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[Illustration: MADONNA AND SAINTS, ATTRIBUTED TO GIOTTO
_In the lower church of Assisi_]
GIOTTO
by
HARRY QUILTER
London
Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington
Crown Buildings. 188, Fleet Street
1880
(All rights reserved.)
London: R. Clay, Sons, and Taylor,
Bread Street Hill, E.C.
TO THE MEMORY
OF
ELIZABETH HARRIET QUILTER
THIS ESSAY IS LOVINGLY DEDICATED
BY
_HER YOUNGEST SON_.
PREFACE.
My only object in writing these few words of preface is to state
plainly the share of originality which belongs to this essay. This is
rendered necessary because the subject of the work has occupied the
attention of many authors of far greater ability and experience than
that of which the present writer can boast.
The extent, then, to which this essay is original is as follows:--The
facts of Giotto's life have been taken from Vasari's _Lives of the
Painters_ and compared with those given by all later writers on the
same subject. As these later authors are mentioned throughout the
book, wherever their opinions are quoted, I need not give a list of
them here. The descriptions of the pictures and sculptures of Giotto
are, in all cases, written by myself after careful study of the
originals. In no case whatever is an opinion expressed upon the merit
or meaning of a work which I have not personally examined; this
applies to all pictures and statues mentioned in the essay as well as
to those of Giotto.
The descriptions of Padua, Assisi, and Florence were written on the
spot, and the vignettes of the two former towns are reduced from
sketches made by myself on purpose for the present work.
The fresco of the _Unknown Madonna_, formerly attributed to Giotto,
and still ascribed to him by the monks of Assisi, is reproduced here,
by chromo-lithography, from a watercolour drawing made by me at Assisi
in the spring of last year--its only use is to show readers the kind
of colouring prevalent in Giotto's work.
Lastly, for all criticisms, theories, and illustrations given in the
essay, I am alone responsible, except in cases where the name of the
author is subjoined in a footnote.
THE WHITE HOUSE, CHELSEA,
_May, 1880_.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I. PAGE
INTRODUCTORY 1
CHAPTER II.
ART IN ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY 11
CHAPTER III.
FRESCO-PAINTING 28
CHAPTER IV.
CIMABUE 33
CHAPTER V.
GIOTTO 41
CHAPTER VI.
THE CHIEF FUNCTION OF PAINTING 53
CHAPTER VII.
THE EARLY WORK OF GIOTTO AT FLORENCE AND ROME 59
CHAPTER VIII.
GIOTTO AT PADUA 68
CHAPTER IX.
GIOTTO'S STYLE 86
CHAPTER X.
GIOTTO AT ASSISI. THE UPPER CHURCH 94
CHAPTER XI.
THE LOWER CHURCH OF ASSISI 111
CHAPTER XII.
GIOTTO'S LATER WORK AT FLORENCE 128
ILLUSTRATIONS.
PAGE
THE UNKNOWN MADONNA AT ASSISI. ATTRIBUTED TO GIOTTO--Frontispiece
THE MADONNA ENTHRONED. BY CIMABUE. IN THE RUCELLAI CHAPEL,
S. MARIA NOVELLA, FLORENCE 36
PASTORAL LIFE. BY GIOTTO. BAS-RELIEF ON THE CAMPANILE,
FLORENCE 42
PADUA. FROM A DRAWING BY THE AUTHOR 71
PARADISE. BY GIOTTO. (GREATLY RESTORED.) IN THE ARENA
CHAPEL, PADUA. _Photograph_ 74
JOACHIM RETIRES TO THE SHEEPFOLD. BY GIOTTO. IN THE ARENA
CHAPEL, PADUA. _Wood Engraving_ 76
THE ENTOMBMENT OF CHRIST. BY GIOTTO. IN THE ARENA CHAPEL,
PADUA. _Photograph_ 80
THE RESURRECTION. "NOLI ME TANGERE." BY GIOTTO. IN THE
ARENA CHAPEL, PADUA. _Photograph_ 82
JUSTICE. BY GIOTTO. IN THE ARENA CHAPEL, PADUA. _Photograph_ 84
THE CHURCH AT ASSISI. FROM A DRAWING BY THE AUTHOR 97
VIEW OF FLORENCE, SHOWING GIOTTO'S CAMPANILE AND THE "DUOMO" 135
THE FIRST ARTS. BY GIOTTO. BAS-RELIEF ON THE CAMPANILE 140
RIDING. BY GIOTTO. BAS-RELIEF ON THE CAMPANILE 142
"As in passing through life we learn many new things, so do we forget
many old things, and gradually the remembrance of them is lost from
among men. Therefore those persons do not reason well who do not study
to perpetuate useful things by writing, because in such case posterity
will hereafter seek in vain for their origin, perfection, and
use."--_Tambroni._
* * * * *
"Such as are ignorant of things done and past before themselves had
any being continue still in the estate of children, able to speak and
behave themselves no otherwise; and even within the bounds of their
native countries (in respect of knowledge or manly capacity) they are
no more than well-seeming dumb images."--_From the Dedication of an
anonymous translation of Boccaccio's Novels, &c._ 1634.
* * * * *
"And so it is with all truths of the highest order: they are separated
from those of average precision by points of extreme delicacy, which
none but a cultivated eye can in the least feel, and to express which
all words are absolutely meaningless and useless. Two lines are laid
on canvas, or cut on stone: one is right and another wrong. There is
no difference between them appreciable by the compasses--none
appreciable by the ordinary eye--none which can be pointed out if it
is not seen. One person feels it, another does not; but the feeling or
sight of the one can by no words be communicated to the other. That
feeling and that sight have been the reward of years of
labour."--_John Ruskin._ 1853.
* * * * *
"I offer this little work as long as I live to the correction of those
who are more learned. If I have done wrong in anything I shall not be
ashamed to receive their admonitions; and if there be anything which
they like, I shall not be slow to furnish more."--_Wilhelm of Bamberg,
circa 1000 A.D._
ERRATA.
Page 28, line 3 from bottom, _for_ Tambrani _read_ Tambroni.
" 46, " 23 " top " hand " panel.
" 68, " 6 " " " O'er " O'erspread.
" 70, " 8 " " " chi " ché.
" 76, " 12 " " " Baptism of Lazarus " Raising of
Lazarus.
" 84, " 16 " bottom, " Selvatia " Selvatica.
" 95, " 1 " " " Sulasio " Subasio.
" 105, " 3 " " Appendix C has been omitted for want of
space.
" 123, " 8 " " _for_ Scavegni _read_ Scrovegni.
" 128, " 5 " top " Links " Lamps.
GIOTTO.
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTORY.
The biographies in this series[1] are intended to help in the
preservation of the memories of those great artists, who, leaving to
the world the legacies of their genius, have not all died, but live to
this hour in the far-reaching influence their works exert. That such
men lived, worked, and perished, is almost the sum of knowledge that
most of us can boast of with regard to them; we here try to add the
simple story of their lives, and perhaps a few touches of description
as to the friends they loved, the country they lived in, and the times
in which they worked; so that, perhaps, they may become in some
measure to us, not only wielders of the chisel and the brush, but men
like ourselves, with moments of frailty as well as exaltation, with
lives more or less difficult through fading ambitions and frequent
failure, but nevertheless bound to us by the tie of a common humanity,
and claiming our sympathy and love, not only for the beauty they have
left us, but because they also carried the burden, and fought the
fight that we are fighting to-day. If it be true, as George Eliot
tells us, that the aspect of affairs for the race, is largely altered
by the influence of "those who have lived faithfully hidden lives, and
rest in unvisited tombs," it is none the less true, that there is some
danger in regarding those whose achievements are of historic
magnitude, as if they belonged to a separate order of humanity, and
were removed alike from its every-day joys and sorrows; and we shall
gain a knowledge by no means to be despised, if we once bring fairly
home to our consciousness the fact that the seeds of greatness
flourish in no other soil than that which we all possess; that the
divine light of genius glorifies natures that are subject to the like
joys, sorrows, and passions as our own, nay, that even, "like the
fierce light that beats upon a throne," it often reveals faults of
which the weakest of us might well be ashamed, as well as virtues of
which we are all capable. It is not by elevating the great to a
passionless region of undisturbed supremacy of life and action, that
we show them our truest reverence, or learn from them our most worthy
lesson, but by seeing them as they were in sober truth. If we would
knit into firmer unison the varying struggles, failures, and triumphs
of our great brotherhood, we must learn to look upon genius, not as
some cold, unapproachable excellence that finds its work in alien
spheres of imagination and action, but rather as a keener insight into
the truths of thought and feeling, with its relations to the everyday
aspects of life, no less than to its most exalted phases.
It will not be wasted time to the busy dwellers in the England of the
nineteenth century, to be led back in spirit to those old Italian days
when as yet civilisation dozed upon the stream of time, when the Arno
and the Tiber ran their course unspanned by other bridges than those
grey stone ones that remain to this day, when under the shadows of the
Umbrian mountains, the rushes of Thrasymene wavered not with the rush
of the locomotive, but the sighing of the breezes, and on the hills of
Assisi the brethren of St. Francis chanted their earliest anthems,
and took their first solemn vows of poverty and obedience. It will not
be wasted time, if a thrill of kindly sympathy can be raised within us
for that old life without whose struggles our fuller knowledge could
never have existed, when the world was plainly divided into soldiers
and scholars, rulers and ruled, men of action and men of thought, when
the good was encrusted with no uncertainties, and the evil mitigated
by no doubts, and all the lives of men were poured along a deeper and
narrower channel than now. Though we should not regret, we should
still remember kindly those times and all that they wrought for us,
and the lessons that they teach, though our lives be cast in a far
different mould.
It is not possible now for a new regenerator of art to cause a new
departure for art by plain reference to natural fact, as did the
subject of this book six hundred years ago; but how long has it been
impossible? For little more than twenty years! Strange as it may seem
to many of our readers, a large portion of the very best art of the
present day is based upon principles which were derived from the works
of Giotto and his immediate successors, and such men as Millais,
Holman Hunt, Rossetti, and Burne Jones, would never have painted as
they have done,[2] had it not been for the Umbrian shepherd boy, whose
story we are about to tell. The quality which they found in Giotto's
work, of simple unswerving truth to the facts of nature and life, this
it is which lies at the root of all their work, this it is which they
sought to find in vain in the pictures of later artists, however
superior such might be, and were, in beauty of form and refinement of
colouring. Forced and eccentric as the work of the modern
pre-Raphaelites at first seemed, it was indubitably based upon a sound
principle--the principle of painting what they saw, and consequently
what they believed in, rather than what they might have seen. They
took up the theory that nature was essentially beautiful and,
carrying it a step further than was usual, drew the conclusion that if
they were absolutely faithful to nature, their work could not be
ugly.[3]
It is hardly too much to say that this principle has gone far to
effect as great a change in modern art as the practice of Giotto
effected in that of six hundred years ago. Even those artists who have
been most antagonistic to the pre-Raphaelite movement, as it is
called, have had their practice modified by it; and though they have
continued to uphold the necessity for following rules of art,
conventionally graceful arrangement of line, and contrasts of light
and shade as the chief elements of pictorial beauty, have still been
forced by their antagonists into bringing their works more into
accordance with natural fact.
Upon this point, however, this is not the place to dwell; it is
sufficient to bear in mind that the influence of Giotto, of which we
have spoken, is one which is even now modifying our art, and that
therefore it will be no small help to the right understanding of
present pictures and picture theories, to understand clearly what
reform it was that Giotto introduced into Italian painting, and how it
comes about that after so long an interval of time his work has come
to form a sort of rallying point for young English artists of our own
day.
There is still another reason for dwelling upon the work of this old
pre-Raphaelite painter; which is, that there is one considerable
section of the English art-world who unite in declaring the essential
and necessary superiority of the Venetian and Florentine painting, say
of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and in speaking in
despairing terms of the hopeless ugliness of modern civilisation. I
often wonder whether those worthy elders, had they lived in the times
of Giotto, would not have referred in terms of despairing eulogy to
the old Roman mosaics of the fifth and sixth centuries, and contrasted
their beauty with the innovating tendency of the shepherd painter, who
actually inserted portraits of living people into his sacred pictures,
and vulgarised the most holy subjects by the insertion of personages
who looked actually glad, or surprised, or sorry, just as they might
have done in actual life!
But it surely is not the case that art alone, of all the great
influences of the world, reached its apogee in the Middle Ages, and
that nothing henceforth remains for it but stagnation or decline. Can
we believe that progress will go on in all else, and that art alone is
doomed to stand still for ever, like a sort of Lot's wife, looking
backward to Venice and Florence, as she to Sodom? Such cannot be the
belief of those who hold that progress is not the result of an
accidental conjunction of fortunate circumstances, but rather that of
an universal law of nature, which ordains that we move for ever
forward, though the steps of our advance are rarely perceptible. It is
possible that all the older forms of art must die--as they seem to be
dying now, of inanition--ere the fuller art be born, but nevertheless
the fuller art must come in its season, and whatever be its
distinguishing characteristic, this at least is certain, that it will
be more in unison with the facts of nature and life, as we now know
them, than a reflection of the faded beauties of ancient story. So
that we are justified in looking with special interest upon the works
of the man who first asserted the principle of the broad relation of
art to life, and painted legends of the Madonna, or whatever were his
subjects, not in the ancient symbolical manner, but as incidents that
happened in the work-a-day world, and were witnessed by spectators,
such as might have really existed, some of whom were curious, some
scornful, and some indifferent.
Whatever changes art may undergo in the future, our debt will be none
the less to those who have made it such as we know it now, to those
early workers who struggled against difficulties and solved them for
us, and whose imperfections formed the groundwork of our fuller
knowledge. And chief of these, as the first who introduced a rational
and verifiable manner of painting, is Giotto Bondone, the pupil of
Cimabue, who not only cast on one side the arbitrary forms of
representation handed down from the Byzantine artists, but, as we have
said, introduced into his pictures the element of natural life, and
carrying his reform into the very heart of his subject, adopted for
his characters not only appropriate action and natural positions, but
made the whole picture tell a story of human life, instead of making
it a composition of more or less graceful lines and variegated
colours.
This will be treated of in subsequent portions of this essay, it is
sufficient to say here that painters were not slow to follow the
example thus set, nor the public to appreciate the change. It was so
sudden and of such marked importance, the advantages gained were so
great, that the new method of painting, completely vanquished the
traditional one, even in the artist's own lifetime; and with the whole
weight of tradition, and with the Church's dislike to innovation to
contend with, it succeeded in permanently establishing itself in
public favour.
From the time of Giotto's early manhood to the death of Titian, the
history of painting is mainly the history of the principles which the
former artist taught his pupils and exemplified in his works.
Even in landscape painting, which was hardly if at all practised in
his time, the advance made by Giotto was remarkable, as he substituted
for the ordinary conventional background, scenes in which nature was
represented faithfully, though with many shortcomings of perspective
and errors of proportion such as were inevitable in a first attempt.
However, for two hundred years afterwards the advance in landscape was
very slight,[4] and in some respects his designs of leaves and
foliage, especially some of those in the sculptures on the Campanile
at Florence, are still worthy of our admiration for their fidelity, no
less than for their beauty.
And lastly, to conclude this introductory chapter, it may be worth
while to attempt to answer the question of what analogy we can find
between the work of Giotto and that of the present day, and what
lessons we can derive from the former. Now that we have had our road
cleared of the many difficulties that beset the old Italian artist,
have we any left that he can teach us how to master, and if so, what
are they?
The answer is a very simple one. In his time art was suffering its
restriction to a certain class of subjects, the religious; and a
certain way of representing those subjects, the conventional. This
restriction had engendered a purely formal and unemotional art, and an
almost total suppression in pictures of the elements of fancy and the
realisation of natural fact. In the present day, as in the thirteenth
century, art suffers from restrictions, the difference being, that
instead of being imposed from without, they are imposed from within,
or in other words, they are developments from her own practice. The
effect of the great advance in art made in the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries has been to make modern artists look at nature in a
particular way, _i.e._, in the manner in which the painters of that
day originated; and instead of aiming at beauty through truth to
nature and life, they rather aim at it through an imitation of the
works of Raphael and Titian. The perfection of _technique_ reached by
those masters and their contemporaries, has raised the admiration of
all later painters to such a degree that they have exalted the methods
of this Renaissance painting into a religion, and seek to find in the
laws of chiaroscuro, composition, balance, and harmony of colour,
which they can deduce from the pictures of that period, the source of
the inspiration that renders those works immortal. Thus art is still
in service, in service to itself; it has but burst one set of fetters
that it might "gather the links of the broken chain to fasten them
proudly round her." No longer bound by superstition and formalism; she
is bound by bonds of her own making, and falls down, like Narcissus of
old, in worship of her own fair face. Indeed the present error is
really a deeper one than that which Giotto vanquished, for throughout
all the degradation of art in the early centuries of the Christian
era, there was one principle which had been clung fast to, and that
was, that pictures should represent things worthy to be represented;
it is true that the range was narrowed and its treatment governed by
rule, but it may be doubted whether this was not preferable to our
present indifference of what it is that is painted, or whether
anything should be painted at all.
For it must be noticed that many modern writers on art seem to hold,
and artists to exemplify, the principle, that one subject is as good
as another; in fact, that the treatment is everything, the meaning of
the work wholly subsidiary. Art no longer exists to depict worthily
worthy things, but rather like an æsthetic Blondin balances itself
solemnly on a tight-rope of its own construction, seeming to pride
itself upon its removal from the vulgar crowd, and moves onward with
abstracted gaze, heedless of the oft repeated cries of "Come down."
Yet now, as in the older centuries, men sorrow and hope, succeed and
fail, and woman's beauty is as fair, and her heart as tender, as under
the Italian sunshine six hundred years ago; there may be at the
present hour in the cottages of England, as then mid the hills of
Vespignano, peasants' children in whom the inspiration of art is
struggling for utterance, needing but the chance that Cimabue gave to
Giotto, to give to mankind new lessons of beauty and truth. In a word,
now as then, the subjects of art and its power are the same as they
have ever been, and men have not ceased to be the same because the
fashion of their dress is changed, and they no longer display their
emotions with the frank egotism of the Middle Ages. And, as has been
said, the history of Giotto is the history of the man who first in
painting gave expression to all the diverse emotions of men, who
refused to believe that traditional arrangements of line, and
profuseness of colouring, could be efficient substitutes for the vital
facts of nature and life; who taught that painting is but one of the
means by which man speaks to man, and that therefore the words it says
are as important, perhaps more so, as the way in which they are said.
So I repeat the history of this old pre-Raphaelite is doubly
important to us at this day, not only as the founder of the great
schools of Italian painting, but as the energetic reformer in whose
works our artists may find an exhortation to cast away formulas for
facts, and rely for the beauty and attractiveness of their pictures,
more upon their correspondence with nature, than their subservience to
artistic tradition.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] This essay was originally written for, and will ultimately appear
in, the series of "Illustrated Biographies of the Great Artists,"
published by Messrs. Sampson Low, and Co.
[2] See _Pre-Raphaelitism_, by John Ruskin. 1862.
[3] In this connection the following quotation from Mr. Ruskin's
description of the origin of English pre-Raphaelitism may be found
interesting. He is here speaking of Messrs. Millais, Hunt, and
Rossetti: "Pupils in the same schools receiving precisely the same
instruction, which for so long a time has paralysed every one of our
painters; these boys agree in disliking to copy the antique statues
set before them. They copy them as they are bid, and they copy them
better than anybody else; they carry off prize after prize, and yet
they hate their work. At last they are admitted to study from the
life, they find the life very different from the antique, and they say
so. Their teachers tell them the antique is the best, and they must
not copy the life. They agree among themselves that they like the life
and that copy it they will. They do copy it faithfully, and their
masters forthwith declare them to be lost men. Their fellow-students
hiss them whenever they enter the room. They cannot help it, they join
hands and tacitly resist both the hissing and the instruction.
Accidentally a few prints of the works of Giotto, a few casts from
that of Ghiberti, fall into their hands, and they see in them
something which they never saw before; something eternally and
everlastingly true."
[4] "From Giotto's old age to the youth of Raphael the advance
consists principally in two great steps: the first, that distant
objects were more or less invested with a blue colour; the second,
that trees were no longer painted with a black ground but with a rich
dark brown, or dark green one."--_John Ruskin._