of the Arena chapel at Padua, begun in 1305. Here at last we are on
indisputable ground. The decoration of this chapel was conceived by
Giotto as a single whole, and was entirely carried out by him, though
doubtless with the help of assistants, and although it has suffered from
restoration it remains the completest monument to his genius. The
general effect of these ample silhouettes of golden yellow and red on a
ground of clear ultramarine is extraordinarily harmonious, and almost
gay. But essentially the design is made up of the sum of a number of
separate compositions. The time had not come for co-ordinating these
into a single scheme, as Michelangelo did in the ceiling of the Sistine.
In the composition of the separate scenes Giotto here shows for the
first time his full powers. Nearly every one of these is an entirely
original discovery of new possibilities in the relation of forms to one
another. The contours of the figures evoke to the utmost the ideal
comprehension of volume and mass. The space in which the figures move is
treated almost as in a bas-relief, of which they occupy a preponderant
part. As compared with the designs at Assisi the space is restricted,
and the figures amplified so that the plastic unity of the whole design
is more immediately apprehended. I doubt whether in any single building
one can see so many astonishing discoveries of formal relations as
Giotto has here made. Almost every composition gives one the shock of a
discovery at
[Illustration:
Giotto. Pietà Arena Chapel, Padua
Plate VI.]
once simple, inevitable, and instantly apprehended, and yet utterly
unforeseeable. In most compositions one can guess at some of the steps
by which the formal relations were established. Here one is at a loss to
conceive by what flight of imagination the synthesis has been attained.
We will consider a few in greater detail.
Giotto was, I believe, the first artist to represent the Resurrection by
the _Noli me tangere_. The Byzantines almost invariably introduced the
Descent into Hades or the Three Maries at the Tomb. In any case it is
characteristic of Giotto to choose a subject where the human situation
is so intimate and the emotions expressed are so poignant. Here, as in
the “Navicella,” where he was free to invent a new composition, he
discards the bilateral arrangement, which was almost invariable in
Byzantine art, and concentrates all the interest in one corner of the
composition. The angels on the tomb are damaged and distorted, but in
the head and hands of the Magdalene we can realise Giotto’s greatly
increased power and delicacy of modelling as compared with the frescoes
at Assisi. It is impossible for art to convey more intensely than this
the beauty of such a movement of impetuous yearning. The action of the
Christ is as vividly realised; almost too obviously, indeed, does he
seem to be edging out of the composition in order to escape the
Magdalene’s outstretched hands. This is a striking instance of that
power which Giotto possessed more than any other Italian, more indeed
than any other artist except Rembrandt, the power of making perceptible
the flash of mutual recognition which passes between two souls at a
moment of sudden illumination.
In the “Pietà” (Plate) a more epic conception is realised, for the
impression conveyed is of a universal and cosmic disaster: the air is
rent with the shrieks of desperate angels whose bodies are contorted in
a raging frenzy of compassion. And the effect is due in part to the
increased command, which the Paduan frescoes show, of simplicity and
logical directness of design. These massive boulder-like forms, these
draperies cut by only a few large sweeping folds, which suffice to give
the general movement of the figure with unerring precision, all show
this new tendency in Giotto’s art as compared with the more varied
detail, the more individual characterisation, of his early works. It is
by this consciously acquired and masterly simplicity that Giotto keeps
here, in spite of the unrestrained extravagance of passion, the
consoling dignity of style. If one compares it, for example, with the
works of Flemish painters, who explored the depths of human emotion with
a similar penetrating and sympathetic curiosity, one realises the
importance of what all the great Italians inherited from Græco-Roman
civilisation--the urbanity of a great style. And nowhere is it felt more
than here, where Giotto is dealing with emotions which classical art
scarcely touched.
It is interesting that Giotto should first have attained to this perfect
understanding of style at Padua, where he was, as we know, in constant
intercourse with Dante. Dante must have often watched him, perhaps
helped him by suggestions, in decorating the chapel built with the
ill-gotten wealth of that Scrovegni whom he afterwards seated amid the
usurers on the burning sands of Hell.
It is mainly by means of the composition and the general conception of
pose and movement that Giotto expresses the dramatic idea. And regarded
from that point of view, these frescoes are an astounding proof of
Giotto’s infallible intuitions. The characters he has created here are
as convincing, as ineffaceable, as any that have been created by poets.
The sad figure of Joachim is one never to be forgotten. In every
incident of his sojourn in the wilderness, after the rejection of his
offering in the temple, his appearance indicates exactly his mental
condition. When he first comes to the sheepfold, he gazes with such set
melancholy on the ground that the greeting of his dog and his shepherds
cannot arouse his attention; when he makes a sacrifice he crawls on
hands and knees in the suspense of expectation, watching for a sign from
heaven; even in his sleep we guess at his melancholy dreams; and in the
scene where he meets his wife at the Golden Gate on his return, Giotto
has touched a chord of feeling at least as profound as can be reached by
the most consummate master of the art of words.
It is true that in speaking of these one is led inevitably to talk of
elements in the work which modern criticism is apt to regard as lying
outside the domain of pictorial art. It is customary to dismiss all that
concerns the dramatic presentation of the subject as literature or
illustration, which is to be sharply distinguished from the qualities of
design. But can this clear distinction be drawn in fact? The imaginings
of a playwright, a dramatic poet, and a dramatic painter have much in
common, but they are never at any point identical. Let us suppose a
story to be treated by all three: to each, as he dwells on the legend,
the imagination will present a succession of images, but those images,
even at their first formation, will be quite different in each case,
they will be conditioned and coloured by the art which the creator
practises, by his past observation of nature with a view to presentment
in that particular art. The painter, like Giotto, therefore, actually
imagines in terms of figures capable of pictorial presentment, he does
not merely translate a poetically dramatic vision into pictorial terms.
And to be able to do this implies a constant observation of natural
forms with a bias towards the discovery of pictorial beauty. To be able,
then, to conceive just the appropriate pose of a hand to express the
right idea of character and emotion in a picture, is surely as much a
matter of a painter’s vision as to appreciate the relative “values” of a
tree and cloud so as to convey the mood proper to a particular
landscape.
Before leaving the Paduan frescoes, I must allude to those allegorical
figures of the virtues and vices in which Giotto has, as it were,
distilled the essence of his understanding of human nature. These
personified virtues and vices were the rhetorical commonplaces of the
day, but Giotto’s intuitive understanding of the expression of emotion
enabled him to give them a profound significance. He has in some
succeeded in giving not merely a person under the influence of a given
passion, but the abstract passion itself, not merely an angry woman, but
anger. To conceive thus a figure possessed absolutely by a single
passion implied, an excursion beyond the regions of experience; no
merely scientific observation of the effects of emotion would have
enabled him to conceive the figure of Anger. It required an imagination
that could range the remotest spaces thus to condense in visible form
the bestial madness of the passion, to depict what Blake would have
called the “diabolical abstract” of anger.
We come now to the last great series of frescoes by Giotto which we
possess, those of the Bardi and Peruzzi chapels of Sta. Croce, his
maturest and most consummate works. From the very first Giotto had to
the full the power of seizing upon whatever in the forms of nature
expressed life and emotion, but the perfect understanding of the
conditions of a suave and gracious style was only slowly acquired. In
the Florentine frescoes it is the geniality, the persuasiveness of the
style which first strikes us. They have, indeed, an almost academic
perfection of design.
The comparison of the “Death of S. Francis” here with the early fresco
of the subject at Assisi shows how far Giotto has moved from the literal
realism of his first works. At Assisi crowds of people push round the
bier, soldiers and citizens come in to see, there is all the shifting
variety of the actual event. Here the composition is sublimated and
refined, reduced to its purest elements. The scene is still vividly,
intensely real, but it is apprehended in a more pensive and meditative
vein. There is in the composition a feeling for space which imposes a
new mood of placidity and repose. This composition became the typical
formula for such subjects throughout the Renaissance, but it was never
again equalled. In spite of its apparent ease and simplicity, it is
really by the subtlest art that all these figures are grouped in such
readily apprehended masses without any sense of crowding and with such
variety of gesture in the figures. The fresco, which had remained for
more than a century under a coat of whitewash, was discovered in 1841
and immediately disfigured by utter restoration. The artist,[35] with a
vague idea that Giotto was a decorative artist, and that decoration
meant something ugly and unnatural, surrounded the figures with hard
inexpressive lines. We can, therefore, only guess, by our knowledge of
Giotto elsewhere, and by the general idea of pose, how perfect was the
characterisation of the actors in the scene, how each responded
according to his temperament to the general sorrow, some in humble
prostration, one with a more intimate and personal affection, and one,
to whom the vision of the ascending soul is apparent, wrapt in mystic
ecstasy.
An interesting characteristic of these late frescoes is the revival
which they declare of Giotto’s early love for classical architecture. He
may well have recognised the pictorial value of the large untroubled
rectangular spaces which it allowed. In the “Salome” he has approached
even more nearly to purely classic forms than in his earliest frescoes
at Assisi. The building has an almost Palladian effect with its square
parapets surmounted by statues, some of which are clearly derived from
the antique. In the soldier who brings in the Baptist’s head he has
reverted to the costume of the Roman soldier, whereas, in the allegory
of Chastity, the soldiers wear mediæval winged helmets.
The fact that there is a free copy of this fresco by the Lorenzetti at
Siena made in 1331 gives us the period before which this must have been
finished. Here again the mood is singularly placid, but the intensity
with which Giotto realised a particularly dramatic moment is shown by a
curious detail in which this differs from the usual rendering of the
scene. Most artists, wishing to express the essentials of the story,
make Salome continue her dance while the head is brought in. But Giotto
was too deep a psychologist to make such an error. At the tragic moment
she stops dancing and makes sad music on her lyre, to show that she,
too, is not wanting in proper sensibility.
There is evidence in these frescoes of an artistic quality which we
could scarcely have believed possible, and yet, as it is most evident in
those parts which are least damaged, it is impossible not to believe
that Giotto possessed it; and that is the real feeling for chiaroscuro
which these paintings show. It is not merely that the light falls in one
direction, though even that was a conception which was scarcely grasped
before Masaccio, but that Giotto actually composes by light and shade,
subordinates figures or groups of figures by letting them recede into
gloom and brings others into prominent light. This is particularly well
seen in the “Ascension of S. John” where the shadow of the building is
made use of to unify the composition and give depth and relief to the
imagined space. It is also an example of that beautiful atmospheric
tonality of which I have already spoken. In the figure of S. John
himself, Giotto seems to have the freedom and ease which we associate
with art of a much later date. There is scarcely a hint of archaism in
this figure. The head, with its perfect fusion of tones, its atmospheric
envelopment, seems already nearly as modern as a head by Titian. Even
the colour scheme, the rich earthy reds, the intense sweet blues of the
figures relieved against a broken green-grey, is a strange anticipation
of Cinquecento art. It seems as though Giotto in these works had himself
explored the whole of the promised land to which he led Italian
painting.
It is true that we are conscious of a certain archaism here in the
relations of the figures and the architecture. A certain violence is
done to that demand for verisimilitude which, perhaps wrongly, we now
invariably make. But in the “Raising of Drusiana,” even this demand is
met. Here the figures all have their just proportions to one another,
and to the buildings, and to the town wall which stretches behind them.
The scene is imagined, not merely according to the conditions of the
dramatic idea, but according to the possibilities and limitations of
actual figures moving in a three dimensional space; even the perspective
of the ground is understood. Such an imaginative construction of three
dimensional space had its disadvantages as well as its advantages for
art, but in any case it is an astonishing indication of Giotto’s genius
that he thus foresaw the conditions which in the end would be accepted
universally in European art. There is scarcely anything here that
Raphael would have had to alter to adapt the composition to one of his
tapestry cartoons.
Of the dramatic power of this I need add nothing to what has already
been said, but as this is the last of his works which we shall examine
it may afford an example of some of the characteristics of Giotto’s
draughtsmanship. For Giotto was one of the greatest masters of line that
the world has seen, and the fact that his knowledge of the forms of the
figure was comparatively elementary in no way interferes with his
greatness. It is not how many facts about an object an artist can
record, but how incisive and how harmonious with itself the record is,
that constitutes the essence of draughtsmanship.
In considering the qualities of line, three main elements are to be
regarded: First, the decorative rhythm, our sense of sight being
constructed like our sense of sound, so that certain relations, probably
those which are capable of mathematical analysis, are pleasing, and
others discordant. Secondly, the significance of line as enabling us
imaginatively to reconstruct a real, not necessarily an actual, object
from it. The greatest excellence of this quality will be the
condensation of the greatest possible suggestion of real form into the
simplest, most easily apprehended line; the absence of confusing
superfluity on the one hand, and mechanical, and therefore meaningless
simplicity, on the other. Finally, we may regard line as a gesture,
which impresses us as a direct revelation of the artist’s personality in
the same way that handwriting does.
Now, with Giotto, beautiful as his line undoubtedly is, it is not the
first quality, the decorative rhythm, that most immediately impresses
us. That is not the object of such deliberate and conscious research as
with some artists. It is in its significance for the expression of form
with the utmost lucidity, the most logical interrelation of parts that
his line is so impressive. Here, for instance, in the figure of the
kneeling woman, the form is expressed with perfect clearness; we feel at
once the relation of the shoulders to one another, the relation of the
torso to the pelvis, the main position of the thighs, and all this is
conveyed by a curve of incredible simplicity capable of instant
apprehension. To record so much with such economy requires not only a
rare imaginative grasp of structure, but a manual dexterity which makes
the story of Giotto’s O perfectly credible should one care to believe
it.
Giotto’s line, regarded as an habitual gesture, is chiefly striking for
its breadth and dignity. It has the directness, the absence of
preciosity, which belongs to a generous and manly nature. The large
sweeping curves of his loose and full draperies are in part the direct
outcome of this attitude.
It is difficult to avoid the temptation to say of Giotto that he was the
greatest artist that ever lived, a phrase which has been used of too
many masters to retain its full emphasis. But at least he was the most
prodigious phenomenon in the known history of art. Starting with little
but the crude realism of Cimabue, tempered by the effete accomplishment
of the Byzantines,[36] to have created an art capable of expressing the
whole range of human emotions; to have found, almost without a guide,
how to treat the raw material of life itself in a style so direct, so
pliant to the idea, and yet so essentially grandiose and heroic; to have
guessed intuitively almost all the principles of representation which it
required nearly two centuries of enthusiastic research to establish
scientifically--to have accomplished all this is surely a more
astounding performance than any other one artist has ever achieved.
But the fascination Giotto’s art exercises is due in part to his
position in the development of modern culture. Coming at the same time
as Dante, he shares with him the privilege of seeing life as a single,
self-consistent, and systematic whole. It was a moment of equilibrium
between the conflicting tendencies of human activity, a moment when such
men as Dante and Giotto could exercise to the full their critical and
analytical powers without destroying the unity of a cosmic theory based
on theology. Such a moment was in its nature transitory: the free use of
all the faculties which the awakening to a new self-consciousness had
aroused, was bound to bring about antitheses which became more and more
irreconcilable as time went on. Only one other artist in later times was
able again to rise, by means of the conception of natural law, to a
point whence life could be viewed as a whole. Even so, it was by a more
purely intellectual effort, and Leonardo da Vinci could not keep the
same genial but shrewd sympathy for common humanity which makes Giotto’s
work so eternally refreshing.
[Illustration:
Castagno. Crucifixion Fresco in St. Apollonia, Florence
Plate VII.]
THE ART OF FLORENCE[37]
The “artistic temperament”--as used in the press and the police court,
these words betray a general misunderstanding of the nature of art, and
of the artist whenever he becomes fully conscious of its purpose. The
idea of the artist as the plaything of whim and caprice, a
hypersensitive and incoherent emotionalist, is, no doubt, true of a
certain class of men, many of whom practise the arts; nothing could be
further from a true account of those artists whose work has had the
deepest influence on the tradition of art; nothing could be less true of
the great artists of the Florentine School.
From the rise of modern art in the thirteenth century till now Florence
and France have been the decisive factors in the art of Europe. Without
them our art might have reflected innumerable pathetic or dramatic
moods, it might have illustrated various curious or moving situations,
it would not have attained to the conception of generalised truth of
form.
To Florence of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and to France of
the seventeenth and succeeding centuries we owe the creation of
generalised or what, for want of a better word, we may call
“intellectual” art.
In speaking of intellect it is necessary to discriminate between two
distinct modes of its operation. The intellect may seek to satisfy
curiosity by observation of the distinctions between one object and
another by means of analysis; but it may concern itself with the
discovery of fundamental relations between these objects, by the
construction of a synthetic system which satisfies the mind, both for
its truth to facts and its logical coherence. The artist may employ both
these modes. His curiosity about the phenomena of nature may lead him to
accurate observation and recognition of the variety and distinctness of
characters, but he also seeks to construe these distinct forms into
such a coherent whole as will satisfy the æsthetic desire for unity.
Perhaps the processes employed by the artist may not be identical with
the intellectual processes of science, but it is evident that they
present a very close analogy to them.
It is a curious fact that at the beginning of the fifteenth century
in Italy, art was deeply affected by both kinds of intellectual
activity. Curiosity about natural forms in all their variety and
complexity--_naturalism_ in the modern sense--first manifested itself in
European art in Flanders, France, and North Italy about the second
decade of the fifteenth century. It appears that Italy actually led the
way in this movement, and that Lombardy was the point of origin.
Pisanello and Jacopo Bellini are the great exemplars in Italy of this
idea of exploring indefatigably and somewhat recklessly all those
detailed aspects of nature which their predecessors, occupied in the
grand Giottesque style, had scorned to notice.
In Florence, too, this impulse was undoubtedly felt, but it is the great
distinction of the Florentine artists that, however much their curiosity
about particular forms may have been excited, their high intellectual
passion for abstract ideas impelled them more to the study of some
general principles underlying all appearance. They refused to admit the
given facts of nature except in so far as they could become amenable to
the generalising power of their art. Facts had to be digested into form
before they were allowed into the system.
We can get an idea of what Florence of the fifteenth century meant for
the subsequent tradition of European art if we consider that if it had
not been for Florence the art of Italy might have been not altogether
unlike the art of Flanders and the Rhine--a little more rhythmical, a
little more gracious, perhaps, but fundamentally hardly more
significant.
Although this typically Florentine attitude defined itself most clearly
under the stress of naturalism it was, of course, already characteristic
of earlier Florentine art. Giotto, indeed, had left the tradition of
formal completeness so firmly fixed in Florence that whatever new
material had to be introduced it could only be introduced into a clearly
recognised system of design.
Of Giotto’s own work we rarely get a sight in England, the National
Gallery having missed the one great chance of getting him represented
some twenty years ago. But though Lady Jekyll’s single figure of Christ
can by its nature give no idea of his amazing and almost unequalled
power of discovering unexpected inevitabilities of formal relations, it
gives none the less something of Giotto’s peculiar beauty of drawing,
wherein the completest reality is attained without any attempted
verisimilitude. In Mr. Harris’s Bernardo Daddi we get nearer perhaps to
Giotto as a composer, and even in his Giovanni da Milano, in spite of
some Lombard grossness and sentimentality, the great tradition still
lives.