When Siena came out of the _bassi tempi_, she grew for a short time side
by side with Florence. She was not Florentine, but she was Tuscan. The
evolution from the Byzantine took place in the sister cities at much the
same date, but with a difference. Pietro Lorenzetti, for some years
probably a contemporary of Cimabue, struggled out of the bonds with a
different gesture. And the dissimilarity is manifest in the wonderful
figure of a child. In the painting of the Madonna, with the Infant
Christ between Saint John and Saint Francis, in the lower church at
Assisi, Lorenzetti shows us surely the earliest example of intent,
instant expression. The Mother looks close into her Child’s eyes, and
Christ gives the Pontifical benediction to Saint Francis, in obedience
to the Virgin’s sign. The drawing is still quite arbitrary and
irresponsible in such matters as the placing of the Child on the
Mother’s fore-arm; the little figure is vacant of weight and substance;
and, though the perspective of the three faces in three quarters has
been courageously attempted, the eyes have still the Byzantine length;
the hands are, by the usual anomaly, altogether undramatic and
inexpressive; only on the English stage can we find any hand so inexpert
as in early Italian art—always excepting the extraordinary and untimely
genius of the sculptors. And the whole design is as it were tied up in
bands of anxious inexperience. But, fettered as it is, the pencil is
strong in its constraint. And in this one figure of the Child the great
genius of expression, destined to perturb the heart of all the human
arts; to strike with a tremor for a thousand weak distresses that
literature which had told unshaken and unappealing the despair of Cain
and the Crucifixion of the Lord; to break the voice of that music which
had steadfastly sung the Good Friday liturgies; to move the arts of
design from their tranquillity so as to make even of portraiture a kind
of familiarity and confidence to the passer-by; to make the statue the
image of the hour, and even to weaken the walls of architecture; the
genius of expression, I say, seems to make nearly its first appeal in
this momentous painting of a child. Pietro Lorenzetti has made the
action, as well as the look, expressive. He has set aside the habit of
ceremonial attitude in order to raise the child’s head and to direct the
speech of this energetic mouth. Amongst the many beginnings of modern
art—as many as the scattered sources of one large river—here, in the
prophetic painting of the Sienese master, is one.
[Illustration:
_Alinari_