CHAPTER I

_BOOKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR_—

HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING IN THE RENAISSANCE

THE COLLECTORS

HOMER MARTIN, POET IN LANDSCAPE

ESTIMATES IN ART

THE PORTRAITS OF DANTE

[Illustration:

GIOTTO: DORMITION OF THE VIRGIN

_Berlin_

]

A HISTORY OF

ITALIAN PAINTING

_By_

FRANK JEWETT MATHER, JR.

PH.D., L.H.D.

Professor of Art and Archaeology in Princeton University

❦

LONDON

STANLEY PAUL & CO., LTD.

31, ESSEX STREET, STRAND, W. C. 2

1923

Printed in the United States of America

_To_

=B. B.=

IN FRIENDSHIP

PREFACE

This book has grown out of lectures which were delivered at the

Cleveland Art Museum in 1919–20. There I had ideal hearers, beginners

who wanted to learn and were willing to follow a serious discussion.

Since I aim at the same sort of a reader now, I have only slightly

retouched and amplified the original manuscript. This is frankly a

beginner’s book. I have had to omit whatever might confuse the novice,

including many painters inherently delightful. Controversial problems

for the same reason have been when possible avoided. When, however, I

have had to cope with such, I have depended more on my own eyes and

judgment than on the written words of others. But the latest literature

has also been used, so that even the adept should here and there find

something to his purpose.

For opinions on contested points, I have given my authority or personal

reason in notes, which, in order not to clutter up the text, are printed

at the end. By the same token, hints on reading and private study are

tucked away in the last pages where they will not bother readers who do

not need or want them. While I hope the book will be welcome in the

classroom, I have had as much in mind the intelligent traveller in

Europe and the private student. Throughout I have had before me the kind

of introduction to Italian painting that would have been helpful to me

thirty years ago in those days of bewildered enthusiasm when I was

making my _Grand Tour_.

THE AUTHOR

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I. GIOTTO AND THE NEW FLORENTINE HUMANISM 1

II. SIENA AND THE CONTINUING OF THE MEDIAEVAL STYLE 59

III. MASACCIO AND THE NEW REALISM 109

IV. FRA FILIPPO LIPPI AND THE NEW NARRATIVE STYLE 157

V. DAWN OF THE GOLDEN AGE: BOTTICELLI AND LEONARDO DA VINCI 201

VI. THE GOLDEN AGE: RAPHAEL AND MICHELANGELO 263

VII. VENETIAN PAINTING BEFORE TITIAN 323

VIII. TITIAN AND VENETIAN PAINTING IN THE RENAISSANCE 389

IX. THE REALISTS AND ECLECTICS 451

NOTES 473

HINTS FOR READING 489

INDEX 491

CHAPTER I

GIOTTO AND THE NEW FLORENTINE HUMANISM

The Florentine ideal of Mass and Emotion—Its Humanism—The City of

Florence about 1300—The Position and Methods of the Painter—The

General demand for Religious Painting—Accelerated by the religious

reforms of 1200, and changed in character—Insufficiency of the

current Italo-Byzantine Style—Experiments towards a new manner:

Duccio and the Sienese, Cimabue, Cavallini and the “Isaac

Master”—Giotto—Immediate followers of Giotto, Andrea Orcagna and

the return to sculptural methods—Later Panoramists, Andrea

Bonaiuti and the Spanish Chapel.

Leonardo da Vinci, from the summit of Florentine art, has written “What

should first be judged in seeing if a picture be good is whether the

movements are appropriate to the mind of the figure that moves.” And

again he has expressed somewhat differently the highest merits of

painting as “the creation of relief (projection) where there is none.”

For Florence, at least, these notions are authoritative, and they may

well serve as text for most that I shall say about Florentine painting.

To give significant emotion convincing mass—this was the problem of the

Florentine painter from the moment when Giotto about the year 1300 began

to find himself, to that day more than two centuries and a half later

when Michelangelo died. No Florentine master of a strenuous sort ever

failed to perceive this mission, and no unstrenuous artist was ever

fully Florentine. This twofold aim—humanistic, in choice and mastery of

emotion; scientific, in search for those indications which most vividly

express mass where no mass is—this twofold endeavor Florence shared with

the only greater city of art, Athens. Thus Florence is to the art of

today what Athens was to that of classical antiquity.

In these two little communal republics were discovered and worked out to

perfection all our ideals of humanistic beauty. Florence saw God, His

Divine Son, the Blessed Virgin, and the saints quite as Athens had seen

the gods of Olympus, the demi-gods, and the heroes simply as men and

women of the noblest physical and moral type. Both agreed in magnifying

and idealizing the people one ordinarily sees. For greater beauty,

Athens represented them nude or lightly draped; for greater dignity,

Florence chose the solemn garb of the Roman forum. Whether pagan or

Christian, the guardians of a people’s morality were to be above haste,

excitement, or any transient emotion. They were to express intensities

of feeling, but a feeling more composed, permanent, and disciplined,

than that of every day. Judgment and criticism count for as much in both

arts as emotional inspiration. The great Florentine artist is a thinker;

he is often poet and scientist, sculptor and architect, besides being a

painter. Behind his painting lies always a problem of mind, and as sheer

personalities the greatest painters of Siena, Venice, and Lombardy often

seem mere nobodies when compared even with the minor Florentines. We

should know something about a city that produced personality so

generously, and before considering Giotto, the first great painter

Florence bred, we shall do well to look at Florence as he saw it about

the year 1300, being a man in the thirties.

Florence was then as now a little city, its population about 100,000

souls, but it was growing. The old second wall of about two miles’

circuit was already condemned in favor of a turreted circuit of over

six. Up the Arno the forest-clad ridge of Vallombrosa was much as it is

today; down the valley the jagged peaks of the Carrara mountains barred

the way to the sea. The surrounding vineyards and olive orchards by

reason of encroaching forest were less extensive than they are now, but

through every gate and from every tower one could see smiling fields

guarded by battlemented villas. In the city, the fortress towers of the

old nobility, partizans mostly of the foreign Emperor, rose thickly, but

already dismantled at their fighting tops, for the people, meaning

strictly the ruling merchant and manufacturing classes, had lately taken

the rule from the old nobles. Many of these had fled; some had been

banished, as was soon to be that reckless advocate of the emperor, Dante

Alighieri, an excellent poet of love foolishly dabbling in politics.

Other patricians sulked in their fortress palaces. Some shrewdly got

themselves demoted and joined the ruling trade guilds. Of these guilds a

big four, five, or six, governed the city, while a minor dozen had

political privilege. Only guild members voted for the city officers. The

guilds combined the function of a trade union and an employer’s

association, including all members of the craft from the youngest

apprentice to the richest boss-contractor. Such a guild as the notaries,

must have been much like a bar association, while the wholesale

merchants’ guild must have resembled a chamber of commerce. The guild

folk had early allied themselves with the Pope, the only permanent

representative of the principle of order in Italy. The Pope was also the

bulwark of the new free communes against the claims of the Teutonic

Emperors. So in Florence piety, liberty, and prosperity were convertible

terms.

Within the narrow walls was a bustling, neighborly, squabbling and

making-up life. Everybody knew everybody else. The craftsman worked in

the little open archways you may still see in the Via San Gallo, in

sight and hearing of the passing world. Of weavers’ shops alone there

were 300. No western city was ever prouder than Florence in those days.

Her credit was good from the Urals to the Pentland Hills. Her gold

florin was everywhere standard exchange. She had secret ways of

finishing the fine cloths that came in ships and caravans from Ghent,

Ypres, and Arras; she handled the silks of China and converted the raw

pelts of the north into objects of fashion.

Her civic pride was actively expressing itself in building. Between 1294

and 1299 she had projected a new cathedral, the great Franciscan church

of Santa Croce, a new town hall, and the massive walls we still see. For

stately buildings she had earlier had only the Baptistry, in which every

baby was promptly christened, and the new church of the Friars Preachers

(Dominicans), Santa Maria Novella. In considering this Florence you must

think of a hard-headed, full-blooded, ambitious community, frankly

devoted to money-making, but desiring wealth chiefly as a step towards

fame. Since the painter could provide fame in this world and advance

one’s position in the next, his estate was a favored one.

The painter himself was just a fine craftsman. He kept a shop and called

it such—a _bottega_. He worked only to order. There were no exhibitions,

no museums, no academies, no art schools, no prizes, no dealers. The

painters modestly joined the guild of the druggists (_speziali_), who

were their color makers, quite as the up-to-date newspaper reporter

affiliates himself with the typographical union. When a rich man wanted

a picture, he simply went to a painter’s shop and ordered it, laying

down as a matter of course the subject and everything about the

treatment that interested him. If the work was of importance, a contract

and specifications were drawn up. The kind of colors, pay by the job or

by the day, the amount to be painted by the contracting artist himself,

the time of completion, with or without penalty—all this was precisely

nominated in the bond. Naturally the painter used his shop-assistants

and apprentices as much as possible. Often he did little himself except

heads and principal figures. But he made the designs and carefully

supervised their execution on panel or wall. A Florentine painter’s

_bottega_ then had none of the preciousness of a modern painter’s

studio. It was rather like a decorator’s shop of today, the master being

merely the business head and guiding artistic taste. When we speak of a

fresco by Giotto, we do not mean that Giotto painted much of it, any

more than a La Farge window implies that our great American master of

stained-glass design himself cut and set the glass. The painter of

Florence had to be a jack-of-all-trades, a color grinder, a cabinet

maker, and a wood carver; a gilder; to be capable of copying any design

and of inventing fine decorative features himself. He must be equally

competent in the delicate methods of tempera painting as in the resolute

procedures of fresco.

These two methods set distinct limits to the work and its effects. The

colors were ground up day by day in the shop. Each had its little pot.

There was no palette. Hence only a few colors were used, and with little

mixing. For tempera painting a good wooden panel—preferably of

poplar—was grounded with successive coats of finest plaster of Paris in

glue and rubbed down to ivory smoothness. The composition was then

copied in minutely from a working drawing. The gold background inherited

from the workers in mosaic was laid on in pure leaf. The composition was

first lightly shaded and modelled either in green or brown earth, and

then finished up a bit at a time, in colors tempered with egg or

vegetable albumen. The paints were thick and could not be swiftly

manipulated; the whole surface set and so hardened that retouching was

difficult. How so niggling a method produced so broad and harmonious

effects will seem a mystery to the modern artist. It was due to system

and sacrifice. Though the work was done piecemeal, everything was

thought out in advance. Dark shadows and accidents of lighting which

would mar the general blond effect were ignored. The beauty desired was

not that of nature, but that of enamels and semi-precious stones. These

panels are glorious in azures, cinnabars, crimsons, emerald-greens, and

whites partaking of all of these hues. Their delicacy is enhanced by

carved frames, at this moment, 1300, simply gabled and moulded; later

built up and arched and fretted with the most fantastic gothic features.

If the painter in tempera required chiefly patience and delicacy, the

painter in fresco must have resolution and audacity. He must calculate

each day’s work exactly, and a whole day’s work could be spoiled by a

single slip of the hand in the tired evening hour. For fresco, the

working sketch was roughly copied in outline on a plaster wall. Then any

part selected for a day’s work was covered with a new coat of fine

plaster. The effaced part of the design must be rapidly redrawn on the

wet ground. Then the colors were laid on from their little pots, and

only the sound mineral colors which resist lime could be employed. The

vehicle was simply water. The colors were sucked deep into the wet

plaster, and united with it to form a surface as durable as the wall

itself. Generally the colors were merely divided into three

values,—light, pure colors, and dark. Everything was kept clear, rather

flat, and blond, highly simple and beautifully decorative. One of the

later painters, Cennino Cennini (active about 1400), tells us that a

single head was a day’s work for a good _frescante_. The touch had to be

sure, for a mis-stroke meant scraping the wet plaster off, relaying it,

and starting all over again. The fresco painter accordingly needed

discipline and method. Nothing could be farther from modern

inspirational methods. Where everything was systematized and calculated

in advance, you will see it was quite safe for a master to entrust his

designs to pupils who knew his wishes. Every fresco when dry was more or

less retouched in tempera, but the best artists did this sparingly,

knowing that the retouches would soon blacken badly or flake off.

So much for the shop methods. Now for him who makes shops possible—the

patron. A wealthy Florentine as naturally wanted to invest in a frescoed

chapel as a wealthy American does in a fleet of motor cars. Considering

the changed value of money, one indulgence was about as costly as the

other. But the Florentine never quite regarded paintings as luxuries.

They were necessary to him. He loved them. They enhanced his prestige in

this world and improved his chances in the next. Then to beautify a

church was really to magnify the liberty and prosperity of Florence,

which largely derived from the Holy See. Recall that every Florentine

was born a Catholic, baptized in the fair Church of St. John with the

name of a saint. This saint, he believed, could aid him morally and

materially, was in every sense his celestial patron. It paid to do the

saint honor, and that could best be done through the painter’s art. The

poorest man might have a small portrait of his patron, a rich man might

endow a chapel and cause all his patron’s miracles to be pictured on the

wall. Think also that every altar—a dozen or more in every large

church—was a shrine[1], containing the bread and wine that by the

never-ceasing miracle of the Mass became the Saviour’s body and blood;

and was also a reliquary or tomb, containing in whole or part the body

of some saint. Every altar then, and every chapel inclosing one, cried

out for a twofold interpretation of its meaning. Everything about the

Eucharist had to be explained (involving pretty nearly all of Biblical

history), and the particular relic required similar illumination. Since

many of the faithful could not read, and the Catholic Church has ever

been merciful as regards sermonizing, these explanations of the altar as

miracle shrine of Our Lord and as tomb of a particular saint were best

made pictorially, and generally were so made.

Such motives for picture-making Florence of course shared with the

entire Christian world. It remains to explain why she wanted more

painting and better than any other mediæval city. She wanted more

painting chiefly because of her exceptional civic pride and prosperity,

she wanted better painting because she had moved ahead of the world

towards finer, more passionate, and conscious experiences of life which

the older painting was powerless to express. About the year 1200, a

century before the time we are considering, there flourished two great

religious leaders who gave to Christianity a new dignity and appeal. St.

Dominic, with his disciple, St. Thomas Aquinas, endeavored to make

Christianity more reasonable, St. Francis of Assisi endeavored to make

it more heartfelt and compassionate. They founded two monastic orders

with divergent yet harmonious aims. The Dominicans called men to a life

of study and self-examination, enlisting the human reason to explain and

justify the universe under the Christian scheme; the Franciscans called

men to poverty, humility, and chastity, and service to the unfortunate.

Between the two—one supplying the light of the reason and the other the

light of the heart—they overcame heresies which had menaced both

Christianity and civilization and roused the Church out of its dogmatic

slumber. It was no longer enough for the Church to threaten. Men yielded

to her now only on condition that their heads be convinced or their

hearts touched. In Florence, where a rationalizing shrewdness and a real

warm-heartedness singularly blended, the double appeal was irresistible.

By and large the whole city either schematized with the Dominicans or

slummed with the Franciscans. Here was urgent new matter requiring an

art that could move and persuade.

Together with this religious revival and the political and commercial

progress we have noted, came a literary revival. Before the end of the

13th century such poets as Guido Guinizelli, Guido Cavalcanti, and Dante

Alighieri had so reshaped the rude vulgar tongue that it became worthy

of its Latin succession. The refinements of chivalric love came to

Florence in melodious verse, and what the poets called the “sweet new

style,” _il dolce stil nuovo_, in diction presaged a similar sweet new

style of painting. Alongside of the poets, Brunetto Latini in the

_Tesoro_ shows glimmerings of scientific interest, and Giovanni Villani

lends substance and dignity to the work of the chronicler. Already the

sculptors Nicola and Giovanni of neighboring Pisa had grasped the

beauties respectively of classic sculpture and the noble intensity of

that of the Gothic North. All this immensely increased that sum of fine

thinking, feeling, and seeing which underlies all great art.

To express these new emotions the old painting was inadequate. Italy

through the so-called Dark Ages produced art abundantly. Wherever power

and order asserted themselves amid the welter of war and oppression,

stately buildings rose and these were decorated. Thus at Rome, where the

popes gradually added temporal to spiritual power, splendid basilicas

grew over the tombs of the martyrs. At Ravenna, through the 6th and 7th

centuries the seat of the Byzantine and Gothic sovereignties,

magnificent churches and baptistries were covered with pictorial

mosaics. In Sicily, at Messina, Cefalù and Palermo, the sway of the

Norman kings in the eleventh and twelfth centuries expressed itself in

churches and civic buildings of the utmost splendor, which were adorned

with mosaics by Greek masters. When the fugitives from the valleys of

the Po, Adige, and Piave, and Brenta fled from Attila to the Venetian

fens, there again was a beginning of great building. Wherever there was

a powerful primate as at Milan, Como, Parma, Pisa, or a wide ruling

abbot as at Subiaco, Monte Cassino, Capua, you will find art.

But hardly, except perhaps in architecture, Italian art. We have

sporadic provincial expressions dominated from afar by the prestige of

the Eastern Roman Empire. At Constantinople there was a permanent court,

a ceremonious civilization, an artistic blending of the traditions of

old Greece and of the mysterious Levant. The merchants of the world

sought from Byzantium, jewelry, enamels, embroideries, brocades, carved

ivories, and pictured manuscripts. She was to the early Middle Ages what

Paris is to ours—the æsthetic fashion maker of the world,—and her

skilled artists went far afield as so many missionaries of the Byzantine

style. We find them making the mosaics of Ravenna in the 6th and 7th

centuries, of St. Mark’s at Venice from the 9th century, of many Roman

churches from an even earlier date, of Palermo in the 12th, and of the

Baptistry at Florence in the 13th. This Byzantine manner, as practiced

by the travelling Greek artists and by their innumerable Italian

imitators, is the real starting point and jump-off place for Italian

painting. Hence in first studying the Byzantine style we do but imitate

the Italian painters who immediately preceded Giotto.

[Illustration:

FIG. 1. Byzantine Narrative Style about 1300. Detail from Mosaic Book

Covers in the Opera del Duomo.

]

[Illustration:

FIG. 2. Mosaic in the Cathedral, Pisa. St. John, left, is by Cimabue,

1302; the Christ is in good Byzantine tradition; the Virgin, right,

is some twenty years later.

]

Byzantine pictures have come down to us on the largest and on the

smallest scale—in the great mosaics and wall paintings, and as well on

small panels and in the illustrated books used in the ritual of the

church. Both are important. The mural decorations are what the early

Italian painter had constantly before his eye; the miniatured psalters,

Gospels, lectionaries, chorals and prayer books, afforded the patterns

from which he drew with little alteration the standard compositions of

the Annunciation to Mary, the Nativity of Christ, His Adoration by the

Shepherds and Kings, His Baptism, the Raising of Lazarus, the Last

Supper, Crucifixion, Descent into Hell, Resurrection, and Ascension. But

Byzantine design is most imposing in its monumental phase. The most

careless traveller still feels awe before those solemn figures of Christ

supreme ruler (_Pantokrator_) and his Mother queen of heaven which are

seen throned against a background of azure or gold and attended by

solemn figures of apostles and martyrs, Figure 2. The forms are

flat,—silhouettes enriched by interior tracery, the arrangement in the

space formal, symmetrical, highly decorative. The smaller narrative

compositions,[2] Figure 1, are clearly conceived but have small

emotional appeal. For this reason the Italians of the Golden Age spoke

of the Byzantine style as rude. This is an error. Rude in the hands of

half-trained local imitators, the style as formulated in the 9th century

at Constantinople was highly sophisticated and decoratively of great

refinement. It was based on an admirable system of color spotting and a

fine understanding of silhouette. The contours were cast in easy

conventional curves. These were enriched within by hatchings and

splintery angles of gold which contrasted effectively with the fluent

outlines. Everything was done by precept and copybook. In four centuries

before the year 1300, the style showed little change, indeed is still

alive in the mountains of Macedonia and, until the Revolution, in

Russia. The Byzantine artist seldom looked at a fellow mortal with

artistic intent. He looked at some earlier picture or considered his own

color preferences. Conventional and anæmic as the narrative style was,

it did all that was required of it. Nothing better serves the purpose of

an authoritative Church than the awe-inspiring Christs of the Lombard

and Sicilian and Roman apses, and so long as the Church felt no duty

beyond that of plain statement of her claims, the unfelt narratives from

the Scriptures served every religious need.

It was different when under the leading of St. Dominic and St.

Francis,[3] the Church eagerly wished to persuade men. Men may well have

been frightened or even instructed by a Byzantine picture; nobody was

ever persuaded by one. It took a century to work away from the Byzantine

style, so deeply was it rooted. In fact, from the year 1226, that of St.

Francis’s death, to about the end of the century, such artists as Guido

of Siena, Coppo di Marcovaldo, Giunta of Pisa, Jacopo Torriti, Giovanni

Cosma, Duccio, and Cimabue chiefly restudied the old Byzantine manner.

They wished to learn how to build creditably before they began to tear

down. Such reverent experiment extending over two generations only

proved that the breach with Byzantine formalism was inevitable.

[Illustration:

FIG. 3. Tuscan Master about 1285.—_Otto Kahn, N.Y._

]

[Illustration:

FIG. 4. Cimabue. Madonna in Majesty.—_Uffizi._

]

With the deepening and broadening of personal, civic, and religious

emotions, the painter found new exactions laid upon him which the

bloodless art of Byzantium could not satisfy. New life called for new

forms to express it. We find in sculpture from about the year 1260, that

of Giovanni Pisano’s first pulpit—wholly classical in its dignity—a

kindred endeavor in advance of the art of painting. The renewal took

three forms: the more conservative spirits accepted the Byzantine

formulas but endeavored to refine on them in a realistic sense, to add

grace to austerity. Such moderate development of the old style fixed the

character of the school of Siena and was magnificently initiated by its

greatest artist, Duccio, active about 1300. A very beautiful Madonna of

this general tendency is in the collection of Mr. Otto Kahn at New York,

Figure 3. It has been quite variously attributed.[4] It seems to me,

however, a pure Tuscan work by Coppo or a painter akin to him. For the

greater spirits such a reform was inadequate. Refine the Byzantine

formulas to the utmost—there was no gain, rather loss in strength.

Accordingly a vehement spirit like Cimabue,[1–5] acknowledgedly father

of the Florentine school, accepts the Byzantine tradition loyally, but

seeks to make its rigid mannerisms express the new religious passions.

At times he is successful at this unlikely task of putting new wine into

old bottles. His great enthroned Madonna at Florence, Figure 4, with

solemn angels in attendance and grim patriarchs below her throne, may

have been painted as early as 1285. It is faithful to the old monumental

tradition—akin to the Christs and Marys of the mosaics—in its impressive

richness is one of the most majestic things the century produced. It

reveals the docility of its creator but only partially his power. We

have hardly his hand but surely an echo of his influence in the tragic

crucifix in the museum of Santa Croce. It is the moment of agony, and

the powerful body writhes against the nails, while the head sinks in

death. It may represent hundreds of similar crosses that stood high in

air on the rood beam before the chancel, in sight both of the preacher

and his public.

Somewhere about 1294, Cimabue was called to Assisi to decorate the

church in which St. Francis was buried. His part was the choir and

transepts of the upper church. In the cross vault he painted the four

evangelists, on the walls he spread the stories of St. Peter and St.

Paul, the legends of the Virgin scenes from the Apocalypse, the gigantic

forms of the archangels and a Calvary, Figure 5, that is one of the most

moving expressions of Christian art. Chipped and blackened, their lights

become dark through chemical change, these wall paintings retain an

immense power and veracity. The Byzantine forms gain a paradoxical

solidity, like that of bronze. The convulsion of the figure of Christ is

given back in the wild gestures of the mourning women and the terrified

Jews. It is the moment of the earthquake and the opening of tombs; a

cosmic terror and despair pervade the place. The work is hampered and

rude but completely expressive. The sensitive Japanese critic and man of

the world, Okakura Kakuzo, used to regard these sooty frescoes in the

transepts of the Franciscan basilica as the high point of all European

art, which should at least induce the tourist and the student to give a

second look at these battered and fading masterpieces. Recently an

inscribed date, 1296, has been discovered on the choir wall which

settles a long vexed question of chronology. The upper part of the work

in the transepts and choir must have been going on for some years

earlier, and the entire decoration of the Upper Church should roughly be

comprised between 1294 and 1300. Cimabue died about 1302 while working

on the apsidal mosaic at Pisa, where the St. John is by his hand, Figure

2. He had brought life and passion into Italian painting, as his younger

contemporary Giovanni Pisano had into Italian sculpture. Cimabue’s

defect—that of a noble spirit—was the faith that the old pictorial form

could contain the new surging emotions.

[Illustration:

FIG. 5. Cimabue. Calvary. Fresco.—_Upper Church, Assisi._

]

[Illustration:

FIG. 6. Pietro Cavallini. Dormition of the Virgin. Mosaic.—_S. M. in

Trastevere, Rome._

]

[Illustration:

FIG. 7. Pietro Cavallini. Apostles, fresco, from Last Judgment.—_Santa

Cecelia in Trastevere._

]

Colder spirits, as is often the case, more readily found the right way.

And the discovery was made at Rome where the sculptured columns, arches,

and sarcophagi, the pagan wall paintings and the earliest Christian

mosaics combined to continue the lesson of classic humanism. A

remarkable family of decorators, the Cosmati; with such contemporaries

as Jacopo Torriti and Filippo Rusuti begin very cautiously to free

themselves from Byzantine trammels. But it was a painter, Pietro

Cavallini,[5] who more fully grasped that glory that had been Rome. In

1291 he designed for the church of Santa Maria in Trastevere a Madonna

and four stories of the Christ Child in mosaic. Here we glimpse a new

pictorial form, Figure 6. Those Byzantine hooks and hatchings which were

quite false to form give way to a reasonable structure in light and

dark, the hair no longer wild and ropy, is disposed in sculpturesque

locks, the draperies are no longer a cobweb pattern, but cast in broad

and classic folds. All these improvements may be noted in more complete

form in the frescoed Last Judgment which has recently been uncovered in

the church of Santa Cecilia, Figure 7. Here the heads of Christ and the

Apostles are well built in carefully graduated light and shade, while

the draperies suggest Hellenistic statuary. But the renovation is on the

whole cold and academic. Cavallini has not much more to say than the

Byzantines, but that little he says with far greater gravity and

truthfulness. He was a lucid and industrious but not a fine or strong

spirit. His work later at Naples—in the Church of the Donna Regina,

about 1310—shows that when he will express strong emotions he becomes

merely hectic. Yet he recovered for Italian painting more than a hint of

the choice naturalism of old Rome, and that is his sufficient glory.

There is greater power and knowledge than his in the work of such

contemporaries as the unknown painters of the frescoed heads of prophets

in Santa Maria Maggiore at Rome and of the stories of Isaac in the Upper

Church at Assisi.[6] These show a resolute and intelligent effort to

draw in masses of light and shade, and as well an ambition to recover

the gravity of the early Christian mosaics. It is no wonder that some

critics ascribe such dramatic and superbly constructed frescoes as The

Betrayal of Esau to young Giotto, Figure 8, but the art is too mature

for any young artist. We have rather to do with a great personality of

Roman training who broke the way for Giotto. Cavalcaselle suggests, I

think rightly, that the Florentine, Gaddo Gaddi, may have done some of

this work. But we are safe only in calling this great painter “The Isaac

Master.”

To recapitulate, there were three ways, all imperfect, open to a young

and progressive painter who like Giotto di Bondone was forming a style

about the year 1300. He might with the Sienese evade the issue of

passion and naturalism, choosing for gracefulness, he might try over

again the great adventure of his master Cimabue, endeavoring to bring

emotion into the old unfit forms, or he might, like Pietro Cavallini,

let emotion take care of itself and work academically towards better

structure, drapery, light, and shade. His choice was absolutely

momentous for modern painting, and I want you to feel that the issue was

quite consciously and vividly before him, for he had spent much of his

youth as a humble assistant in the basilica at Assisi, where frescoes in

the vehement Tuscan manner of Cimabue and in the dignified Roman style

of the Isaac Master were being painted side by side. His decision was to

combine the merits of the two manners—to seek, like his master,

sincerity and depth of emotion, but to embody it in the new and nobler

forms of the Roman school. This decision virtually fixed the character

of Christian art in Italy—it was to be warm and humanistic, but it was

to revive much of that abstract nobility which old Rome had inherited

from Greece. Thus Italian painting at the outset took a classic stamp

which when true to itself it has never lost. In fundamental ideas of

beauty, there is no real difference between Giotto, Masaccio, Leonardo

da Vinci, Raphael, Titian, Michelangelo.

[Illustration:

FIG. 8. “The Isaac Master.” Esau before Isaac. Fresco.—_Upper Church,

Assisi._

]

Giotto di Bondone,[7] according to the best information we have on a

disputed point, was born in 1266, at the village of Colle, in the lovely

valley of the Mugello. His people were prosperous and his way smooth. I

see no reason for doubting the charming legend told by Ghiberti that

Cimabue found the lad Giotto by the roadside diligently scratching the

outlines of a sheep on a slate, and that that was the beginning of their

association. In any case, we may surmise that he was early with Cimabue

as apprentice and eventually went with the Master to Assisi to grind

colors, clean brushes, and paint under direction. To be at that moment

in the Franciscan Basilica was to be at the greatest creative center of

the world. It seems to me likely that Giotto may have had a considerable

part in the actual painting of the Old and New Testament stories in the

nave, and I believe we may find his earliest designs in certain frescoes

of the upper rows. The Lamenting over Christ’s Body, for example,

singularly combines the energy of Cimabue with the dignity of Cavallini,

and there are significant echoes of the composition in Giotto’s later

version of the same theme at Padua. Tradition also ascribes to Giotto,

maybe correctly, the Resurrection and Pentecost on the entrance wall.[8]

After 1296, according to Vasari’s entirely credible account, young

Giotto took over the direction of the work for the newly elected

Franciscan General, Giovanni dal Muro. What share he had in the

vivacious and justly loved stories of St. Francis,[9] in the lower range

of the nave, is greatly disputed. Of the twenty-eight frescoes involved,

it seems clear to me that the first and the last three are by an artist

more nearly in the Sienese tradition, that Nos. II to XVIII inclusive

are designed by Giotto in the style of the Old Testament stories above

and painted by him with a certain amount of assistance, and that the

rest are largely inspired by Giotto but executed in his absence and

without his final control. What is more important is the variety and

vivacity of these narratives. Young Giotto is free to improvise, as he

was not in the standard Bible subjects, and the mood shifts readily. We

have charity, with St. Francis giving his cloak to a beggar, in an

idyllic landscape; family strife in St. Francis renouncing his father,

Figure 9; sorcery in the exorcism of the devils from Arezzo; an odd

mixture of ogreishness and witchcraft, in St. Francis’s Fire Ordeal

before the Soldan, Figure 11; a great pious intentness, in the

choristers at the Cradle Rite; intense physical appetite, in the Miracle

of the Spring; an entrancing blend of reverence and humor, in the Sermon

to the Birds, Figure 10; stark tragedy in the Death of the Knight of

Celano.

[Illustration:

FIG. 10. The Sermon to the Birds.—_Upper Church, Assisi._

]

[Illustration:

FIG. 9.—St. Francis renounces His Father.—_Upper Church, Assisi._

]

[Illustration:

FIG. 11. St. Francis before the Soldan.—_Upper Church, Assisi._

]

[Illustration:

FIG. 12. Early Sketch Copy after Giotto’s Mosaic of the Navicella.

Compare Fig. 31.—_Metropolitan Museum, New York._

]

Giotto is still chiefly a sprightly illustrator. He is as yet

insensitive to composition. He often perfunctorily splits his groups,

giving each a landscape—or architectural back-screen quite in the

Byzantine manner. His story-telling is brusque and without rhythm. His

sense of form is already strong and growing, but there is little of the

ease and style of the Isaac frescoes just above. In vitality the stories

of St. Francis mark a great advance, but they lack the gravity and

exquisiteness of balance proper to the best mural decoration.

It was at Rome that young Giotto was to broaden and refine his art. He

was called thither before the year 1300 to design the great mosaic of

Christ walking on the Sea of Galilee beside the tempest-tossed boat of

the Apostles. It stood over the inside cloister-portal of old St.

Peter’s, and has been many times moved in the rebuilding of the church,

and with each move restored, so that what we now see in the porch is

entirely remade. From certain fragments of the old mosaic, and old

sketch copies, Figure 12, we may judge that the Navicella, as the

Italians loved to call it, was an elaborate composition of great

dramatic power, the logical consummation of the experiments at Assisi.

Our best version of the Navicella is Andrea Bonaiuti’s adaptation,

Figure 31, for the vault of the Spanish Chapel, 1365.

But Giotto was soon to renounce the facile method of diffuse and genial

narrative in favor of a concise and massive style, akin to sculptured

relief, and deeply influenced by the antique. The arches and the columns

of Imperial Rome are teaching their silent lesson, the simple and noble

forms of Cavallini and his nameless rivals show how painting may vie

with sculpture in sense of mass and reality. With the problem of the

representation of mass on a flat surface, Giotto wrestled eagerly and

triumphantly. With a genius that few painters have equalled, he grasped

the truth that the figure painter’s problem of representing space is

chiefly that of emphatically suggesting mass. If you convince the eye of

the tangibility of your objects, the mind will supply elbow room and air

to breathe. It isn’t necessary to simulate a box, as the Sienese

painters often did. The painter who can give a convincing sense of mass

may handle accessories and perspective with the utmost freedom,

according to the inner law of his design. The painter who thinks first

of his space is in every way more bound to the smaller probabilities.

Much thinking of this sort must have been done by Giotto before he

worked out his new style at Padua.

After his return from Rome, Giotto sojourned for a time in Florence, and

in 1304 or thereabouts painted the gigantic Madonna formerly in the

Trinità, Figure 13. It is impressive in mass, admirable in the intent

expression of the attendant angels, rich in color, but the great figure

is unhappily crowded by the canopy. Giotto is still a bit uncertain as

to the rendering of space, and makes a good if unpleasing effort to

suggest depth despite the limitations of a gold background. With all its

nobility and tenderness, this is by no means so good a decoration as the

great Madonna by Cimabue, Figure 4, which hangs nearby in the Uffizi.

With the problems of space and mass, Giotto was soon to cope

triumphantly. A wealthy citizen of Padua, Enrico Scrovegni, was planning

a new chapel to the Virgin Annunciate. Doubtless he wished the repose of

his father’s soul, for his father had been a notorious usurer. Dante

incontinently puts him in hell with other profiteers. Enrico Scrovegni

built his chapel near the ruins of a Roman arena and dedicated it March

25, 1305. The Arena Chapel was a brick box, barrel vaulted within—a

magnificent space for a fresco painter. Giotto spread upon it the

noblest cycle of pictures known to Christian art. Over the chancel arch

he painted the Eternal, surrounded by swaying angels, and listening to

the counter-pleas of Justice and Mercy concerning doomed mankind, with

the Archangel Gabriel serenely awaiting the message that should bring

Christ to Mary’s womb and salvation to earth. This is the Prologue.

Opposite on the entrance wall is the Epilogue—a last judgment, with

Christ enthroned as Supreme Judge amid the Apostles, and the just being

parted from the wicked. Amid the just you may see Enrico Scrovegni

presenting the chapel to three angels.

The side walls are ruled off into three rows of pictures, with ornate

border bands and a basement of sculpturesque figures symbolizing the

seven virtues and vices. The story reads down from above. Below the

azure vault and still a little in the curve are the stories of the

Childhood of the Virgin—nothing in the chapel more simple and stately

than these.[10] The middle course is devoted to the early deeds of

Christ, from his birth to the expulsion of the money lenders from the

temple. The lower row depicts His Passion ending with the Miracle of

Pentecost. Much later a disciple of Giotto completed the story with the

last days of the Virgin, in the Choir. Thus the narrative in its

broadest sense is a life of the Virgin Mary, including that of her

Divine Son, and both lives are brought into an eternal scheme of things

by the prologue, which shows a relenting God, and the Epilogue which

shows a now relentless Christ awarding bliss and woe to the race for all

eternity.

[Illustration:

FIG. 13. Giotto. Madonna Enthroned.—_Uffizi._

]

The first impression of a visitor to the chapel will be a feeling of awe

qualified by joy in the loveliest of colors. The whites of the classical

draperies dominate. They are shot with rose, or pale blue, or grey

green. Certain old enamels have the same quality of making the most

splendid crimsons, blues, and greens seem merely foils to foreground

masses of white which seem to include by implication all the positive

colors. It is this bright and original color scheme balancing crimsons

and azures with violets and greens which makes a thing of beauty out of

what would otherwise be a stilted checkerboard arrangement.

[Illustration:

FIG. 13_a_. St. Joachim and St. Anna at the Beautiful Giotto

Gate.—_Arena, Padua._

]

[Illustration:

FIG. 14. Giotto. The Flight into Egypt.—_Arena, Padua._

]

Next the eye will realize splendid people gravely occupied with solemn

acts. There is the strangest blend of passion and decorum. See the eager

old man who clutches his wife before a massive city gate while she

caresses him tenderly, Figure 13_a_, note the firm gentleness of the

bearded priest who handles a screaming baby before the altar, mark the

sense of strain and hurry where a mother and child mounted on an ass,

Figure 14, are pushed and dragged along by an old man and attendants. Or

again, what sinister power in the scene where three Jewish magistrates

press money upon a haggard, bearded, nervous man. You do not need the

bat-like demon prompting him to know that it is the arch-traitor Judas,

Figure 15. Then there is a strange, serene, processional composition,

with the Virgin moving homeward among her friends to a solemn music,

Figure 16. It has a rhythm like the frieze of the Parthenon. Perhaps

your eye will fix longest on the scene where about the pale body of the

dead Christ women wail with outstretched hands, or tend the broken body,

while bearded men, accustomed to the hardness of life, stand in mute

sympathy with folded hands, Figure 17. It is what the Gospel ought to

look like. How Giotto shows every feeling, pushing its expression just

to the verge, and there stopping, so that idyl and tragedy, devotion and

wrath, treachery and fealty, fear and courage, each keeps its proper and

distinguishing aspect, while all are invested in a common dignity and

nobility. You will perhaps never have seen an art at once so varied and

moving, and nevertheless so monumental, and you may well be curious as

to the method.

[Illustration:

FIG. 15. Giotto. Judas betraying Christ.—_Arena, Padua._

]

You will see readily that these compositions are conceived sculpturally.

Every one with the slightest change could be cut in marble. Indeed the

seven Virtues, Figure 18, and seven Vices impersonated in monochrome on

the dado of the chapel are direct imitations of sculpture. The figures

throughout the life of Christ and the Virgin are of even size, and

usually all on one plane. The landscapes and architectural features are

arranged simply as frames or backgrounds for the figure groups. The

figures are, whenever the subject permits, clad in drapery of a classic

cast. Expression is conveyed not much by the faces, which have a uniform

Gothic intentness, but by the action of the entire figure and especially

of the hands. The forms are rather squat and massive, yet have a homely

gracefulness. There is nothing like perspective, and small regard for

distance, yet the figures have convincing bulk and move gravely in

adequate space. All this is due to the most consummate draughtsmanship.

Giotto simplifies his seeing; what he cares for is the thrust of the

shoulder, or the poise of hip, the swing of the back from the pelvis,

the projection of the chest, the balance of the head on the neck and its

attachment to the shoulders. All these essential facts of mass he

represents by the simplest lines of direction, by broad masses of light

and shade, often merely by the tugging lines in drapery that tell of the

form beneath. The cave men would have understood Giotto, and so would

the post-impressionists of today. Conciseness, economy, force,

mass—these are the technical qualities of the work, as human insight and

tenderness are its grace. As the great analytical critic Bernard

Berenson has well remarked, this painting makes the strongest possible

appeal to our tactile sense, stirring powerfully all our memories of

touch, and presenting the painted indications as so many swiftly grasped

clues to reality. We have to do with a magnificently conceived

shorthand. No artist before or since has made a greater expenditure of

mind or achieved a more notable inventiveness than Giotto in the Arena

Chapel.

[Illustration:

FIG. 16. Giotto. The Virgin returning from her wedding.—_Arena,

Padua._

]

[Illustration:

FIG. 17. Giotto. Lamentation over Christ.—_Arena, Padua._

]

It was dedicated March 25, 1305, Giotto being nearly forty years old,

and it was probably not completely painted on the day of dedication,

since many draperies were borrowed from St. Mark’s, Venice, to cover,

presumably, the still unpictured parts of the walls. Giotto lived some

four years in Padua, brought his family there, received the exiled poet

Dante and with him joked not too decorously about his own ugliness and

that of his children. It seems likely enough, though not certain, that

he followed the banished Pope to Avignon about 1309, and spent some

years in Southern France. What is certain is that he was again in

Florence by 1312, and that, having found his own solution of the problem

of mass in the Arena Chapel, he thereafter rested comfortably on his

discovery, never was quite as strenuous again, and spent his later years

at a new problem—that of decorative symmetry.

[Illustration:

FIG. 18. Giotto. Hope.—_Arena, Padua._

]

The first experiment towards a sweeter and more complex style was made

in the cross vaults of the Lower Church of Assisi, immediately above the

tomb of St. Francis. The subjects were the three virtues of the

Franciscan vow—Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience—with a St. Francis in a

glory of angels. In these great triangular compositions, allegory and

symbolism run riot, and we do well to recall Hazlitt’s shrewd remark on

Spenser’s “Faery Queene”—“the allegory will not bite.” Indeed one might

forget it for the radiance of the azures, moss-greens, rose pinks, and

deeper violets, for the delightful contrast of the freely composed

groups with the intricate geometrical formality of the rich borders. Yet

to ignore the allegory completely would be to forget the master’s

intention. We may savor it best in the great composition: St. Francis

Marries his Lady Poverty, Figure 18_a_. The bridal group stands on a

central crag, Christ serving as priest, St. Francis slipping a ring on

the gaunt hand of a haggard, yet strangely fascinating bride clothed in

a single ragged garment. Her bare feet show through a crisply drawn and

blossomless rose tree. Two urchins at the foot of the little cliff stand

ready to stone so unseemly a bride. From the central group to right and

left, earnest groups of angels spread in a descending curve. In the

lower angle, left, a young man gives his rich cloak to an old beggar,

while an angel points to the bridal: Poverty is accepted. At the lower

right corner, another angel attempts to detain a young man who passes

with a gesture of contempt in the company of two portly priests: Poverty

is rejected by such. From the apex of the great triangle, the hands of

God descend to welcome two angels, one of which offers the cloak given

to the beggar, and the other a model of the church which is the splendid

covering for the body of the Saint. The fantastic beauty of this and its

companion pieces can only be appreciated on the spot. No frescoes of

Italy surpass these for loveliness of color and perfection of condition.

It is the most beautiful pictured Gothic ceiling in the world, perhaps

the most fantastically beautiful of all figured ceilings whatever.

[Illustration:

FIG. 18_a_. Giotto. St. Francis’ Mystic Marriage with Poverty.—_Lower

Church, Assisi._

]

Because the figures are a little slight and the expression a bit

sentimentalized, and the proportions rather arbitrarily handled to meet

the exigencies of the curved spaces, many good critics, including

Venturi and Berenson, deny these compositions to Giotto. One of them,

the St. Francis in Glory, is clearly of inferior design and quality. For

the others, it seems to me that the designs can only be by Giotto, while

the execution is mostly by a charming assistant whose work in this

ceiling and elsewhere in this church makes us wish we knew his name. No

middle-aged painter of established repute was likely to undertake

personally the dirty and fatiguing work of painting a ceiling in fresco.

If we are right in supposing that Giotto may have designed this ceiling,

shortly after his return from Avignon, say, after 1312, he would have

been towards fifty years old, and provided with a shop-staff of

well-trained assistants. From this time on, indeed, we may assume that

he rather directed the work of others than painted himself. Such a view

will permit us to accept as school works many fine pictures the design

of which a too strict criticism has denied to Giotto. For example, the

admirable Coronation of the Virgin, in Santa Croce, Florence, seems to

me completely designed by Giotto, and the logical next step after the

Franciscan allegories, though there can be little actual painting by the

master on the panel, and his personal contribution may have been limited

to a small working drawing. Indeed the only one of the later panels

which seems to show throughout his actual handiwork is the lovely

Dormition of the Virgin at Berlin, Frontispiece, which was painted for

the Church of Ognissanti.

At about this period I think we may set the several crucifixes in

Florentine churches, without inquiring too narrowly whether they are by

the master or by scholars. Giotto has developed a singularly noble type.

The Christ is no longer contorted in agony as in the crucifixes by

Cimabue. He is dead, with his head quietly sunk on the powerful breast,

and the body relaxed. The conception is humanistic. One feels chiefly

the pity of stretching that glorious thing that is a man’s body on a

cross. Probably the earliest of these crucifixes is that at Santa Maria

Novella, while the finest is at San Felice. About 1320 we may set the

dismembered _ancona_, painted for Cardinal Gaetano Stefaneschi, which

originally stood on the high altar of St. Peter’s, Rome. The tarnished

fragments which you may still see in the sacristy, are more splendid in

color than any other tempera painting whatsoever. Probably only the

central panels, Christ and St. Peter enthroned, are from Giotto’s hand,

the side panels representing the martyrdom of Peter and Paul may well be

both designed and executed by the accomplished assistant who carried out

the allegories at Assisi.

[Illustration:

FIG. 19. Giotto. Naming of St. John the Baptist.—_Peruzzi Chapel,

Santa Croce._

]

So far we have seen Giotto a wanderer. Assisi, Rome, Padua, Rimini,

delighted to do him honor, but apparently Florence had claimed few works

from his hand. We have record of frescoes in the Badia which may have

been early works. It was the decoration of Arnolfo’s great Franciscan

church of Santa Croce that finally recalled Giotto and evoked his most

accomplished work. He completed in the transepts of Santa Croce four

chapels and as many altar-pieces. The frescoes were white-washed in the

16th century, and the panels broken up and lost. But in the last century

the white-wash was scraped off from two of the chapels, and there we may

see, so far as defacement and repainting permit, the masterpieces of the

early Florentine school. We may reasonably guess the date of this work

to be somewhere about 1320, Giotto being nearly sixty.

In the chapel maintained by that noble family, the Peruzzi, Giotto

spread on the side walls three stories from the life of St. John the

Baptist, and as many more from that of St. John the Evangelist. The

figures are superb, magisterial in pose; the draperies grand and ample

after the classical fashion. Upon bulk and relief there is less

insistence than at Padua. Giotto has passed the experimental stage as

regards form, is less strenuous and more at his ease. Nothing is more

stately in the chapel than the presentation of the infant Baptist to his

father, who is temporarily stricken with dumbness, Figure 19. Simeon

gravely writes the name John; Elizabeth with her adoring group of

attendants carefully offers the vivacious child to his father’s gaze.

The gestures are slow, definite, determined. The group beautifully fills

the square space without crowding it. The composition, unlike the widely

spaced Paduan designs, is drawn together into a mass.

[Illustration:

FIG. 20. Giotto. Resuscitation of Drusiana by St. John.—_Peruzzi

Chapel, Santa Croce._

]

Upon the Feast of Herod with Salome modestly dancing John Ruskin[11] has

expended just eulogies in the petulant yet important little book

“Mornings in Florence.” What is notable in the scene is its general

decorum and the pathetic indecision of the weak King.

But the most accomplished design as such is the miracle of the

Resuscitation of Drusiana by St. John the Evangelist, Figure 20. Even

the inscenation before a fine Romanesque city is adequately, if very

simply, realized. The gesture of the apostle is of majestic power, the

contrast of the massive, upright, columnar forms of the elders, with the

sharply bent forms of Drusiana, her mourners and bier bearers, is

admirably invented, and the drastic portraiture of a cripple at the left

adds a tang of reality while in no wise detracting from the dignity of

the scene. We have a work in the grand style, massively conceived,

warmly felt, wrought into an elaborate and satisfying symmetry. The

Ascension of St. John has an even graver and more ample rhythm. The

Golden Age of Raphael and Titian will have little to add to this except

the minor graces.

In the adjoining chapel of the Bardi family, Giotto, a little later, I

believe, painted six stories of St. Francis, and four figures of the

great Franciscan saints, St. Louis of France, St. Louis of Toulouse, St.

Clare, and St. Elizabeth of Hungary. Over the entrance arch he set an

animated picture of St. Francis receiving the stigmata, the wounds of

the Saviour. Nearly thirty years earlier he had done this subject for

the Church at Assisi, and in an altar-piece which has passed from Pisa

to the Louvre. By comparing the rigid, angular figures of the earlier

composition and their ill-adjusted accessories, with this easy and

beautifully balanced arrangement, you may see how far Giotto had gone in

the direction of grace, and you will not fail also to note how much more

tragic the earlier and less calculated work is.

For the first time, in the Bardi chapel, Giotto conceives the decoration

of the side walls as a whole. From the pointed lunettes above, through

the three compositions on each wall, there is an architectural axis,

sometimes arbitrarily imposed, about which the figures are symmetrically

distributed. Often the scene is a screen with projecting wings as in the

St. Francis before the Sultan of Morocco, or a similar fore-court, as in

the Mourning for St. Francis. It will be well to compare the story of

St. Francis renouncing his father, Figure 21, with the same subject at

Assisi. You will recall that St. Francis, when rebuked by his father for

a rash and impulsive act of charity, stripped off his clothes, then

threw them at his father’s feet, and took refuge under the robe of the

Bishop of Assisi. In the earlier version the architectural background

splits the composition in two, adding to its intensity perhaps, but

displeasing to the eye. Here in the late version a fine building seen in

perspective both unifies the two groups and serves as apex for the

decorative axis of the entire side wall.

[Illustration:

FIG. 21. Giotto. St. Francis renounces his Father. Compare FIG.

9.—_Bardi Chapel, Santa Croce._

]

More remarkable still is the contrast between St. Francis Braving the

Fire Ordeal before the Soldan, Figure 22, as depicted at Assisi and

Florence. We have to do not merely with an immense advance in decorative

composition, the accessories at Assisi being trivial and fantastic; not

merely with progress towards a gracious symmetry and more massive and

impressive form, but also with a complete change of moral point of view.

At Assisi the Soldan is an ogre exacting a cruel test. The Moslem

priests are a cowardly pack of magicians ignobly slinking away, St.

Francis a grim fanatic. At Florence the Soldan is a noble and humane

gentleman, amazed at an unreasonable ordeal forced upon his wise men.

The Moslem doctors are splendid scholars grudgingly shrinking from an

unfair test, St. Francis an alert little enthusiast half gloating over

the confusion he has thrown into the enemy camp. With a by no means

orthodox feeling, old Giotto, humanistic Giotto, almost seems to take,

or at least to see, the pagans’ side of it. He who had written a manly

poem against the excesses and hypocrisies of the Franciscan ideal of

poverty, is now capable of criticizing the more extravagant propagandism

of the saint himself.

It is a criticism that admits all tenderness and sympathy, as may be

seen in the famous fresco representing the Mourning over the body of St.

Francis while his soul is translated to heaven, Figure 23. Again John

Ruskin is your best interpreter to this picture, which after all only

needs to be seen. It combines all the qualities for which Giotto had

striven—warmth, vivacity, ingenuity, unexpectedness in the narrative

details; massiveness and dignity of the individual forms; and a

decorative symmetry at once monumental, formal, and delightfully varied.

[Illustration:

FIG. 22. Giotto. St. Francis before the Soldan. Compare Fig.

11.—_Bardi Chapel, Santa Croce._

]

[Illustration:

FIG. 23. Giotto. Death of St. Francis.—_Bardi Chapel, Santa Croce._

]

With this noble and deeply felt composition we virtually take leave of

Giotto. For though he lived for many years yet, the works of his old age

have largely perished. In the chapel at Assisi dedicated to St. Mary

Magdalen are fine frescoes in which he surely had a leading part. From

1330 to 1333 he worked at Naples for King Robert of Anjou. Nothing

remains from this visit except certain shrewd jests which the painter

exchanged with the King. In 1334 Florence recalled him, and made him

_capomaestro_ of the Cathedral. Giotto designed the flower-like tower

which rises lightly beside the temple of Our Lady of the Flower,

invented and perhaps cut in marble certain reliefs on the base

representing the crafts of men, but did not live to see the loveliest of

bell towers finished. The task was completed by his pupil and artistic

executor, Taddeo Gaddi. In the last years Giotto conceived vast

compositions of a religious and political sort for the public buildings

of the Commune. There were allegories of a strong and weak state, in the

Bargello, the prison-fortress of the Captain of the People. These great

symbolical designs are a kind of missing link between Giotto and the

panoramic painters who followed him. We may find an echo of this lost

work in the Civic Allegories in the Palazzo Pubblico of Siena. These

were doing at the moment of Giotto’s death by a Sienese painter,

Ambrogio Lorenzetti, who had studied the great Florentine master

devoutly. Nothing of Giotto’s latest phase is left save a few figures in

the battered frescoes in the Bargello which contain the idealized

portrait of youthful Dante, Figure 24, and the gracious Dormition of the

Virgin at Berlin, Frontispiece.

[Illustration:

FIG. 24. Giotto. Dante, tracing from the ruined fresco in the

Bargello.

]

Just before Giotto died, the tyrant of Milan borrowed him from Florence.

Giotto soon returned, to die early in the year 1337, being seventy years

old. Almost single-handed he had made Italian painting. He had lent life

and warmth to the cold and academic reform of the Roman painters. He had

expressed a maximum of feeling, without sacrifice of dignity. He had

worked out beautiful and impressive forms of composition wherein

symmetry and contrast met harmoniously. He had mastered the expression

of mass on a plane surface with a certainty and energy no artist before

had even imagined, and that few since have equalled. He had forecast and

led the way in every manner of realistic figure painting.

Florence, when true to herself, could only repeat Giotto in one phase or

another of his activity. In her casual and sprightly mood, she carries

on the method of Giotto’s stories of St. Francis at Assisi, in mystical

reflection and symbolism she must build on the allegories over St.

Francis’ tomb and on the lost political frescoes; in her mood of

strenuous search for reality she can but repeat the Paduan chapter of

Giotto’s strivings, in rare moments of vision and fulfilment she will

merely begin where the Santa Croce frescoes of Giotto ended.

However Giotto be ranked, and personally I see no greater artist on the

rolls of history, his is indisputably the greatest single achievement;

for no other artist who accomplished so much began with so little. It

was no exaggeration that made Lorenzo Ghiberti regard the advent of

Giotto as the coming to life of an art that had been buried for

centuries. It is indeed the measured classicism of Giotto’s art that

constitutes its greatness—its sweet and lucid reasonableness, its rugged

yet disciplined strength. Seneca or Marcus Aurelius would have

understood it perfectly, as Giotto himself, for his mellow wisdom and

wit, would have been a welcome visitor at Horace’s Sabine farm. In his

broad and flexible insight, his love of mankind, his clear perceptions

of aims and ready acceptance of limitations, in his pathos without

exaggeration, in his constructive skill without ostentation, in his

simplicity without bareness, he is the authentic and indispensable link

between the beauty of Greece and Rome and that of the Italian Golden

Age. To know him is to know almost everything that is needful about

older European painting, not to know him is to lack the very rudiments

of an artistic education.

Giotto left many followers,[12] not one of whom at all understood his

greatness. Like his friend Dante, he was distantly admired, but really

loved only in bits. As perceptive a person as the artist biographer

Vasari lavishes praise upon Giotto for his more trivial inventions—the

Christ Child struggling out of the arms of the High Priest, for example.

So Giotto’s followers picked unintelligently from his great

accomplishment, choosing what the master himself would least have

valued—his simple contours without his significant mass, his variety and

vivacity without his warmth and restraint. On their own account they

added complication. The sparse economy of Giotto’s best work could never

have appealed to Florence at large. Something richer and gayer was

wanted, more like Florentine life itself as it became after the general

loosening up of manners and morals following the plague of 1348. Its

chronicler, the author of the “Decameron,” fairly represents the new

spirit. The best of the younger painters have indeed something of

Boccaccio’s mentality—his light touch, his charm, his panoramic

richness, his fluid and undisciplined grace. Thus arises what I may call

the panoramic style of fresco painting—superficial, full of episodes and

accessories, still religious in theme, but mundane in spirit, often

cleverly conceived, and very superficially felt. These artists had

grasped neither the meaning of Giotto’s drawing nor the beauty of his

decorative formulas, they saw only his variety and energy. Meanwhile a

great Sienese painter, Ambrogio Lorenzetti, a profound admirer of

Giotto, had worked out a nobly spectacular form of painting in which the

stage setting was elaborate and realistic. He painted much in Florence

about 1334 and his novelties allured the new men. So we find fresco

painting tending in a scenic direction, and panel painting following the

same course more conservatively—not merely in Florence and Siena, but

throughout Northern Italy as well.

[Illustration:

FIG. 25. Giotto’s Assistant at Assisi. Flight into Egypt. Compare

Figure 14.—_Lower Church, Assisi._

]

[Illustration:

FIG. 26. Taddeo Gaddi. St. Joachim Meets St. Anna. Compare FIG.

13_a_.—_Baroncelli Chapel, Santa Croce._

]

Many of Giotto’s immediate pupils are mere names to us. Maso, whom the

sculptor commentator Ghiberti praised for his sweetness, Stefano whom he

dubbed the “ape of nature,” Puccio Capanna—their work must be at Assisi,

but criticism has not succeeded in clearly disengaging it. The nameless

master who executed the Franciscan allegories at Assisi and designed the

stories of Christ’s youthful days, in the adjoining right transept, is

the most accomplished and individual follower of Giotto. He works for

grace, pathos, sumptuousness, and decorative breadth. He is a Giotto

with the angles rubbed down. By comparing Giotto’s Flight of the Holy

Family to Egypt, with the later version at Assisi, Figure 25, we may

grasp the difference between master and scholar. Giotto is brusque,

harsh, noble; the flight through a rocky defile gives a sense of urgency

and peril; the composition carries forward like the ram of a battleship.

In the version at Assisi the flight has become an attractive family

excursion through a romantic valley; the mood is gentle, charming,

unspecific. A moment in an epic has been attenuated into an idyl. This

master never fails to express a dreamy sort of poetry, and in such

compositions as the Massacre of the Innocents, and the Calvary, he

commands a genuine pathos. He is exactly what Giotto might have been,

had he skipped the strenuous Paduan phase, and become a decorator

without the preliminary discipline of the draughtsman. There are reasons

for thinking that this work was done by a shop assistant of Giotto’s,

who for many years directed the decoration of the Lower Church at Assisi

in Giotto’s stead. Some of the work in the Childhood of Christ, I

believe, may be as late as 1330 to 1335.

Taddeo Gaddi is a more definite and less pleasing personality. He was

Giotto’s godson and his assistant for twenty-four years, presumably from

1313 to 1337, as well as his artistic executor. Whether in panel or

fresco, he was an admirable craftsman; in tempera, a fine colorist. His

panels are widely scattered, some ten being in the United States; his

frescoes, all that we need to note, are in Santa Croce. In the

Baroncelli Chapel, just after Giotto’s death, Taddeo finished these

frescoes of the early life of the Virgin, repeating themes which Giotto

had used both in Padua and elsewhere in Santa Croce itself. His way of

competing with Giotto is to stir and add and mix things up. Compare the

meeting of Anna and Joachim at the Beautiful Gate in the two masters;

Giotto at Padua is grave, noble, heartfelt; how he discriminates between

the masculine clutch of the old husband and the tender embrace of the

wife—how drastic the conception is, but also how clear and stately. Poor

Taddeo on the other hand brings the sacred pair together with the bounce

of a modern dance, Figure 26. He brings no brains to bear, and almost no

feelings, just a sprightly and wholly casual inventiveness. Certain

delightful little panels with stories of Christ and St. Francis which he

did in Giotto’s shop for the doors of the sacristy wardrobes of Santa

Croce remind us of the pity that he ever ceased to be an interpreter of

a greater man’s designs. In the fresco of Job’s trials, in the Campo

Santo, Pisa, he seems nearly a great artist. Conceivably he worked on

designs of his late master. At least he had a certain critical sense,

for at an artist’s reunion at San Miniato, about 1360, he told Andrea

Orcagna and the rest of the company that painting had constantly

declined since Giotto and was declining every day. He transmitted, his

sound craftsmanship to a son, Agnolo, who decorated the Choir of Santa

Croce with the legends of the Cross. He carried down the panoramic style

to the end of the 14th century, practicing it with more taste than his

father, achieving a grace without much inwardness or force.

A later contemporary of Giotto’s, Buonamico Buffalmacco,[13] seems to

have inherited something of Giotto’s power, but the identification of

his work is very uncertain, and he lives for us chiefly as an egregious

wag in the pages of the Italian story writers.

[Illustration:

FIG. 27. Giottino. Deposition—_Uffizi._

]

From another contemporary and possibly a scholar of Giotto, Bernardo

Daddi, we have many panel pictures and a few frescoes at Santa Croce. He

is an admirable craftsman, and a sincere illustrator, within his

limitations, applying very competently to panel painting something of

the panoramic realism of Ambrogio Lorenzetti. A prolific artist, his

exquisitely finished little panels are quite common. In America are good

examples in the New York Historical Society, in the Platt Collection,

Englewood, and a more monumental piece in the Johnson Collection,

Philadelphia. He lived well beyond the middle of the century.

Giottino, who possibly is to be identified with Giotto’s pupil Maso, is

a more delicate spirit with unusual resources of pathos. His best work

is an altar-piece of the Deposition, Figure 27, painted about 1360 for

the Church of San Remigio at Florence and now in the Uffizi. A

preference for isolated figures and for vertical lines is noteworthy, as

is the wistfulness of the attendant donors. Similar qualities of

delicate precision as of dispersion are in the frescoes in Santa Croce

which represent the Miracles of Pope Sylvester. The note is feminine and

rather Sienese than genuinely Florentine.

[Illustration:

FIG. 28. Andrea Orcagna. Christ conferring authority upon St. Peter

and St. Thomas Aquinas.—_Strozzi Chapel, Santa Maria Novella._

]

Outside of Giotto’s _bottega_ arose the rare continuers of his

tradition. Such an artist flourished about the middle of the century in

the person of Andrea di Cione, better known by his nickname of Orcagna.

He was more of a sculptor and architect than a painter, a man of dignity

and force, a poet and thinker. Although not a pupil of Giotto, he

studied that master’s work admiringly, and sought to reproduce its

massiveness. Its brusqueness he largely rejected. Instead of sketching

the draperies summarily, he drew the folds carefully after the model; he

liked to treat the panel and wall as a whole, where Giotto had accepted

the tradition of subdivision; he gave to his faces a greater sweetness

and he occasionally attempted foreshortenings and impetuosities of

gesture that Giotto would have avoided. Unluckily Orcagna’s most

important frescoes have perished. We may grasp his nobility in the

altar-piece which he finished and dated in 1357, Figure 28, for the

chapel of the Strozzi family at Santa Maria Novella. The formality of

the composition is noteworthy, as is the stately sweetness of the

Madonna. The subject is Christ delegating his Power and Wisdom

respectively to St. Peter and to St. Thomas Aquinas.

In the same chapel the figure of Christ leaning forward over a cloud and

making the sublime gesture that decrees the end of the world and the

Judgment Day, Figure 29, is probably designed by Orcagna, as are the

larger figures below. We have here one of the freest and grandest

conceptions of the period. The lovely garden-like heaven and the quaint

and ingenious hell on the side walls are by Orcagna’s brother, Nardo di

Cione. The mood is less grave than Orcagna’s, variety counts for more.

The heads of the saints are of a most delicate beauty. Nardo has many of

the qualities of the panoramic painters without their heedlessness. He

represents a compromise between the severity of Giotto and the

diffuseness of his own day. He worked indefatigably until 1366, and his

younger brother, Jacopo, and his imitator, Mariotto, continued the

manner almost into the new century.

Orcagna was perhaps more versatile than critics have supposed. Recently

discovered fragments of frescoes in Santa Croce, Figure 30, show a

drastic power that no other Florentine possessed. The theme is miserable

folk in time of pestilence crying out to Death to end their sorrows. The

entire fresco would have shown Death passing them by and poising the

scythe for prosperous and happy folk beyond. The whole scene exists in

the famous frescoes of the Pisan Campo Santo which, while traditionally

ascribed to Orcagna, are unquestionably of Sienese inspiration. They

will occupy us later. Orcagna’s solitary position in Florence reminds us

that artistic succession is rarely from master to pupil, but from great

soul to great soul across intervening mediocrity.

[Illustration:

FIG. 30. Andrea Orcagna. They call Death in Vain. Fragment from ruined

fresco of the Triumph of Death.—_Santa Croce._

]

[Illustration:

FIG. 29. Andrea Orcagna. Upper part of Fresco of Last

Judgment.—_Strozzi Chapel, Santa Maria Novella._

]

Giorgio Vasari regarded Gherardo Starnina (active before 1400) as an

important link between Giotto and the Renaissance, and if Professor

Suida is right in ascribing the frescoes of the legend of St. Nicholas

in the Castellani Chapel, Santa Croce, to Starnina, Vasari was quite

right. About this mysterious pupil of Antonio Veneziano who worked in

Spain, we really know almost nothing. But the St. Nicholas frescoes have

a grimness and gravity which points back to Giotto and withal a careful

fusion of light and shade which anticipates Masolino and Masaccio.

Meanwhile Giotto’s own great compositions in still undiminished splendor

and impressiveness stood ready to give lessons to the eye and mind that

could read them aright. Before such later panoramists as Niccolò di

Pietro Gerini, Mariotto di Nardo, and Spinello Aretino were gone, that

eye was already busy, in the person of a rugged little boy of San

Giovanni in Valdarno. He may have already been called Masaccio for his

untidiness. He was to rebuild on Giotto and create the grand style of

the Renaissance.

A mere catalogue of those painters who pursued the panoramic method with

ability can hardly be expected. One and all they followed the Sienese

narrative style. Prominent would be certain incomers from other cities,

Giovanni da Milano, Antonio Veneziano, and Spinello Aretino. These are

typical decorators of the last quarter of the 14th century.

[Illustration:

FIG. 31. Andrea Bonaiuti, The Navicella, fresco, closely imitated from

Giotto’s Mosaic at St. Peter’s, Rome.—_Spanish Chapel._

]

We do better to fix our attention upon the most remarkable example of

the Florentine panoramic style, the decoration of the Spanish Chapel,

the chapter house attached to the Dominican Church of Santa Maria

Novella.[14] The work was begun by Andrea Bonaiuti in the year 1365, as

we know from a recently discovered document. As decoration it is

delightful, if rather superficially so. The artist treats his spaces as

wholes, declining to cut them up into oblongs after the earlier fashion.

He covers his great surfaces with ease and taste, has a knack at

illustration, and a fine sense of color. The great Calvary over the

triumphal arch imposes from its very vastness; the triangles of the

cross vault, including a spirited transcript of Giotto’s Navicella,

Figure 31, are composed with clarity and skill; the famous composition

of the Dominican theologian, St. Thomas Aquinas, enthroned above the

Liberal Arts and Sciences, and their representatives in history,

combines an almost Byzantine formality and grandeur with prettiness and

ingenuity in details. But the method is better shown in the decoration

opposite, which represents the dual earthly powers, the Pope and the

Emperor, enthroned equally, and supported by the representatives of the

spiritual orders and secular estates, Figure 32. The group which

symbolizes the right government of society, according to mediæval ideas,

is set before a church which quite faithfully shows what the Cathedral

of Florence was then intended to be. High up in the arch is the goal of

all earthly endeavor—Heaven with Christ enthroned amid the angels; an

altar with a lamb before Him, symbolizing His sacrifice; His Mother

kneeling as intercessor for mankind. The Gate of Heaven with St. Peter

in attendance, is naïvely set above the church on a sort of aerial raft.

Below is a novel realistic touch, the villa-studded sky line of hills

which encloses Florence. The real guide to St. Peter’s presence is

always a Dominican monk, usually St. Dominic himself is intended—the

founder and militant evangelist of the order, as St. Thomas Aquinas was

its systematic theologian. In the lower range of the picture, St.

Dominic confutes the heretics, who tear their wicked books in despair.

Above he vainly beseeches careless gentlefolk at dalliance in an orange

grove; still higher, he leads the truly penitent to Heaven’s gate. At

the foot the Domini Canes (a bad pun for Dominicans) are vigilant. The

moral of the fresco is, happy the world which trusts its worldly and

religious business to the Emperor and the Pope, and its personal

religious problems to the Dominicans. It is a kind of glorified poster

for the order.

In its sprightliness, variety, complication and facile charm, it is a

fine example of the panoramic style. It lacks every quality of

seriousness whether as a composition or in the drawing of the figures.

But its fairy tale profuseness and ease have made it ever since it was

painted, one of the most popular decorations in Italy. Its success shows

the kind of taste with which the few disciplined artists of the

fourteenth century had to contend. Such obstacles have ever been the

fate of the artist who cares enough for his art to practice it

austerely.

[Illustration:

FIG. 32. Andrea Bonaiuti. Dominican Allegory of Church and State.

Fresco.—_Spanish Chapel._

]

Work of the facile and superficial character of the Spanish Chapel

Florence produced in abundance for two generations after Giotto’s death.

His faithful but dull disciple, Taddeo Gaddi, as we have seen, gloomily

foresaw the downfall of the art of painting. But as in a great

personality the recreations and even dissipations seldom permanently

eclipse the greater purpose, so Florence was big enough to indulge for a

time her weaker side. Had Taddeo Gaddi been more intelligent, or even

more hopeful, he would have seen that new masters must arise, and that

there would soon be pictures in Florence at which Giotto come back to

earth would gaze with that humility with which he had once viewed the

marble gods of Rome, with that understanding sympathy which he had borne

to all his fellow mortals.

ILLUSTRATIONS FOR CHAPTER I

ON THE DIGNITY AND WEALTH OF OLD FLORENCE

Giovanni Villani, _Historie_, XII, 4, regrets the passing of decorum

with the advent of the French and the Duke of Athens in 1342, but wealth

increased.

“Formerly the clothing and costumes [of the Florentines] was the most

beautiful, noble and distinguished of any nation, in the manner of the

togaed Romans.” Evidently the look of things favored the art of a

Giotto.

In book XI, ch. 91–93, Villani gives remarkable and quite modern

statistics which I paraphrase and quote, in part from the Giunta

edition, Venice, 1559. The time is about 1340.

“We found by diligence that in these times there were in Florence 25,000

men fit to bear arms, from 15 to 70 years old, among whom there were

1506 nobles.... There were then in Florence 65 fully equipped knights,

though before the middle class which now rules was organized, there were

more than 250 knights.... There was estimated to be 90,000 ... men,

women and children in the city. There is supposed to be generally in the

city 1,500 foreigners, travellers, and soldiers not counting in the

population the clergy, monks, and nuns.... In the outlying districts are

supposed to be 80,000 people. We have found from the rector who baptizes

the children (since for every male who was baptized in San Giovanni—in

order to have the count—was dropped a black bean, and for every female a

white) that for every year in these times there were from 5,800 to

6,000, the males generally exceeding by 300 to 500 a year.

“We find that the boys and girls at [primary] school were from 8,000 to

10,000. The boys who study the abacus (calculation) and arabic numbers,

in six schools, from 1,000 to 1,200. And those who are learning [Latin]

grammar and logic, in four great schools, from 550 to 600.

“The churches, which were then in Florence and in the suburbs, counting

the abbeys, and monastic churches, we find to be 110, of which 57,

parish churches ... 5 abbeys and two priories with 80 monks, 24 convents

of nuns, with more than 500 women, 10 friaries with more than 700

friars, 30 hospitals with more than 1000 beds to lodge the poor and

infirm, and from 250 to 300 chaplain priests.

“The shops of the cloth makers (_arte della lana_) were 200 and more,

and they made from 70,000 to 80,000 bolts, at a value of more than

1,200,000 gold florins, although fully a third part staid in the city

for the workers, without gain for the cloth handlers, and the workers

are more than 30,000 persons....

“The warehouses of the art of the _Calimala_, for the French and

transalpine cloth, were 20, which brought in per year more than 10,000

bolts of a value of 300,000 gold florins, all of which was sold in

Florence....

Banks of money changers 80.... Shops of bootmakers ... 300. The college

of judges, from 80 to 100. And notaries from 600 up, doctors of physic

and surgery 60, and druggists’ shops 100....

“The greater part of the well-to-do, rich, and noble citizens with their

families, staid in the country for four months, and some, more, a

year.”...

“Other dignities and magnificences of our city of Florence I should not

fail to bring to memory, for information of such as shall come after us.

It was, within, well built with many beautiful palaces and houses, and

in these times they were continually demolishing, thus bettering the

building by making it more comfortable and rich, bringing in from

outside the examples for every sort of betterment and beauty. Churches,

cathedrals, friaries of every rule, monasteries, magnificent and rich.

Furthermore, there was no citizen who did not have a country place,

great or small, which was not richly built, indeed far greater buildings

than in the city; and every citizen sinned by inordinate spending,

whence they were thought crazy. But it was so magnificent a thing to

see, that a foreigner, not used to coming in, believed, because of the

rich structures for three miles about, that it was all one city after

the manner of Rome, not to mention the rich palaces, towers, court

yards, terraced gardens, still further from the city, which in any other

country would have been called the rural districts. In short one would

have thought that within six miles of the city were more rich and noble

inhabitants, than, taking them together, two Florences could have

produced. And let this suffice for telling of the facts of Florence.”

GIOTTO’S VIEW OF FRANCISCAN POVERTY

Giotto’s humanistic detachment from the Franciscan doctrine of voluntary

poverty is well illustrated in his poem which is quoted in part from

Dante Gabriel Rosetti’s translation. The original is in G. Milanesis’

edition of Vasari, _Le Vite_, Vol. I, Florence 1878, pp. 426–8.

“Many there are, praisers of Poverty;

The which as man’s best state is register’d

When by free choice preferr’d,

With strict observance, having nothing here.

For this they find certain authority

Wrought of an over-nice interpreting.

Now as concerns such thing,

A hard extreme to me it doth appear,

Which to commend I fear,

For seldom are extremes without some vice,

Let every edifice,

Of work or word, secure foundation find;

Against the potent wind,

And all things perilous, so well prepared—

That it needs no correction afterward.”

A CONTRACT WITH ORCAGNA FOR THE ALTAR-PIECE OF 1357

Tommaso di Rossello Strozzi left a rough note of the terms of the

contract for the altar-piece of his chapel. Doubtless the actual

contract was much fuller. The minute is published by Filippo Baldinucci,

_Opere_, Milano 1811, Vol IV. p. 397.

“Herewith is to be written [on my part] and Andrea called Orcagna that I

Tommaso di Rossello aforesaid have given to paint for the altar-piece

which is made for the altar of [the chapel] in Santa Maria Novella, of a

breadth of five braccia, 1 sol. [over 10 feet] there or thereabouts. The

aforesaid Andrea is to paint in fine and splendid colors; and gold,

silver and everything else are truly to be used in the entire panel and

pinnacles, that is [gold] leaf. Only in the side columns may silver be

used.... And [with] as many figures as [directed] by me Tommaso it shall

be completed. And the said panel to be entirely painted by his own hand.

“[1] 354 in twenty months....

“Should it come about that the aforesaid Andrea should not give it to us

completed and painted.”

“He should pay me for every additional week that he works at the

painting as it shall seem right to the judgment of the here named

arbitrators.”...

“Should it come to more than the aforesaid price, we will take the

judgment of Carlo, Paolo and Fra Jacopo.”

Such is approximately the sense of this very difficult and quite

grammarless annotation of Tommaso Strozzi. The arbitrators must have had

occasion to act, for the panel is dated 1357, two years after the

promised time.

[Illustration:

FIG. 33. Ambrogio Lorenzetti. Madonna of San Francesco.

]