the Gallery in
which we stand. The poorness of the pictures here is the measure of the
richness of others. To feel the full greatness of Raphael's Madonna
(1171), one should first pause awhile before the earliest Italian
picture here (564), the gaunt and forbidding Madonna by
Margaritone of Arezzo,
With the grave-clothes garb and swaddling barret
(Why purse up mouth and beak in a pet so,
You bald old saturnine poll-clawed parrot?) (_R. Browning_).
But even in the earliest efforts of infancy, there is a certain
amount of inherited gift. First of all, therefore, one should look at
a specimen of such art as Italians had before them when they first
began to paint for themselves. With the fall of the Roman Empire
and the invasion of the Goths, the centre of civilisation shifted
to the capital of the Eastern Church, Byzantium (Constantinople).
The characteristics of Byzantine art may be seen in a Greek picture
(594). The history of early Italian art is the history of the effort
to escape from the swaddling clothes of this rigid Byzantine School.
The effort was of two kinds: first the painters had to see nature
truly, instead of contenting themselves with fixed symbols--art had to
become "natural," instead of "conventional." Secondly, having learned
to see truly, they had to learn how to give a true resemblance of
what they saw; how to exhibit things in relief, in perspective, and
in illumination. In _relief_: that is, they had to learn to show one
thing as standing out from another; in _perspective_: that is, to
show things as they really look, instead of as we infer they are; in
_illumination_: that is, to show things in the colours they assume
under such and such lights. The first distinct advance was made by
Cimabue and Giotto at Florence, but contemporaneous with them was the
similar work of Duccio and his successors at Siena, whose pictures
should be studied in this connection. Various stages in the advance
will be pointed out under the pictures themselves; and the student
of art will perhaps find the same kind of pleasure in tracing the
painter's progress as grown-up people feel in watching the gradual
development of children.
But there is another kind of interest also. Wordsworth says that
children are the best philosophers; and in the case of art at any
rate there is some truth in what he says, for "this is a general
law, that supposing the intellect of the workman the same, the more
imitatively complete his art, the less he will mean by it; and the
ruder the symbol, the deeper is its intention" (Ruskin's _Lectures on
Art_, § 19). The more complete his powers of imitation become, the
more intellectual interest he takes in the expression, and the less
therefore in the thing meant. What then is the meaning of these early
pictures? To answer this question, we must go back to consider what
it was that gave the original impulse to the revival of art in Italy.
To this revival two circumstances contributed. First, no school of
painting can exist until society is comparatively rich, until there
is wealth enough to support a class of men with leisure to produce
beautiful things. Such an increase of wealth took place at Florence in
the thirteenth century: the gay and courteous life of the Florentines
at that time was ready for the adornment of art. The particular
direction which art took was due to the religious revival, headed by
St. Francis and St. Dominic, which occurred at the same time. Churches
were everywhere built, and on the church walls frescoes were wanted,
alike to satisfy the growing sense of beauty and to assist in teaching
Christian doctrine. These early pictures are thus to be considered as
a kind of painted preaching. The story of Cimabue's great picture (see
No. 565) well illustrates the double origin of the revival of art. It
was to its place above the altar in the great Dominican church of Sta.
Maria Novella at Florence that the picture was carried in triumphal
procession; whilst the fact that a whole city should thus have turned
out to rejoice over the completion of a picture, proves "the widespread
sensibility of the Florentines to things of beauty, and shows the
sympathy which, emanating from the people, was destined to inspire and
brace the artist for his work" (Symonds: _Renaissance_, iii. 137).[15]
The history of Giotto is no less significant. It was for the walls of
the church of St. Francis at Assisi that his greatest work was done. It
was there that he at once pondered over the meaning of the Christian
faith (with what result is shown by Ruskin in _Fors Clavigera_ and
elsewhere), and learned the secret of giving the resemblance of the
objects of that faith in painting. Thus, then, we arrive at the second
source of interest in these old pictures of Florence--rude and foolish
as they sometimes seem. "Those were noble days for the painter, when
the whole belief of Christendom, grasped by his own faith, and firmly
rooted in the faith of the people round him, as yet unimpaired by alien
emanations from the world of classic culture, had to be set forth for
the first time in art. His work was then a Bible, a compendium of grave
divinity and human history, a book embracing all things needful for
the spiritual and civil life of man. He spoke to men who could not
read, for whom there were no printed pages, but whose hearts received
his teaching through the eye. Thus painting was not then what it is
now, a decoration of existence, but a potent and efficient agent in
the education of the race" (_ibid._ p. 143). The message which these
painters had to deliver was painted on the walls of churches or civic
buildings; and it is only there--at Assisi, and Padua, and Florence,
and Siena--that they can be properly read. But from such scraps and
fragments as are here preserved, one may learn, as it were, the
alphabet, and catch the necessary point of view.
But why, it may be asked, did painting come to its new birth first at
Florence, rather than elsewhere in Italy? The first answer is that
painting thus arose at Florence because it was there that a new style
of building at this time arose. The painters were wanted, as we have
seen, to decorate the churches, and in those days there was no sharp
distinction between the arts. Not only were architects sculptors, but
they were often painters and goldsmiths as well. Giotto and Orcagna
are instances of this union of the arts. But why did the new style of
building arise specially in Florence? The answer to this is twofold:
first, the Florentines inherited the artistic gifts and faculties of
the Etruscan (Tuscan) race. Even in late Florentine pictures, pure
Etruscan design will often be found surviving (see 586). Secondly, in
the middle of the thirteenth century new art impulse came from the
North in the shape of a northern builder, who, after building Assisi,
visited Florence and instructed Arnolfo in Gothic, as opposed to Greek
architecture. Thus there met the two principles of art--the Norman (or
Lombard), vigorous and savage; the Greek (or Byzantine), contemplative
but sterile. The new spirit in Florence "adopts what is best in each,
and gives to what it adopts a new energy of its own, ... collects and
animates the Norman and Byzantine tradition, and forms out of the
perfected worship and work of both, the honest Christian faith and
vital craftsmanship of the world.... Central stood Etruscan Florence:
agricultural in occupation, religious in thought, she directed the
industry of the Northman into the arts of peace; kindled the dreams
of the Byzantine with the fire of charity. Child of her peace, and
exponent of her passion, her Cimabue became the interpreter to mankind
of the meaning of the Birth of Christ" (_Ariadne Florentina_, ch. ii.;
_Mornings in Florence_, ii. 44, 45).
--> _In the left-hand corner of the Vestibule will be found a
very remarkable series of archaic Greek portraits dating from
the second or third century A.D. (Nos. 1260-1270)._
* * * * *
The architecture of the Entrance Hall and Vestibule is worth some
attention, for here is the finest collection of marbles in London.
Many distant parts of the world have contributed to it. The Alps, from
a steep face of mountain 2000 feet high on the Simplon Pass, send the
two massive square pillars of light green "cipollino" which form the
approach to the Vestibule from the Square. Their carved capitals are of
alabaster from Derbyshire, whilst the bases on which they stand are of
Corrennie granite from near Aberdeen. The square blocks of bluish gray
beneath the upper columns come from New Zealand. Ascending the stone
steps, the visitor should notice the side walls, built up of squares
of "giallo antico," which was brought from the quarry at Simittu, in
the territory of Tunis. It had long been known that Rome was full of
the beautiful "giallo antico," sometimes yellow, sometimes rosy in
colour, but always of exquisite texture and even to work. It had come
from the province of Africa; and the quarry was rediscovered by a
Belgian engineer working on the railway then being made from Tunis to
the Algerian frontier. He observed at Simittu a half-consumed mountain
with gaps clearly marked, from which the last monoliths had been cut,
and the work of the Romans was presently resumed by a Belgian Company.
No more beautiful specimen of the "giallo antico" similar to that used
in Augustan Rome could be desired than slabs in the entrance to the
National Gallery. The cornice above the "giallo antico" walls is of
"pavonazzetto" from the Apennines, near Pisa, and the same marble forms
the base of the red columns. These splendid columns come from quarries
near Chenouah, just west of Algiers, which were first opened by the
French some years ago. Red Etruscan is the unmeaning trade name of this
jasper-like stone, which is also used for door frames in many of the
new rooms with very sumptuous effect.
[Illustration]