School of _Taddeo Gaddi_ (Florentine: 1300-1366). _See_ 215.
_See also_ (p. xix)
In the centre is John the Baptist, baptizing Christ; on the left St.
Peter, on the right St. Paul. In the pictures for the _predella_
(the step on the top of the altar, thus forming the base of the
altar-piece) is a saint at either end; and then, on the left, (1) the
angel announcing the Baptist's birth, (2) his birth, (3) his death,
(4) Herod's feast, and (5) Herodias with John the Baptist's head in a
charger. The picture must have been the work of an inferior scholar;
but it is interesting to notice that this attempt to tell a consecutive
story in his picture, as in an epic poem, instead of a fastening on
some one turning-point in it, as in a drama, is characteristic of
early art (see under 1188). Notice further in the central picture "how
designedly the fish in the water are arranged: not in groups, as chance
might rule in the actual stream, but in ordered procession. All great
artists ... have shown this especial delight in ordering the relations
of self-set details" (A. H. Macmurdo in _Century Guild Hobby Horse_, i.
71).
579a. PARTS OF AN ALTAR-PIECE.
School of _Taddeo Gaddi_ (Florentine: 1300-1366). _See_ 215.
_See also_ (p. xix)
These three panels formed the _cuspidi_ of the Baptism of Christ (579).
In the centre is the Almighty, on the left the Virgin, on the right
Isaiah, holding a scroll with the words (in Latin), "Behold a virgin
shall conceive."
580, 580a and b. THE ASCENSION OF ST. JOHN THE EVANGELIST.
_Jacopo Landini_ (Florentine: about 1310-1390).
Jacopo Landini was born at Prato Vecchio, in the Casentino;
whence his common designation, Jacopo da Casentino. This
picture was formerly in the Church of St. John at the painter's
native place. He was a pupil of Taddeo Gaddi, and the master of
Spinello Aretino.
Another of the altar-pieces (_cf._ 579, above), which aimed at giving
the whole story of some subject, and thus recall the time when sacred
pictures were (as it has been put) a kind of "Scripture _Graphic_."
In the _predella_ pictures (580_b_) are, on the left, (1) St. John
distributing alms and baptizing, (2) his vision of Revelation in the
island of Patmos, (3) his escape from the cauldron of boiling oil;
and then, as the subject of the principal picture, his ascension to
heaven, for, "according to the Greek legend, St. John died without
pain or change, and immediately rose again in bodily form and ascended
into heaven to rejoin Christ and the Virgin." In the central picture,
Mr. Gilbert finds "a glimpse of true landscape feeling in the brown
platform of rock, carefully gradated in aerial perspective, in the
colouring, coarse though it be, and especially in the long dark
sea-line beyond" (_Landscape in Art_, p. 184). In the other small
pictures and in the pilasters are various saints, and immediately over
the central picture are (1) the gates of hell cast down, (2) Christ
risen from the dead, (3) the donor of the picture and his family, being
presented by the two St. Johns. Of the _cuspidi_, or upper pictures
(580a), the centre piece is a symbolic representation of the Trinity
(seen best on a large scale in 727); at the sides are the Virgin and
the Angel of the Annunciation, divided as explained under 1139.