[Page heading: DOMENICO VENEZIANO]
To distinguish clearly, after the lapse of nearly five centuries,
between Uccello and Castagno, and to determine the precise share each
had in the formation of the Florentine school, is already a task fraught
with difficulties. The scantiness of his remaining works makes it more
than difficult, makes it almost impossible, to come to accurate
conclusions regarding the character and influence of their somewhat
younger contemporary, Domenico Veneziano. That he was an innovator in
technique, in affairs of vehicle and medium, we know from Vasari; but as
such innovations, indispensable though they may become to painting as a
craft, are in themselves questions of theoretic and applied chemistry,
and not of art, they do not here concern us. His artistic achievements
seem to have consisted in giving to the figure movement and expression,
and to the face individuality. In his existing works we find no trace of
sacrifice made to dexterity and naturalism, although it is clear that he
must have been master of whatever science and whatever craft were
prevalent in his day. Otherwise he would not have been able to render a
figure like the St. Francis in his Uffizi altar-piece, where tactile
values and movement expressive of character--what we usually call
individual _gait_--were perhaps for the first time combined; or to
attain to such triumphs as his St. John and St. Francis, at Santa Croce,
whose entire figures express as much fervour as their eloquent faces.
As to his sense for the significant in the individual, in other words,
his power as a portrait-painter, we have in the Pitti one or two heads
to witness, perhaps, the first great achievements in this kind of the
Renaissance.
[Page heading: FRA FILIPPO LIPPI]
No such difficulties as we have encountered in the study of Uccello,
Castagno, and Veneziano meet us as we turn to Fra Filippo. His works are
still copious, and many of them are admirably preserved; we therefore
have every facility for judging him as an artist, yet nothing is harder
than to appreciate him at his due. If attractiveness, and attractiveness
of the best kind, sufficed to make a great artist, then Filippo would be
one of the greatest, greater perhaps than any other Florentine before
Leonardo. Where shall we find faces more winsome, more appealing, than
in certain of his Madonnas--the one in the Uffizi, for instance--more
momentarily evocative of noble feeling than in his Louvre altar-piece?
Where in Florentine painting is there anything more fascinating than the
playfulness of his children, more poetic than one or two of his
landscapes, more charming than is at times his colour? And with all
this, health, even robustness, and almost unfailing good-humour! Yet by
themselves all these qualities constitute only a high-class illustrator,
and such by native endowment I believe Fra Filippo to have been. That he
became more--very much more--is due rather to Masaccio's potent
influence than to his own genius; for he had no profound sense of either
material or spiritual significance--the essential qualifications of the
real artist. Working under the inspiration of Masaccio, he at times
renders tactile values admirably, as in the Uffizi Madonna--but most
frequently he betrays no genuine feeling for them, failing in his
attempt to render them by the introduction of bunchy, billowy,
calligraphic draperies. These, acquired from the late Giottesque painter
(probably Lorenzo Monaco) who had been his first master, he seems to
have prized as artistic elements no less than the tactile values which
he attempted to adopt later, serenely unconscious, apparently, of their
incompatibility. Filippo's strongest impulse was not toward the
pre-eminently artistic one of re-creation, but rather toward expression,
and within that field, toward the expression of the pleasant, genial,
spiritually comfortable feelings of ordinary life. His real place is
with the _genre_ painters; only his _genre_ was of the soul, as that of
others--of Benozzo Gozzoli, for example--was of the body. Hence a sin of
his own, scarcely less pernicious than that of the naturalists, and
cloying to boot--expression at any cost.