In Florence the art of the modeller was far in advance of the painter’s.
This is not unintelligible, for the sculptor had under his eyes the
sculpture of the past, whereas the painter had no painting; he had the
conventions and code of a virtually new art to decide. The mosaics and
the illuminations were all that the early painters possessed for
precedents and models. The difficult art of bas-relief had become
Italian through the first Tuscan who learnt of the last Greek; but
Italian painting had nothing nearer to Antiquity than some so-called
Madonnas of the painter-Evangelist Saint Luke. The mosaics and the
illuminations were, indeed, Byzantine, and indirectly Greek. But compare
the figures of the enthroned mosaic Madonna at Ravenna, and her
ceremonial Child, with the classic sarcophagus that inspired the Pisan.
The one is Byzantine, the other Greek. The sculptor, then, inherited the
rules of the art. The painter had to devise, for instance, the treatment
of a certain degree of perspective by means of the linear art.
Margaritone d’Arezzo, born in the year of Magna Charta, and the Sienese
who was his contemporary, and Cimabue who followed him after a score of
years, together established the general terms of painting.
Thus the Tuscan sculptor, set free by his possession of an established
art, was at ease with nature and the convention of bust and bas-relief,
and with nature’s simple and wild creature the child.
Giovanni Pisano was born some five years before the nearly Byzantine,
the majestic but captive, Cimabue. In the cathedral of Prato and in the
Camposanto at Pisa are Bambini of Giovanni’s that are agile, springing
in the mother’s arms, playing with her diadem, perfect children. His
father Niccola was in art virtually a Greek, but his glorious “Nativity”
upon the Pisa pulpit and that on the Siena pulpit do not, of course,
show us a spirited child; though, by the way, Fra Guglielmo of Pisa has
an animated little infant whom the women attending the Virgin wash in a
stream, at the mouth of the cave of the Nativity, from which sheltered
sheep are drinking. Giovanni Pisano’s Bambino is assuredly one of the
earliest of Italian children studied from life and full of life. And
when we speak of the fifteenth-century’s re-discovery of childish
proportion, let us remember that this great sculptor observed it, and
was born early in the thirteenth.
[Illustration:
_Alinari_