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THE OLD MASTERS AND THEIR PICTURES
_For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art_
BY SARAH TYTLER
AUTHOR OF "PAPERS FOR THOUGHTFUL GIRLS" ETC.
_NEW AND ENLARGED EDITION_
* * * * *
LONDON
ISBISTER AND COMPANY LIMITED
15 & 16 TAVISTOCK STREET COVENT GARDEN
1893
[_The Right of Translation is Reserved_]
LONDON:
PRINTED BY J.S. VIRTUE AND CO., LIMITED,
CITY ROAD.
PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION.
I wish to say, in a very few words, that this book is intended to be a
simple account of the great Old Masters in painting of every age and
country, with descriptions of their most famous works, for the use of
learners and outsiders in art. The book is not, and could not well be,
exhaustive in its nature. I have avoided definitions of schools,
considering that these should form a later and more elaborate portion of
art education, and preferring to group my 'painters' according to what I
hold to be the primitive arrangements of time, country, and rank in
art.
PREFACE TO NEW EDITION.
The restrictions with regard to space under which the little volume
called "The Old Masters" was originally written, caused me to omit, to
my regret, many names great, though not first, in art. The circulation
which the book has attained induces me to do what I can to remedy the
defect, and render the volume more useful by adding two chapters--the
one on Italian and the other on German, Dutch, and Flemish masters.
These chapters consist almost entirely of condensed notes taken from two
trustworthy sources, to which I have been already much indebted--Sir C,
and Lady Eastlake's version of Kugler's "Handbook of Italian Art," and
Dr. Waagen's "Handbook,"--remodelled from Kugler--of German, Dutch, and
Flemish art, revised by J.A. Crowe. I have purposely given numerous
records of those Dutch painters whose art has been specially popular in
England and who are in some cases better represented in our country than
in their own.
CONTENTS.
CHAP. PAGE I. EARLY ITALIAN ART--GIOTTO, 1276-1337--ANDREA PISANO,
1280-1345--ORCAGNA, 1315-1376--GHIBERTI, 1381-1455--MASACCIO, 1402-1428
_OR_ 1429--FRA ANGELICO, 1387-1455 1
II. EARLY FLEMISH ART--THE VAN EYCKS, 1366-1442--MABUSE, _ABOUT_
1470-1532--MEMLING, _ABOUT_ 1478-1499--QUINTIN MATSYS, 1460-1530 OR 31
41
III. IN EARLY SCHOOLS OF ITALIAN ART--THE BELLINI, 1422-1512--MANTEGNA,
1431-1506--GHIRLANDAJO, 1449-1498--- IL FRANCIA, 1450-1518--FRA
BARTOLOMMEO, 1469-1517--ANDREA DEL SARTO, 1488-1530 53
IV. LIONARDO DA VINCI. 1452-1519--MICHAEL ANGELO, 1475-1564--RAPHAEL,
1483-1520--TITIAN, 1477-1566 83
V. GERMAN ART--ALBRECHT DÜRER, 1471-1528 169
VI. LATER ITALIAN ART--GIORGIONE, 1477-1511--CORREGGIO, _ABOUT_
1493-1534--TINTORETTO, 1512-1594--VERONESE, 1530-1588 181
VII. CARRACCI, 1555-1609--GUIDO RENI, 1575-1642--DOMENICHINO,
1581-1641--SALVATOR ROSA, 1615-1673 212
VIII. LATER FLEMISH ART--RUBENS, 1577-1640--REMBRANDT, 1606 _OR_
1608-1669--TENIERS, FATHER AND SON, 1582-1694--WOUVVERMAN,
1620-1668--CUYP, 1605; _STILL LIVING_, 1638--PAUL POTTER,
1625-1654--CORNELIUS DE HEEM, 1630 225
IX. SPANISH ART--VELASQUEZ, 1599-1660--MURILLO, 1618-1682 260
X. FRENCH ART--NICOLAS POUSSIN, 1594-1665--CLAUDE LORRAINE,
1600-1682--CHARLES LE BRUN, 1619-1690--WATTEAU, 1684-1721--GREUZE,
1726-1805 286
XI. FOREIGN ARTISTS IN ENGLAND--HOLBEIN, 1494-1543--VAN DYCK,
1599-1641--LELY, 1618-1680--CANALETTO, 1697-1768--KNELLER, 1646-1723 309
XII. ITALIAN MASTERS FROM THE FOURTEENTH TO THE SEVENTEENTH
CENTURIES--TADDEO GADDI, 1300, SUPPOSED TO HAVE DIED 1366--FRA FILIPPO,
1412-1469--BENOZZO GOZZOLI, 1424-1496--LUCA SIGNORELLI, 1441, SUPPOSED
TO HAVE DIED ABOUT 1524--BOTTICELLI, 1447-1515--PERUGINO,
1446-1522--CARPACCIO, DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH AND DEATH
UNKNOWN--CRIVELLI, FILIPPINO LIPI, EARLIER THAN 1460--ANTONELLA DA
MESSINA, BELIEVED TO HAVE DIED AT VENICE, 1416--GAROPALO,
1481-1559--LUINI, DATE OF BIRTH UNKNOWN, SUPPOSED TO HAVE DIED ABOUT
1530--PALMA, ABOUT 1480-1528--PARDENONE, 1483-1538--LO SPAGNA, DATE OF
BIRTH UNKNOWN, 1533--GIULIO ROMANO, 1492-1546--PARIS BORDONE,
1500-1570--IL PARMIGIANINO, 1503-1540--BAROCCIO, 1528-1612--CARAVAGGIO,
1569-1609--LO SPAGNOLETTO, 1593-1656--GUERCINO, 1592-1666--ALBANO,
1578-1660--SASSOFERRATO, 1605-1615--VASARI, 1512-1574--SOFONISBA
ANGUISCIOLA, 1535, ABOUT 1626--LAVINIA FONTANA, 1552-1614 364
XIII. GERMAN, FLEMISH, AND DUTCH ARTISTS FROM THE FIFTEENTH TO THE
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY--VAN DER WEYDEN, A CONTEMPORARY OF THE VAN EYCKS,
1366-1442--VAN LEYDEN, 1494-1533--VAN SOMER, 1570-1624--SNYDERS,
1579-1657--G. HONTHORST, 1592-1662--JAN STEEN, 1626-1679--GERARD DOW,
1613-1680--DE HOOCH, DATES OF BIRTH AND DEATH UNKNOWN--VAN OSTADE,
1610-1685--MAAS, 1632-1693--METZU, 1615. STILL ALIVE IN 1667--TERBURG,
1608-1681--NETCHER, 1639-1684--BOL, 1611-1680--VAN DER HELST,
1613-1670--RUYSDAEL, 1625 (?)-1682--HOBBEMA, 1638-1709--BERCHEM,
1620-1683--BOTH 1600 (?)-1650(?) DU JARDIN, 1625-1678--ADRIAN VAN DE
VELDE, 1639-1672--VAN DER HEYDEN, 1637-1712--DE WITTE, 1607-1692--VAN
DER NEER, 1619 (?)-1683--WILLIAM VAN DE VELDE, THE YOUNGER,
1633-1707--BACKHUYSEN, 1631-1708--VAN DE CAPELLA, ABOUT
1653--HONDECOETER, 1636-1695--JAN WEENIX, 1644-1719--PATER SEGERS,
1590-1661--VAN HUYSUM, 1682-1749--VAN DER WERFF, 1659-1722--MENGS,
1728-1774 391
* * * * *
THE OLD MASTERS AND THEIR PICTURES.
* * * * *
CHAPTER I.
EARLY ITALIAN ART--GIOTTO, 1276-1337--ANDREA PISANO. 1280-1345--ORCAGNA,
1315-1376 GHIBERTI, 1381-1455--MASACCIO, 1402-1428 OR 1429--FRA
ANGELICO, 1387-1455.
A pencil and paper, a box of colours, and a scrap-book, form so often a
child's favourite toys that one might expect that a very large portion
of men and women would prove painters. But, as we grow in years and
knowledge, the discrepancy between nature and our attempts to copy
nature, strike us more and more, until we turn in dissatisfaction and
disgust from the vain effort.
There was only one old woman in an Esquimaux tribe who could be called
forward to draw with a stick on the sand a sufficiently graphic likeness
of the Erebus and the Terror. It is only a few groups of men belonging
to different countries, throughout the centuries, who have been able to
give us paintings to which we turn in wonder and admiration, and say
that these are in their degree fair exponents of nature. The old
painter's half-haughty, half-humble protest was true--it is 'God
Almighty,' who in raising here and there men above their fellows, 'makes
painters.'
But let us be thankful that the old propensity to delight in a
facsimile, or in an idealized version of nature, survives in the very
common satisfaction and joy--whether cultivated or uncultivated---
derived from looking at pictures, thinking over their details, striving
to understand the meaning of the painters, and proceeding farther to
consider the lives and times which throw light on works of genius. Music
itself is not more universally and gladly listened and responded to,
than pictures are looked at and remembered.
Thus I have no fear of failing to interest you, my readers, in my
subject if I can only treat it sympathetically,--enter at a humble
distance into the spirit of the painters and of their paintings, and
place before you some of the paintings by reverent and loving
word-painting such as others have achieved, and such as I may strive to
attain to, that you may be in a sort early familiar with these
paintings, before you see them in engravings and photographs, and on
canvas and in fresco, as I trust you may be privileged to see many of
them, when you may hail them not only for what they are, the glories of
art, but for what they have been to you in thoughts of beauty and high
desires.
Of the old Greek paintings, of which there are left isolated specimens
dug up in Herculaneum and Pompeii, I cannot afford to say anything, and
of the more modern Greek art which was spread over Europe after the fall
of Constantinople I need on Europe the birth-place of painting as of
other arts, that Greek painting which illustrated early Christianity,
was painting in its decline and decay, borrowing not only superstitious
conventionalities, but barbaric attributes of gilding and blazoning to
hide its infirmity and poverty. Virgins of the same weak and meaningless
type, between attenuated saints or angels, and doll-like child-Christs
in the one invariable attitude holding up two fingers of a baby hand to
bless the spectator and worshippers, were for ever repeated. In a
similar manner the instances of rude or meagre contemporary paintings
with which the early Christians adorned their places of worship and the
sepulchres of their dead in the basilicas and catacombs of Rome, are
very curious and interesting for their antiquity and their associations,
and as illustrations of faith; but they present no intrinsic beauty or
worth. They are not only clumsy and childish designs ill executed, but
they are rendered unintelligible to all save the initiated in such
hieroglyphics, by offering an elaborate ground-work of type, antitype,
and symbol, on which the artist probably spent a large part of his
strength. Lambs and lilies, serpents, vines, fishes, dolphins,
phoenixes, cocks, anchors, and javelins played nearly as conspicuous a
part in this art as did the dead believer, or his or her patron saint,
who might have been supposed to form the principal figure in the
picture.
Italian art existed in these small beginnings, in the gorgeous but
quaintly formal or fantastic devices of illuminated missals, and in the
stiff spasmodic efforts of here and there an artist spirit such as the
old Florentine Cimabue's, when a great man heralded a great epoch. But
first I should like to mention the means by which art then worked.
Painting on board and on plastered walls, the second styled painting in
fresco, preceded painting on canvas. Colours were mixed with water or
with size, egg, or fig-juice--the latter practices termed _tempera_ (in
English in distemper) before oil was used to mix colours. But painters
did not confine themselves then to painting with pencil or brush, else
they might have attained technical excellence sooner. It has been well
said that the poems of the middle ages were written in stone; so the
earlier painters painted in stone, in that mosaic work which one of them
called--referring to its durability--'painting for eternity;' and in
metals. Many of them were the sons of jewellers or jewellers themselves;
they worked in iron as well as in gold and silver, and they were
sculptors and architects as well as painters; engineers also, so far as
engineering in the construction of roads, bridges, and canals, was known
in those days. The Greek knowledge of anatomy was well-nigh lost, so
that drawing was incorrect and form bad. The idea of showing degrees of
distance, and the management of light and shade, were feebly developed.
Even the fore-shortening of figures was so difficult to the old Italian
painters that they could not carry it into the extremities, and men and
women seem as though standing on the points of their toes.
Landscape-painting did not exist farther than that a rock or a bush, or
a few blue lines, with fishes out of proportion prominently interposed,
indicated, as on the old stage, that a desert, a forest, or a sea, was
to play its part in the story of the picture. So also portrait-painting
was not thought of, unless it occurred in the likeness of a great man
belonging to the time and place of the painter, who was the donor of
some picture to chapel or monastery, or of the painter himself, alike
introduced into sacred groups and scenes; for pictures were uniformly of
a religious character, until a little later, when they merged into
allegorical representations, just as one remembers that miracle plays
passed into moral plays before ordinary human life was reproduced. Until
this period, what we call dramatic expression in making a striking
situation, or even in bringing the look of joy or sorrow, pleasure or
pain, into a face, had hardly been attained.
Perhaps you will ask, what merit had the old paintings of the middle
ages to compensate for so many great disadvantages and incongruities?
Certainly before the time I have reached, they have, with rare
exceptions, little merit, save that fascination of pathos, half-comic,
half-tragic, which belongs to the struggling dawn of all great
endeavours, and especially of all endeavours in art. But just at this
epoch, art, in one man, took a great stride, began, as I shall try to
show, to exert an influence so true, deep, and high that it extends, in
the noblest forms, to the present day, and much more than compensates to
the thoughtful and poetic for a protracted train of technical blunders
and deficiencies.
Giotto, known also as Magister Joctus, was born in 1276 near Florence. I
dare say many have heard one legend of him, and I mean to tell the
legends of the painters, because even when they are most doubtful they
give the most striking indications of the times and the light in which
painters and their paintings were regarded by the world of artists, and
by the world at large; but so far as I have heard this legend of Giotto
has not been disproven. The only objection which can be urged against
it, is that it is found preserved in various countries, of very
different individuals--a crowning objection also to the legend of
William Tell. Giotto was a shepherd boy keeping his father's sheep and
amusing himself by drawing with chalk on a stone the favourites of the
flock, when his drawings attracted the attention of a traveller passing
from the heights into the valley. This traveller was the well-born and
highly-esteemed painter Cimabue, who was so delighted with the little
lad's rough outlines, that getting the consent of Giotto's father,
Cimabue adopted the boy, carried him off to the city of Florence,
introduced him to his studio, and so far as man could supplement the
work of God, made a painter of the youthful genius. I may add here a
later legend of Giotto. Pope Boniface VIII, requested specimens of skill
from various artists with the view to the appointment of a painter to
decorate St Peter's. Giotto, either in impatient disdain, or to show a
careless triumph of skill, with one flourish of his hand, without the
aid of compass, executed a perfect circle in red chalk, and sent the
circle as his contribution to the specimens required by the Pope. The
audacious specimen was accepted as the most conclusive, Giotto was
chosen as the Pope's painter for the occasion, and from the incident
arose the Italian proverb 'round as the o of Giotto.' Giotto was the
friend of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, especially of Dante, to whom
the grandeur of some of the painter's designs has been vaguely enough
attributed. The poet of the 'Inferno' wrote of his friend:
'......... Cimabue thought
To lord it over painting's field; and now
The cry is Giotto's, and his name eclipsed.'
Petrarch bequeathed in his will a Madonna by Giotto and mentioned it as
a rare treasure of art. Boccaccio wrote a merry anecdote of his comrade
the painter's wit, in the course of which he referred with notable
plain-speaking to Giotto's 'flat currish' plainness of face.
The impression handed down of Giotto's character is that of an
independent, high-spirited man, full of invention, full of imagination,
and also, by a precious combination, full of shrewdness and common
sense; a man genial, given to repartee, and at the same time not
deficient in the tact which deprives repartee of its sting. While he was
working to King Robert of Naples, the king, who was watching the painter
on a very hot day, said, with a shrug, 'If I were you, Giotto, I would
leave off work and rest myself this fine day, 'And so would I, sire, if
I were _you_,' replied the wag.
I need scarcely add that Giotto was a man highly esteemed and very
prosperous in his day; one account reports him as the head and the
father of four sons and four daughters. I have purposely written first
of the fame, the reputed character, and the circumstances of Giotto
before I proceed to his work. This great work was, in brief, to breathe
into painting the living soul which had till then--in mediæval
times--been largely absent. Giotto went to Nature for his inspiration,
and not content with the immense innovation of superseding by the actual
representation of men and women in outline, tint, and attitude, the
rigid traditions of his predecessors, he put men's passions in their
faces--the melancholy looked sad, the gay glad. This result, to us so
simple, filled Giotto's lively countrymen, who had seldom seen it, with
astonishment and delight. They cried out as at a marvel when he made the
commonest deed even coarsely lifelike, as in the case of a sailor in a
boat, who turned round with his hand before his face and spat into the
sea; and when he illustrated the deed with the corresponding expression,
as in the thrill of eagerness that perceptibly pervaded the whole figure
of a thirsty man who stooped down to drink. But Giotto was no mere
realist though he was a great realist; he was also in the highest light
an idealist. His sense of harmony and beauty was true and noble; he rose
above the real into 'the things unseen and eternal,' of which the real
is but a rough manifestation. He was the first to paint a crucifixion
robbed of the horrible triumph of physical power, and of the agony which
is at its bidding, and invested with the divinity of awe and love.
Giotto's work did not end with himself; he was the founder of the
earliest worthy school of Italian art, so worthy in this very glorious
idealism, that, as I have already said, the men whose praise is most to
be coveted, have learned to turn back to Giotto and his immediate
successors, and, forgetting and forgiving all their ignorance,
crudeness, quaintness, to dwell never wearied, and extol without measure
these oldest masters' dignity of spirit, the earnestness of their
originality, the solemnity and heedfulness of their labour. It would
seem as if skill and polish, with the amount of attention which they
appropriate, with their elevation of manner over matter, and thence
their lowered standard, are apt to rob from or blur in men these highest
qualifications of genius, for it is true that judges miss even in the
Lionardo, Michael Angelo, and Raphael of a later and much more
accomplished generation, and, to a far greater extent, in the Rubens of
another and still later day, the perfect simplicity, the unalloyed
fervour, the purity of tenderness in Giotto, Orcagna, Fra Angelico, and
in their Flemish brethren, the Van Eycks and Mabuse.
The difference between the two classes of painters in not so wide as
that between the smooth and brilliant epigrammatic poets of Anne's and
the ruggedly rich dramatists of Elizabeth's reign, neither was there the
unmistakable preponderance of such a mighty genius as that of
Shakespeare granted to the first decade, still the distinction was the
same in kind.[1]
I wish you, my readers, to note it in the very commencement, and to
learn, like the thoughtful students of painting, to put aside any
half-childish over-estimate of the absurdity of a blue stroke
transfixing a huge flounder-like fish as a likeness of a sea, (which you
have been accustomed to see translucid, in breakers and foam, in modern
marine pictures,) or your quick sense of the ugliness of straight
figures with long hands, wooden feet, and clinging draperies, while your
eyes have been familiar with well-modelled frames and limbs and flowing
lines. But we must look deeper if we would not be slaves to superficial
prettiness, or even superficial correctness; we must try to go into the
spirit of a painting and value it more in proportion as it teaches art's
noblest lesson--the divinity of the divine, the serenity of utmost
strength, the single-heartedness of passion.
I have only space to tell you of three or four of the famous works of
Giotto. First, his allegories in the great church, in honour of St
Francis, at Assisi, in relation to which, writing of its German
architect, an author says: 'He built boldly against the mountain, piling
one church upon another; the upper vast, lofty, and admitting through
its broad windows the bright rays of the sun: the lower as if in the
bowels of the earth--low, solemn, and almost shutting out the light of
day. Around the lofty edifice grew the convent, a vast building, resting
upon a long line of arches clinging to the hill-sides. As the evening
draws nigh, casting its deep shadows across the valley, the traveller
beneath gazes upwards with feelings of wonder and delight at this
graceful arcade supporting the massy convent; the ancient towers and
walls of the silent town gathering around, and the purple rocks rising
high above--all still glowing in the lingering sunbeams--a scene
scarcely to be surpassed in any clime for its sublime beauty.' The
upper church contains frescoes wonderfully fresh, by Cimabue, of
Scriptural subjects, and frescoes of scenes from the life vowed to
poverty of St Francis. In the lower church, over the tomb of St Francis,
are the four masterpieces with which we have to do. These are the three
vows of the order figuratively represented. Mark the fitness and
grandeur of two of the figures, the suggestion of which has been
attributed to Dante, the woman Chastity seated beyond assault in her
rocky fortress, and Obedience bowing the neck to curb and yoke. The
fourth fresco pictures the saint who died, 'covered by another's cloak
cast over his wasted body eaten with sores,' enthroned and glorified
amidst the host of Heaven.
I have chosen the second example of the art of Giotto because you may
with comparative ease see it for yourselves. It is in the National
Gallery, London, having belonged to the collection of the late Samuel
Rogers. It is a fragment of an old fresco which had been part of a
series illustrating the life of John the Baptist in the church of the
Carmine, Florence, a church which was destroyed by fire in 1771. The
fragment in the National Gallery has two fine heads of apostles bending
sorrowfully over the body of St John. Though it is not necessary to do
it, in strict justice, because good work rises superior to all accidents
of comparison as well as accidents of circumstance, one must remember in
regarding this, the stilted and frozen figures and faces, which, before
Giotto broke their bonds and inspired them, had professed to tell the
Bible's stories.
The third instance I have chosen to quote is Giotto's portrait of Dante
which was so strangely lost for many years. The portrait occurs in a
painting, the first recorded performance of Giotto's, in which he was
said to have introduced the likeness of many of his contemporaries, on
the wall of the Palazzo dell' Podestà or Council Chamber of Florence.
During the banishment of Dante the wall was plastered or white-washed
over, through the influence of his enemies, and though believed to
exist, the picture was hidden down to 1840, when, after various futile
efforts to recover it, the figures were again brought to light.
This portrait of Dante is altogether removed from the later portraits of
the indignant and weary man, of whom the Italian market-women said that
he had been in Hell as well as in exile. Giotto's Dante on the walls of
the Council Chamber is a noble young man of thirty, full of ambitious
hope and early distinction. The face is slightly pointed, with broad
forehead, hazel eyes, straight brows and nose, mouth and chin a little
projecting. The close cloak or vest with sleeves, and cap in folds
hanging down on the shoulder, the hand holding the triple fruit, in
prognostication of the harvest of virtue and renown which was to be so
bitter as well as so glorious, are all in keeping and have a majesty of
their own. The picture is probably known by engravings to many of my
readers.
The last example of Giotto's, is the one which of all his works is most
potent and patent in its beauty, and has struck, and, in so far as we
can tell, will for ages strike, with its greatness multitudes of widely
different degrees of cultivation whose intellectual capacity is as far
apart as their critical faculty. I mean the matchless Campanile or
bell-tower 'towering over the Dome of Brunelleschi' at Florence, formed
of coloured marbles--for which Giotto framed the designs, and even
executed with his own hands the models for the sculpture. With this
lovely sight Dean Alford's description is more in keeping than the
prosaic saying of Charles V., that 'the Campanile ought to be kept under
glass.' Dean Alford's enthusiasm thus expresses itself:
'A mass of varied light written on the cloudless sky of
unfathomed blue; varied but blended, as never in any other
building that we had seen; the warm yellow of the lighter marbles
separated but not disunited by the ever-recurring bands of dark;
or glowing into red where the kisses of the sun had been hottest;
or fading again into white where the shadows mostly haunted, or
where the renovating hand had been waging conflict with decay.'
It is known that Giotto, together with his friend Dante, died before
this--Giotto's last great work--was finally constructed by Giotto's
pupil, Taddeo Gaddi, and that therefore neither of the friends could
have really looked on 'Giotto's Tower,' though Italian Ciceroni point
out, and strangers love to contemplate, the very stone on which 'Grim
Dante' sat and gazed with admiration in the calm light of evening on the
enduring memorial of the painter.
Giotto died in the year 1336 or 1337, his biographer adds, 'no less a
good Christian than an excellent painter,' and in token of his faith he
painted one crucifixion in which he introduced his own figure 'kneeling
in an attitude of deep devotion and contrition at the foot of the
Cross.' The good taste of such an act has been questioned, so has been
the practice which painted the Virgin Mother now as a brown Italian, now
as a red and white Fleming, and again as a flaxen-haired German or as a
swarthy Spaniard, and draped her and all the minor figures in the
grandest drama the world ever saw--as well as the characters in older
Scripture histories, in the Florentine, Venetian, and Antwerp fashions
of the day. The defence of the practice is, that the Bible is for
universal time, that its Virgin Mother, its apostles and saints, were
types of other mothers and of other heroes running down the stream of
history; that even the one central and holy figure, if He may be
represented at all, as the Divine brother of all humanity, may be clad
not inaptly in the garments of all. It appears to me that there is
reason in this answer, and that viewed in its light the criticism which
constantly demands historic fidelity is both carping and narrow. I do
not mean, however, to underrate historic accuracy in itself, or to
depreciate that longing for completeness in every particular, which
drives our modern painters to the East to study patiently for months the
aspects of nature under its Oriental climate, with its peculiar people
and animals, its ancient costumes and architecture.
Giotto was buried with suitable honours by a city which, like the rest
of the nation, has magnified its painters amongst its great men, in the
church of Santa Maria del Fiore, where his master Cimabue had been
buried. Lorenzo de' Medici afterwards placed over Giotto's tomb his
effigy in marble.
In chronicling ancient art I must here diverge a little. I have already
mentioned how closely painting was in the beginning allied with working
in metals as well as with sculpture and architecture. It is thus
necessary to write of a magnificent work in metal, the study and
admiration of generations of painters, begun in the life of Giotto, and
completed in two divisions, extending over a period of nearly a hundred
years. We shall proceed to deal with the first division, and recur to
the second a little later.
The old Italian cities. They were then the great merchant cities of the
world, more or less republican in their constitution. They stood to the
citizens, who rarely left their walls, at once as peculiar possessions
and as native countries rather than as cities alone, while they excited
all the patriotism, pride, and love that were elsewhere expended on a
whole country--which after all was held as belonging largely to its king
and nobles. The old Italian merchant guilds, and wealthy merchants as
individuals, vied with each other in signalizing their good citizenship
by presenting--as gifts identified with their names--to their cities,
those palace buildings, chapels, paintings, gates, which are the delight
of the world to this day. It was a merchant guild which thought happily
of giving to Florence the bronze gates to the baptistery of San Giovanni
or St John the Baptist, attached to the Cathedral. After some
competition the gates were intrusted to Andrea Pisano, one of a great
group of painters, sculptors, and architects linked together and named,
as so often happened in Italy, for their place of birth, Pisa. Andrea
executed a series of beautiful reliefs from the life of John the
Baptist, which were cast in 1330, gilt, and placed in the centre
door-way. I shall leave the rest of the gates, still more exquisitely
wrought, till their proper time, only observing that the Pisani group of
carvers and founders are supposed to have attained their extraordinary
superiority in skill and grace, even over such a painter as Giotto, in
consequence of one of them, Nicola Pisano, having given his attention to
the study of some ancient Greek sarcophagi preserved at Pisa.
Passing for a while from the gates of St John of Florence, we come back
to painting and a painter, and with them to another monument--in itself
very noble and curious in its mouldering age, of the old Italians' love
to their cities. Andrea Orcagna, otherwise known as Andrea di Cione, one
of a brotherhood of painters, was born in Florence about 1315. His
greatest works are in the Campo Santa of Pisa.
This wonderful 'holy field' is a grand legacy, so far as dilapidation,
alas, will let it be, of the old painters. Originally a place of burial,
though no longer used as such, it is enclosed by high walls and an
arcade, something like the cloisters of a cathedral or college running
round, and having on the north and east sides chapels where masses for
the dead were celebrated. The space in the centre was filled with earth
brought from the Holy Land by the merchant ships of Pisa. It is covered
with turf, having tall cypress-trees at the corners, and a little cross
in the centre. The arcade is pierced with sixty-two windows, and
contains on its marble pavement hundreds of monuments--among them the
Greek sarcophagi studied by Nicola Pisano. But the great distinction of
the Campo Santa (of which there are many photographs) are the walls
opposite the windows of the arcade painted with Scriptural subjects by
artists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, for the decoration of
the walls was continued at intervals, during two hundred years. The
havoc wrought by time and damp has been terrible; not only are the
pictures faded and discoloured, but of the earliest only mutilated
fragments, 'here an arm and there a head,' remain. Giotto's
illustrations of the book of Job have thus perished. Still Orcagna's
work has partially escaped, and left us indications of what it was in
his and its youth, when Michael Angelo and Raphael did not disdain to
borrow from it in design and arrangement. Dean Alford has thus described
Orcagna's mournful, thoughtful 'Triumph of Death:'
'The picture is one of crowded action, and contains very many
personages. The action may be supposed to begin in the lower corner on
the right hand. There we see what appears to be a wedding-party seated
in festivity under a grove of orange-trees laden with fruit. Over two of
them a pair entertaining them with merry strains. But close to them on
the left comes swooping down on bats' wings, and armed with the
inevitable scythe, the genius of Death. Her wild hair streams in the
wind, her bosom is invulnerable, being closed in a trellised armour of
steel. Beneath her, on the ground, are a heap of corpses, shown by their
attire to be the great and wealthy of the world. Three winged figures,
two fiends and one angel, are drawing souls, in the form of children,
out of the mouths of three of these corpses. Above, the air is full of
flying spirits, angels and demons: the former beautiful and saintly, the
latter hideous and bestial. Some are dragging, or bearing upwards, human
souls: others are on their way to fetch them from the heaps of dead:
others, again, are flying about apparently without aim. Further yet to
the left, a company of wretched ones, lame and in rags, are invoking
Death with outstretched arms to come to their relief; but she sweeps by
and heeds them not.
'Dividing one half of the picture from the other, is a high range of
rocks, terminating in a fiery mountain, into which the demons are
casting the unhappy souls which they have carried off. Beyond that seems
to be a repetition of the same lesson respecting Death in another form.
A party of knights and dames are issuing on horseback from a mountain
pass. In the left hand of the picture there lie in their path three
corpses in coffins, with coronets on their heads. One is newly dead; on
the second, decay has begun its work; the third is reduced to a
grinning skeleton. The impression produced on the gay party by the sight
is very various. Some look on carelessly; one holds his nose in disgust;
one, a lady jewelled and crowned, leans her head on her hand in solemn
thought. Above, on a rising ground, an aged monk (it is said, Saint
Macarius) is holding a scroll, and pointing out to passengers the moral
of the sight which meets them. The path winds up a hill crowned with a
church, and by its side at various points are hermits sitting in calm
security, or following peaceful occupations. One of them is milking a
doe; another is reading; a third is calmly contemplating from a distance
the valley of Death. About them are various animals and birds. The idea
evidently intended to be conveyed is that deliverance from the fear of
death is to be found not in gaiety and dissipation, but in contemplation
and communion with God.
'Such is the wonderful fresco, and the execution is as wonderful as the
conception. Belonging as the painter did to a rude and early period of
art, he yet had the power of endowing his figures with both majesty and
tenderness of expression.'
The Last Judgment is no less solemn and sad, with hope tempering its
sadness. Mrs Jameson's note of it is: 'Above, in the centre, Christ and
the Virgin are throned in separate glories. He turns to the left,
towards the condemned, while he uncovers the wound in his side, and
raises his right arm with a menacing gesture, his countenance full of
majestic wrath. The Virgin, on the right of her Son, is the picture of
heavenly mercy, and, as if terrified at the words of eternal
condemnation, she turns away. On either side are ranged the Prophets of
the Old Testament, the Apostles and other saints, severe, solemn,
dignified figures. Angels, holding the instruments of the Passion, hover
over Christ and the Virgin; under them is a group of archangels. The
archangel Michael stands in the midst holding a scroll in each hand;
immediately before him another archangel, supposed to represent Raphael,
the guardian angel of humanity, cowers down, shuddering, while two
others sound the awful trumpets of doom. Lower down is the earth where
men are seen rising from their graves; armed angels direct them to the
right and left. Here is seen King Solomon, who, whilst he rises, seems
doubtful to which side he should turn; here a hypocritical monk, whom an
angel draws back by the hair from the host of the youth in a gay and
rich costume, whom another angel leads away to Paradise. There is
wonderful and even terrible power of expression in some of the heads;
and it is said that among them are many portraits of contemporaries, but
unfortunately no circumstantial traditions as to particular figures have
reached us.'
One of Orcagna's altar-pieces, that of 'the coronation of the Virgin,'
containing upwards of a hundred figures, and with the colouring still
rich, is in our National Gallery. As an architect, Orcagna designed the
famous Loggia de' Lanzi of the grand ducal palace at Florence.
Now I must take you back to the bronze gates of the Baptistery in their
triumphant completion nearly a hundred years after the first gate was
executed by Andrea Pisano. I should have liked, but for our limits, to
tell in full the legend of the election of Lorenzo Ghiberti, the
step-son of a goldsmith, and skilled in chasing and enamelling, to
design the second gate; when yet a lad of twenty-three, how he and two
other young men, one of them still younger than Ghiberti, were declared
the most promising competitors in the trial for the work; how the last
two voluntarily withdrew from the contest, magnanimously proclaiming
Lorenzo Ghiberti their superior; how all the three lived to be famous,
the one as a founder in metal, the others as an architect and a
sculptor, and remained sworn brothers in art till death.
Lorenzo Ghiberti has left us an expression of the feeling with which he
set about his task, an expression so suggestive that, even had we no
other indication, it is enough to stamp the true and tender nature of
the man. He prepared for his achievement 'with infinite diligence and
love'--the words deserve to be pondered over. He took at least
twenty-two years to his work, receiving for it eleven hundred florins.
He chose his subjects from the life and death of the Lord, working them
out in twenty panels, ten on each side of the folding doors, and below
these were eight panels containing full-length figures of the four
evangelists and four doctors of the Latin Church, with a complete border
of fruit and foliage, having heads of prophets and sibyls interspersed.
So entire was the satisfaction the superb gate gave, that Lorenzo was
not merely loaded with praise, he received a commission to design and
cast a third and central gate which should surpass the others, that were
thenceforth to be the side entrances.
For his second gate Lorenzo Ghiberti repaired to the Old Testament for
subjects, beginning with the creation and ending with the meeting of
Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, and represented them in ten compartments
enclosed in a rich border of fruit and foliage, with twenty-four
full-length figures of the Hebrew heroes and prophets, clearly and
delicately designed and finished, occupying corresponding niches. This
crowning gate engaged the founder upwards of eighteen years--forty-nine
years are given as the term of the work of both the gates.
The single defect which is found in those marvellous gates--left to us
as a testimony of what the life-long devotion of genius could
produce--is that they abound floridly both in ornament and action, in
place of being severely simple and restrained according to the classical
standard.
Michael Angelo called these gates 'worthy to be the gates of Paradise,'
and they are still one of the glories of Florence. Casts of the gates
are to be found in the School for Art at Kensington, and at the Crystal
Palace.
A young village boy learned to draw and model from Ghiberti's gates. He
in his turn was to create in the Brancacci Chapel of the Church of the
Carmine at Florence a school of painters scarcely less renowned and
powerful in its effects than that produced by the works in the Campo
Santa. You will find the Italian painters not unfrequently known by
nicknames, quite as often by their father's trades as by their father's
surnames, and still oftener by the town which was their place of birth
or nurture. This Tom village birth-place, was commonly called Masaccio,
short for Tomasaccio, 'hulking Tom,' as I have heard it translated, on
account of his indifferent, slovenly habits. I think there is a
tradition that he entered a studio in Florence as a colour boy, and
electrified the painter and his scholars, by _brownie_ like freaks of
painting at their unfinished work, in their absence, better than any of
his masters, and by the dexterity with which he perpetrated the frolic
of putting the facsimile of a fly on one of the faces on the easels. His
end was a tragic conclusion to such light comedy. At the age of
twenty-six, he quitted Florence for Rome so suddenly that he left his
finest frescoes unfinished. It was said that he was summoned thither by
the Pope. At Rome, where little or nothing of Masaccio's life is known,
he died shortly afterwards, not without a suspicion of his having been
poisoned.
A curious anecdote exists of the identification of the time when he
forsook Florence to meet his death in Rome. Just as we have read, that
the period of the death of Massinger the dramatist has been settled by
an entry in an old parish register, 'died, Philip Massinger a stranger,'
so there has been found some quaint equivalent to a modern tax-paper
which had been delivered at the dwelling of Masaccio when the word
'gone' was written down.
There is a further tradition--not very probable under the
circumstances--that Masaccio is buried, without name or stone, under the
Brancacci Chapel. Be that as it may, he very early rose to eminence,
surpassing all his predecessors in drawing and colouring, and he
combined with those acquirements such animation and variety of
expression in his characters, that it was said of him 'he painted souls
as well as bodies,' while his invention was not less bold and fresh.
It is difficult to indicate Masaccio's pictures because some of them
have been repainted and destroyed. As to those in the Brancacci Chapel
from the life of St Peter, (with the exception of two,) considerable
confusion has arisen as to which are Masaccio's, and which belong to
his scholar Filippino Lippi. The fresco which Masaccio left unfinished,
that of the Apostles Peter and Paul raising a dead youth (from
traditional history), was finished by Lippi. In the fresco of Peter
baptizing the converts, generally attributed to Masaccio, there is a lad
who has thrown off his garments, and stands shivering with cold, whose
figure, according to authority, formed an epoch in art. Lionardo da
Vinci, Michael Angelo, Andrea del Sarto, Fra Bartolommeo, all studied
their art in this chapel. Raphael borrowed the grand figure of St Paul
preaching at Athens in one of the cartoons, from one of Masaccio's or
Filippo Lippi's frescoes. Masaccio's excellence as an artist, reached at
an immature age, is very remarkable.
I have come to the last and probably the best appreciated among modems
of the early Italian painters. Fra Angelico da Fiesole, the gentle
devout monk whom Italians called '_Il Beato_,' the Blessed, and who
probably did receive the distinction of beatification, a distinction
only second in the Roman Catholic Church to that of canonization. He was
born at the lovely little mountain-town of Fiesole near Florence, 1387,
and his worldly name, which he bore only till his twenty-first year, was
Guido Petri de Mugello. In his youth, with his gift already recognized,
so that he might well have won ease and honour in the world, he entered
the Dominican Convent of St Mark, Florence, for what he deemed the good
and peace of his soul. He seldom afterwards left it, and that only as
directed by his convent superior, or summoned by the Pope. He was a man
devoid of personal ambition, pure, humble, and meek. When offered the
Archbishopric of Florence as a tribute to his sanctity, he declined it
on account of his unworthiness for the office. He would not work for
money, and only painted at the command of his prior. He began his
painting with fasting and work, he steadfastly refused to make any
alteration in the originals. It is said that he was found dead at his
easel with a completed picture before him. It is not wonderful, that
from such a man should come one side of the perfection of that idealism
which Giotto had begun. Fra Angelico's angels, saints, Saviour, and
Virgin are more divinely calm, pure, sweet, endowed with a more exulting
saintliness, a more immortal youth and joy, and a more utter
self-abnegation and sympathetic tenderness than are to be found in the
saints and the angels, the Saviour and the Virgin of other painters.
Neither is it surprising that Fra Angelico's defects, besides that of
the bad drawing which shows more in his large than in his small
pictures, are those of a want of human knowledge, power, and freedom.
His wicked--even his more earthly-souled characters, are weak and faulty
in action. What should the reverent and guileless dreamer know, unless
indeed by inspiration of the rude conflicts, the fire and fury of human
passions intensified in the malice and anguish of devils? But Fra
Angelico's singular successes far transcend his failures. In addition to
the sublime serenity and positive radiance of expression which he could
impart to his heads, his notions of grouping and draping were full of
grace, sometimes of splendour and magnificence. In harmony with his
happy temperament and fortunes, he was fond of gay yet delicate colours
'like spring flowers,' and used a profusion of gold ornaments which do
not seem out of keeping in his pictures. The most of Fra Angelico's
pictures are in Florence--the best in his own old convent of St Mark,
where he lovingly adorned not only chapter-hall and court, but the cells
of his brother friars. A crucifix with adoring saints worshipping their
crucified Saviour is regarded as his masterpiece in St Mark's. A famous
coronation of the Virgin, which Fra Angelico painted for a church in his
native town, and which is now in the Louvre, Paris, is thus described by
Mrs Jameson: 'It represents a throne under a rich Gothic canopy, to
which there is an ascent of nine steps; on the highest kneels the
Virgin, veiled, her hands crossed on her bosom. She is clothed in a red
tunic, a blue robe over it, and a royal mantle with a rich border
flowing down behind. The features are most delicately lovely, and the
expression of the face full of humility and adoration. Christ, seated on
the throne, bends forward, and is in the act of placing the crown on her
head; on each side are twelve angels, who are playing a heavenly concert
with guitars, tambourines, trumpets, viols, and other musical
instruments; lower than these, on each side, are forty holy personages
of the Old and New Testament; and at the foot of the throne kneel
several saints, male and female, among them St Catherine with her wheel,
St Agnes with her lamb, and St Cecilia crowned with flowers. Beneath the
principal picture there is a row of seven small ones, forming a border,
and representing various incidents in the life of St Dominic.'