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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 class- room, | 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 I. GioTTo AND THE NEw FLORENTINE HUMANISM Il. SIENA AND THE CONTINUING OF THE MEDIAEVAL STYLE III. Masaccio AND THE NEw REALISM TV. Fra Firtieprpo Lipp1 AND THE NEw NarRRATIVE STYLE V. Dawn oF THE GOLDEN AGE: BOTTICELLI AND LEONARDO DA VINCI VI. THe Gotpen AGE: RAPHAEL AND MICHELANGELO VII. VENETIAN PaIntTING BEFoRE TITIAN VIII. Tirtan aND VENETIAN PAINTING IN THE RENAIS- SANCE. IX. Tue REALISTs AND ECLECTICS TN a PRR ReTORT READING. “5 ¢ . oe 6 oo oe Eke er ys er i PELE ee ee Vil PAGE I 59 109 157 201 263 323 389 451 473 489 491 (OrrA pare Rat 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 some- what 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 paint- ing. 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 I 2 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING ereater 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 Virg'n, 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 great- est 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 tur- reted 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, GIOTTO AND FLORENTINE HUMANISM 3 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 mer- chant 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 young- est 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 them- selves 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, squab- bling 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 pass- ing 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 4. HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING 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 Preach- ers (Dominicans), Santa Maria Novella. In considering this Florence you must think of a hard-headed, full-blooded, am- bitious 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. 4 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 com- pletion, with or without penalty — all this was precisely nomi- nated 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 GIOTTO AND FLORENTINE HUMANISM 5 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 com- petent 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. Ihe 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 al- bumen. The paints were thick and could not be swiftly manipulated; the whole surface set and so hardened that re- touching was difficult. How so niggling a method produced so broad and harmonious effects will seem a mystery to the mod- ern 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. hese panels are glorious in azures, cinnabars, crim- sons, emerald-greens, and whites partaking of all of these hues. 6 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING 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 deli- cacy, 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 forma 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 misstroke 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 every- thing 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 natur-' ally wanted to invest in a frescoed chapel as a wealthy Amer- GIOTTO AND FLORENTINE HUMANISM 7 ican 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’, 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 ex- plained (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 medieval city. She wanted more painting chiefly because of her excep- tional civic pride and prosperity, she wanted better painting because she had moved ahead of the world towards finer, 8 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING 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 di- vergent 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 sup- plying 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 singu- larly 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 Guini- zelli, 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 Flor- ence in melodious verse, and what the poets called the “sweet new style,” 21 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, GIOTTO AND FLORENTINE HUMANISM 9 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 inade- quate. 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 cov- ered with pictorial mosaics. In Sicily, at Messina, Cefalu 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 Vene- tian fens, there again was a beginning of great building. Where- ever 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 Constanti- nople 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 zsthetic fashion IO _ HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING 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 Fic. 1. Byzantine Narrative Style about 1300. Detail from Mosaic Book Covers in the Opera del Duomo. 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 study- ing the Byzantine style we do but imitate the Italian painters who immediately preceded Giotto. Byzantine pictures have come down to us on the largest and on the smallest scale —in the great mosaics and wall paint- ings, 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 con- stantly before his eye; the miniatured psalters, Gospels, lec- tionaries, chorals and prayer books, afforded the patterns from which he drew with little alteration the standard com- positions of the Annunciation to Mary, the Nativity of Christ, GIOTTO AND FLORENTINE HUMANISM 11 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 Fic. 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. traveller still feels awe before those solemn figures of Christ supreme ruler (Pankrator) and his Mother queen of heaven which are seen throned against a background of azure or gold and at- tended 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 deco- rative. The smaller narrative compositions,? 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 12 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING 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 con- trasted 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 anzemic 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 un- felt narratives from the Scriptures served every religious need. It was different when under the leading of St. Dominic and St. Francis,? 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 itrooted. 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. 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. GIOTTO AND FLORENTINE HUMANISM 13 New life called for new forms to express it. We find in sculpture from about the year 1260, that of Niccolo Pisano’s first pulpit — wholly classical in its dignity —a kindred en- deavor in advance of the art of painting. The renewal took three forms: the more conservative spirits accepted the By- Fic. 3. Tuscan Master about Fic. 4. Cimabue. Madonna in 1285. — Otto Kabn, N.Y. Majesty — U ffizi. zantine 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.* 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 14 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING gain, rather loss in strength. Accordingly a vehement spirit like Cimabue,® 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, Fig- ure 4, with solemn angels in attendance and grim patriarchs be- low 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 be- fore 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_ black- ened, 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 GIOTTO AND FLORENTINE HUMANISM — 15 Japanese critic and man of the world, Okakura Kakuzo, used to regard these sooty frescoes in the transepts of the Francis- can 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 Fic. 5. Cimabue. Calvary. Fresco.— Upper Church, Assisi. 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. 16 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING 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 sarcophaghi, the pagan wall Fic. 6. Pietro Cavallini. Dormition of the Virgin. Mosaic. — S. M. in Trastevere, Rome. paintings and the earliest Christian mosaics combined to con- tinue 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 them- selves from Byzantine trammels. But it was a painter, Pietro Cavallini,> 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 GIOTTO AND FLORENTINE HUMANISM _ 17 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 Fic. 7. Pietro Cavallini. Apostles, fresco, from. Last Judgment. — Santa Cecelia in Trastevere. 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 18 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING that is his sufficient glory. There is greater power and knowl- edge than his in the work of such contemporaries as the un- known 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. 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. Caval- caselle 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 struc- ture, 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 man- ner 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 GIOTTO AND FLORENTINE HUMANISM 19 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 Fic. 8. “The Isaac Master.” Esau before Isaac. Fresco. — Upper Church, Assisi. 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. Giotto di Bondone,’ according to the best information we 20 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING 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 de- signs 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 sig- nificant 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 en- trance wall.® ; 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,° 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. I] 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 impor- tant is the variety and vivacity of these narratives. Young GIOTTO AND FLORENTINE HUMANISM) 21 Fic. 10. The Sermon to the: Birds. — Upper Church, . Assisi. Fic. 9. —St. Francis renounces His Fic. 11. St. Francis before the Father. — Upper Church, Assist. Soldan. — Upper Church, Assisi. 22 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING 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; EP be Rite. Fic. 12. Early Sketch Copy after Giotto’s Mosaic of the Navicella. ‘Compare Fig. 31.— Metropolitan Museum, New York. sorcery in the exorcism of the devils from Arezzo; an odd mix- ture 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. 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 GIOTTO AND FLORENTINE HUMANISM — 23 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 re- fine 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 tangiubility 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 24 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING 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 Ognissanti, 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 deco- ration 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 Annun- ciate. Doubtless he wished the repose of his father’s soul, for his father had been a notorious usurer. Dante inconti- nently puts him in hell with other profiteers. Enrico Scro- vegni 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 salva- tion 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. GIOTTO AND FLORENTINE HUMANISM) 25 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— noth- ing in the chapel more simple and stately than these.!® 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 Pas- sion 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 lic. 13. Giotto. Madonna lives are brought into an eternal pul aronedss = Uyiee 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. 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 26 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING thing of beauty out of what would otherwise be a stilted checkerboard arrangement. Next the eye will realize splendid people gravely occupied with solemn acts. There is the strangest blend of passion and Fic. 13a. Giotto. St. Joachim and St. Anna at the Beautiful Gate. —Arena, Padua. decorum. See the eager old man who clutches his wife before a massive city gate while she caresses him tenderly, Figure 13a, 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 attend- ants. Or again, what sinister power in the scene where three Jewish magistrates press money upon a haggard, bearded, GIOTTO AND FLORENTINE HUMANISM 27 nervous man. You do not need the bat-like demon prompting him to know that it 1s 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 Fic. 14. Giotto. The Flight into Egypt.— Arena, Padua. 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 sym- pathy with folded hands, Figure 17. It is what the Gospel ought to look like. How Giotto shows every feeling, push- ing its expression just to the verge, and there stopping, so 28 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING that idyl and tragedy, devotion and wrath, treachery and fealty, fear and courage, each keeps its proper and distinguish- ing 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 nev- ertheless so monumental, and you may well be curious as to the method. You will see readily that these compositions are conceived sculpturally. Every one with the slightest change could be cut in marble. Indeed the seven Vir- tues, Figure 18, and seven Vices impersonated in monochrome on the dado of the chapel are direct Fic. 15. Giotto. Judas betraying jmitations of sculpture. The Christ. — Arena, Padua. 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 GIOTTO AND FLORENTINE HUMANISM — 29 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. Con- Fic. 16. Giotto. The Virgin returning from her wedding.— Arena, Padua. ciseness, economy, force, mass — these are the technical qual- ities 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 mem- ories 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. 30 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING 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 Fic. 17. Giotto. Lamentation over Christ. — Arena, Padua. 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 cer- tain, 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 GIOTTO AND FLORENTINE HUMANISM 31 Arena Chapel, he thereafter rested comfortably on his dis- covery, never was quite as strenuous again, and spent his later years at a new problem — that of decorative symmetry. 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 Francis- can vow — Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience — with a St. Francis in a glory of angels. In these great triangular composi- tions, 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 con- trast of the freely composed Fic. 18. Giotto. Hope. — Arena, Padua. groups with the intricate geomet- rical formality of the rich bor- ders. Yet to ignore the allegory completely would be to forget the master’s intention. We may savor it best in the great com- position: St. Francis Marries his Lady Poverty, Figure 18a. 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. wo urchins at the foot of the little cliff stand ready to stone so unseemly a bride. From the central group to right a2 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING 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 Fic. 18a. Giotto. St. Francis’ Mystic Marriage with Poverty. — Lower Church, Assist. 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 fan- tastic beauty of this and its companion pieces can only be ap- preciated 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. Because the figures are a little slight and the expression a GIOTTO AND FLORENTINE HUMANISM 33 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 com- positions 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 execu- tion 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 assist- ants. 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 pic- tures 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 cruci- fixes in Florentine churches, without inquiring too narrowly whether they are by the master or by scholars. Giotto has de- veloped a singularly noble type. The Christ is no longer con- torted 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 34 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING 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 Giot- to’s hand, the side panels rep- ee Rem etree Iain oe resenting the martyrdom of Peter - St. John the Baptist. — Peruzzi and Paul may well be both de- Chapel, Santa Croce. . 7 signed and executed by the accomplished assistant who carried out the allegories at Assisi. 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. | GIOTTO AND FLORENTINE HUMANISM — 35 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; Fic. 20. Giotto. Resuscitation of Drusiana by St. John. — Peruzzi Chapel, Santa Croce. 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. Upon the Feast of Herod with Salome modestly dancing John Ruskin ™ has expended just eulogies in the petulant yet 36 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING important little book “Mornings in Florence.” What is not- able in the scene is its general decorum and the pathetic inde- cision 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 ade- quately, if very simply, realized. The gesture of the apostle is of majestic power, the contrast of the massive, upright, colum- nar 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 sym- metry. 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 lu- nettes above, through the three compositions on each wall, GIOTTO AND FLORENTINE HUMANISM = 37 there is an architectural axis, sometimes arbitrarily imposed, about which the figures are symmetrically distributed. Often Fic. 21. Giotto. St. Francis renounces his Father. Compare - Fic. 9.— Bardi Chapel, Santa Croce. the scene is a screen with projecting wings as in the St. Francis before the Sultan of Morocco, or a similar forecourt, 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 decora- tive axis of the entire side wall. 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 im- 38 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING mense advance in decorative composition, the accessories at Assisi being trivial and fantastic; not merely with progress towards a gracious symmetry and more massive and impres- sive 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 un- reasonable ordeal forced upon his wise men. The Moslem doc- tors 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 inter- preter 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 delight- fully varied. 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 fres- coes in which he surely had a leading part. From 1330 to 1333 he worked at Naples for King Robert of Anjou. Nothing re- GIOTTO AND FLORENTINE HUMANISM = 39 Fic. 22. Giotto. St. Francis before the Soldan. Compare Fic. 11. — Bardi Chapel, Santa Croce. Fic. 23. Giotto. Death of St. Francis. — Bardi Chapel, Santa Croce. 40 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING mains from this visit except certain shrewd jests which the painter exchanged with the King. In 1334 Florence recalled him, and made him capomaesiro 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 com- pleted by his pupil and artistic executor, [addeo Gaddi. In the last years Giotto conceived vast compositions of a' religious and political sort for the public buildings of the Commune. Fic. 24. Giotto. “Dante, tracing here were allegories of a strong from the ruined fresco in the and weak state, in the Bargello, Bargello. : the prison-fortress of the Cap- tain 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, Fig- ure 24, and the gracious Dormition of the Virgin at Berlin, Frontispiece. | 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 GIOTTO AND FLORENTINE HUMANISM — 41 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 com- position 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 im- agined, 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 re- ality she can but repeat the Paduan chapter of Giotto’s striv- ings, 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 1s 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 wis- dom 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 con- structive skill without ostentation, in his simplicity without bareness, he is the authentic and indispensable link between 42 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING the beauty of Greece and Rome and that of the Italian Golden Age. To know him is to know almost everything that is need- ful about older European painting, not to know him is to lack the very rudiments of an artistic education. Giotto left many followers,” not one of whom at all under- stood 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 fol- lowers 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 GIOTTO AND FLORENTINE HUMANISM — 43 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. Fic. 25. Giotto’s Assistant at Assisi. Flight into Egypt. Compare Figure 14.— Lower Church, Assist. 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 fol- lower 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 44 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING 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 Fic. 26. Taddeo Gaddi. St. Joachim Meets St. Anna. Compare Fic. 13a. — Baroncelli Chapel, Santa Croce. 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 Cal- vary, he commands a genuine pathos. He is exactly what Giotto might have been, had he skipped the strenuous Paduan GIOTTO AND FLORENTINE HUMANISM $45 phase, and become a decorator without the preliminary disci- pline 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 person- ality. 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 admitr- able 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 oJld 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 amodern dance, Figure 26. He brings no brains to bear, and almost no feelings, just a sprightly and wholly casual inventiveness. Cer- tain 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 46 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING 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 toason, 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 Buffal- macco,!®= 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. Fic. 27. Giottino. _ Deposition. From another contemporary — Uffizi. : . 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 exqui- sitely 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, GIOTTO AND FLORENTINE HUMANISM — 47 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 Fic. 28. Andrea Orcagna. Christ conferring authority upon St. Peter and St. Thomas Aquinas. — Strozzi Chapel, Santa Maria Novella. of dispersion are in the frescoes in Santa Croce which repre- sent the Miracles of Pope Sylvester. The note is feminine and rather Sienese than genuinely Florentine. 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 mas- -siveness. Its brusqueness he largely rejected. Instead of sketching the draperies summarily, he drew the folds care- 48 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING fully after the model; he liked to treat the panel and wall as a whole, where Giotto had accepted the tradition of subdivi- sion; he gave to his faces a greater sweetness and he occasion- ally attempted foreshortenings and impetuousities 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, 1s 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 in- defatigably 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 sup- posed. 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 GIOTTO AND FLORENTINE HUMANISM 49 Fic. 30. Andrea Orcagna. They call Death in Vain. Fragment from ruined fresco of the Triumph of Death. — Santa Croce. Fic. 29. Andrea Orcagna. Upper part of Fresco of Last Judgment. — Strozzi Chapel, Santa Maria Novella. 50 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING 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 soli- ‘Florence reminds us that artistic succession tary ‘position: in, is rarely frorn master to pupil, but from great soul to great soul agross intervening mediocrity. Giorgio Vasari regarded Gherardo Starnina (active yi 1400) as an important link between Giotto and the Renais- sance, 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 mys- terious 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 com- positions 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 Niccoléd 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 pano- ramic method with ability can hardly be expected. One and all they followed the Sienése 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. 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 Do- minican Church of Santa Maria Novella The work GIOTTO AND FLORENTINE HUMANISM — 51 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 Fic. 31. Andrea Bonaiuti, The Navicella, fresco, closely imitated from Giotto’s Mosaic at St. Peter’s, Rome. — Spanish Chapel. 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 52 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING transcript of Giotto’s Navicella, Figure 31, are composed with clarity and skill; the famous composition of the Dominican theo- logian, St. Thomas Aquinas, enthroned above the Liberal Arts and Sciences, and their representatives in history, com- bines 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 medizval ideas, is set before a church which quite faithfully shows what the Cathe- dral 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 attend- ance, is naively 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 theolo- gian. 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 Do- minicans. 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 GIOTTO AND FLORENTINE HUMANISM 53 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 Fic. 32. Andrea Bonaiuti. Dominican Allegory of Church and State. Fresco. — Spanish Chapel. 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. 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 54 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING 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. 91-03, Villani gives remarkable and quite modern statistics which I paraphrase and quote, in part from the Giunta edi- tion, 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 GIOTTO AND FLORENTINE HUMANISM — 55 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 learn- ing [ 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, ro 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 trans- alpine 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 td 100. And notaries from 600 up, doc- tors of physic and surgery 60, and druggists’ shops Ioo. .. . “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, ayear.. “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 in- 56 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING habitants, than, taking them together, two Florences could have pro- duced. 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, Ofere, 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 [yold] leaf. Only in the side columns may silver be used... And jwith] as many figures as [directed] by me Tommaso it shall be completed. And the said panel to be entirely painted by his own hand. “C1] 354 in twenty months.... GIOTTO AND FLORENTINE HUMANISM 57 “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 arbi- Eratorsss-, ... “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 gram- marless annotation of Tommaso Strozzi. The arbitrators must have had occasion to act, for the panel is dated 1357, two years after the prom- ised time. Madonna of San Francesco. Ambrogio Lorenzetti. Fic. 33. Cuapter II SIENA AND THE CONTINUING OF THE MEDIEVAL STYLE On the Romantic instability of Siena — Fidelity to Byzantine Ideals — Guido, Coppo, the Master of the Altar-front of St. Peter — Duccio and his great Majesty of the Madonna — His two-fold tendency: to elaborated staged narrative; to sparse and exquisite decoration — Simone Martini and the Idealistic chivalric style—The Brothers Lorenzetti and the popular panoramic style — Second half of the Fourteenth Century — The Fifteenth Century: Sassetta and Giovanni de Paolo — Matteo, Benvenuto and Neroccio — The Renaissance and the downfall of the School, Francesco di Giorgio, Sodoma. As you enter Siena by the wide Camollia gate you will read in Latin ‘‘Siena opens her Heart still wider to thee”: — Cor magis tibt Sena pandit. Thus Siena avows herself the city of the heart. Where Florence studied and calculated, she mused and dreamed; where Florence was solid, she was volatile. For unrewarding idealisms she had a kind of genius. Long after the other Italian communes had seen it was worst pos- sible business to support the emperor, Siena was faithful to that lost cause. Every few years she changed her form of government, and seldom for the better. Merrymaking and pageantry were universal in old Italy, but Siena alone had a Spendthrift Club (Brigata Spendereccia) devoted to continual pleasure, and a poet, Folgore da San Gemignano, to celebrate its gaieties. Siena was ardent in inconstant fashion. Early in the 14th century was found a nude marble Venus so beautiful that it was set up in the great square and thronged with ad- 59 60 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING mirers. Then the war with Florence went badly, and at a few words from a pious fanatic, the citizenry smashed up the image and secretly buried the bits on Florentine soil to bring bad luck to the foe. Naturally no bad luck ensued to Florence, but Siena had enjoyed two delightful emotional crises. You will see why Siena never could produce a realistic art, any more than Ireland has produced one. Her eye was not on the object but on her own state of mind. Thus Florence will produce historians, scientists, and politicians, while Siena will produce saints and miracles. Amid this romantic inconstancy, the continuing thread was the cult of the Blessed Virgin. No other city thought so delicately of her, and no other art has represented her so ideally. Had she not saved the city? In 1259 the Florentine Guelfs and their allies marched with overwhelming force to the very gates of Siena. Ruin was imminent and despair abroad, when by a common impulse the populace marched penitently to the Cathedral and before the rude picture of the Queen of Heaven solemnly committed the city into her hands. In ecstacy of renewed faith the inferior army of Siena fell upon the invaders at Montaperti and utterly routed them. In gratitude Siena remained the city of the Virgin. When in 1310 the painter Duccio replaced the rude effigy of the Madonna of Victory with one of the finest Madonnas known to art, Fig. 37, the whole city suspended business and escorted the picture from the studio to the Cathedral with hymns and litanies in honor of their divine patroness. Nowhere else has painting paid such homage to the Virgin Mary. Inother cities it was enough to represent her enthroned with a handful of angels or saints in attendance. The Sienese painters multiplied the celestial escort until it became a heav- enly court over which the Mother of God presides in sweet majesty. Siena also grasped at the then not quite orthodox sub- ject of the Assumption of the Virgin into Heaven. You see SIENA AND MEDIEVAL STYLE 61 her slender form rising amid a glory of angels more than a hundred years before the theme was common elsewhere. These brief hints will tell of the temper of Siena. You will not expect such a city to be like Florence, interested in facts and charmed by the human spectacle. She will be rather engrossed with the beauty of old legends and in rare forward- looking moments concerned with her own devout imaginings. She will not wish the saints to be like the people one knows, but like denizens of some divine, far-off fairyland. Her painting will not be humanistic but of an unworldly idealism. Such being the temper of Siena, her artists, unlike those of Florence, had no quarrel with the Byzantine style. Its splen- did irreality only needed to be Fic. 34. Guido of Siena. made flexible and gracious. Madonna. — Accademia, Florence. Siena has really no new ideas to express, merely feelings more tender and exquisite. Her pictorial reforms are reverent and gradual, backward-looking, medieval. Her art from 1300 to 1500, as lovely within its narrow limits as the closed garden of the Virgin, has the great interest of teaching us what ca- pacities for growth lay in the medieval tradition itself — what painting in Italy would have been had Siena exercised her temporary might after Montaperti and razed Florence five years before Giotto was born. A little earlier than the year 1225, when Florence called in strangers to adorn the Baptistery with mosaics in the Greek style, Guido of Siena signed and dated 1221 the most 62 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING famous of his madonnas. Unhappily the enthroned Virgin of the Palazzo Pubblico was repainted some fifty years later, a fact which has led many critics unnecessarily to doubt the date! But from half a dozen. other pictures by Guido Fic. 35. Sienese about 1275. Altar-front of St. Peter. — Siena. we may learn that he was a diligent and rather heavy-handed imitator of the current Greek formulas, Figure 34. At the battle of Montaperti the Sienese captured an excellent Flor- entine painter, Coppo di Marcovaldo, and in 1261 he painted the admirable madonna which is still in the church of the Servi. It shows a sensitive use of the Byzantine conventions. There is pensiveness and almost shyness in the face and posture of the Virgin, and loving intentness in that of the Child. Their relation is to each other and not as in earlier madonnas to the devout public. These intimate qualities have been ascribed, I think wrongly, to restoration. But they appear even more emphatically in the entirely unrestored Madonna, Figure 3, SIENA AND MEDIAVAL STYLE 63 in the collection of Mr. Otto Kahn, which I think may be a Coppo”, and is in any case of similar date and feeling. The same process of sweetening the old style while accepting it, is shown in the famous altar-piece of St. Peter in the Acad- emy at Siena, Figure 35. The gaunt figure of the Saint is completely tra- ditional, the little stories of the An- nunciation and Nativity at the side show a new vivacity and a new grace. Siena met the innovating painter more than half way, for the indignant citizens soon marred with their knives _ the crucifiers of the head of the Christian Church. The date of the panel will not be far from 1275, and alréady the painter of genius who was to create the sweet, new style was learning his trade. Fic. 36. Duccio. Ruccellai Of Duccio di Buoninsegna, the Madonna.—Santa Maria Novella, Florence. father of the Sienese school, and everything considered its greatest master, we have numer- ous records,? and by no means all to his credit. He must have had the artistic temperament in a degree then unusual. The court records show half a dozen fines against him, and he was not scrupulous about paying his debts. One forgets these foibles before those Madonnas which are a consummate expression of taste and those narratives which are a triumph of tact and-ingenuity. Duccio’s mind does not grasp the harsher and more heroic emotions, but within the realm of the tender and pathetic he is supreme. His elegance appears in his first important work, the famous Rucella1 Madonna, Figure 36, in Santa Maria Novella at Florence, which tradi- tion erroneously ascribes to Cimabue. It is presumably 64 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING the great panel which Duccio contracted to paint in 1285.4 He was probably young and unconsidered, for he took all the risks, agreeing that the picture might be rejected at the will of the patrons. The Society of Saint Mary the Virgin Fic. 37. Duccio. Madonna in Majesty. — Opera del Duomo, Siena. would have been foolish indeed to reject the most gracious Madonna the world had then seen. Characteristic of Duccio are the swaying curves of the contours and especially of the draperies, the thin, delicately folded robes of the Child and the attendant angels and the sensitively drawn bare feet. Working in Florence and doubtless impressed by Cimabue, Duccio has retained in this early work a certain austerity which gives way in his later work to a more feminine sweet- ness. For that very reason the Rucellai Madonna is perhaps the greatest Madonna of the century, since without loss of the stately Byzantine qualities, she gains the new attributes of grace. It was no wonder that when the name of Duccio had faded out of the Florentine memory, Florence ascribed this noble Madonna to the venerated founder of her native school, Cimabue. Recent criticism has righted the uncon- scious wrong thus done to Siena. , SIENA AND MEDIAEVAL STYLE 65 To mature his style Duccio needed only to intensify the qualities of sweetness and grace which are evident already in the Rucellai Madonna. The stages of his growth are repre- sented in minor works at Siena and in British and Roman collections. But his fame, for the layman, is associated with the magnificent altar-piece which he executed for the Cathedral of Siena, and only the special student need look beyond it. On the gth of October, 1309, Duccio contracted with the trustees of the Cathedral to do a great altar-piece wholly with his own hands, at the rate of sixteen soldi a day and expenses. He promised to take no other work during the painting. It was finished in June of 1311 and carried in solemn procession from the bottega outside the Porta a Stalloreggi to the Cathedral. A chronicler describes the cortege “parading about the Campo, as is usual, all the bells pealing a glory in devotion for so noble a picture as this is... And all that day they kept praying with many alms which were given to poor folk, pray- ing to God and His Mother, who is our advocate, that she defend us in her infinite mercy from every adversity and every ill, and save us from the hands of traitors and foes of Siena.” Most characteristic of the febrile patriotism of Siena is this constant dread of the traitor. About a year before this ceremony the trustees enlarged the scheme for the picture, making an additional contract for thirty-eight stories to be paid at the rate of two florins and a half each. These were put on the back of the altar-piece, covering very fully the life of Christ and that of the Virgin. Thus the front of the altar-piece represents the decorative and monumental ideals of Sienese painting while the back exemplifies its feeling for narrative. Everything that Sienese painting was to be is already in germ in this marvellous work. In depicting the Virgin ‘‘in Majesty,” Figure 37, Duccio has magnified the theme. Earlier pictures show only a hand- ful of angels in attendance. Here we have a cloud of celestial 66 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING witnesses, the four patrons of Siena kneeling in the foreground, at the sides charming alternation of grim, bearded evangelists, orientally soft girl martyrs, and youthful archangels. Seven years earlier Cimabue had conceived a similar great Majesty for the Church of Santa Chiara at Pisa.6 Doubtless Duccio had seen it, and, though it is lost to us, we may assume, that the Sienese artist outdid his prototype both in sweetness and splendor. In many ways Duccio’s Majesty is highly traditional. It shows the Byzantine horror of voids, is a little crowded. But this defect would be less apparent if it were raised on its histor- lated base (predella) with its original pinnacles above. Every- thing derives from Byzantine exemplars, reverently improved in a realistic direction. Duccio has dared to paint the Christ as a laddie; and not as a little old man; he has shown the soft forms of His body through light draperies; he has kept the austerity of the Byzantine apostles but has attenuated their harshness; he has worked the insipid female masks of the older art into forms of a positive and dreamy grace. One feels the tender mood of the work in the Latin jingle at the foot of the throne, typical of dozens of similar dedications in Siena: Mater Sancta Dei Sis caussa Senis requel Sis Duccio vita Te quia pinxit ita which I may rudely paraphrase: Holy Mother of God: grant Siena rest, Grant life to Duccio, — he did his best. All the sensibility of the City of the Virgin is in these prattling _ rhymes with which they loved to hallow and offer great pic- tures. | If the front of this panel shows only moderate innovations, SIENA AND MEDIZAVAL STYLE 67 the case is not so for the back. The two score stories from the Bible or early Christian legend, in the distribution of the figures follow faithfully the standard Italo-Byzantine compo- sitions. Where Duccio steps in is in bettering the forms, Fic. 38. Duccio. Entry into Jerusalem; Christ Washing the Apostles’ Feet; Last Supper. From the back of the great Madonna. — Opera del Duomo, , Siena. giving grace to the draperies, and animation to the gestures — above all in providing contemporary architectural accessories, and coping with the problem of space. He also carries to their ultimate refinement certain decorative formulas which the Byzantine painters had glimpsed but not fully realized. Thus two quite opposed tendencies pass into Sienese painting from Duccio; — a rather small preoccupation with accessories: and the problem of space, and a pure zstheticism concerned’ 68 HISTORY OF ITALIAN. PAINTING with finesses of decorative arrangement — in short, the prose and the poetry of Sienese painting. Sienese narrative painting tends to be scrupulous about details and inscenation, quite as a good story-teller naturally provides incidents that make for plausibility. We may see how Duccio’s mind works in the familiar theme of Christ entering Jerusalem, Figure 38. Duccio sets the spectator in a garden with an open gate, thus throwing the scene back a little. Above the procession and the rejoicing throng rises a city wall, and still higher against the sky bristle Gothic towers and spires. ‘hus the theme gains picturesqueness and variety. One forgets that there is hardly space for the welcoming throng before the gate, and that the donkey’s four feet are on a level although he is going up hill. These little maladjustments show that while Duccio took infinite pains in inventing the setting, he borrowed the figure groups bodily from earlier Byzantine compositions in which the setting was simpler. In this piecing-together process he turns some pretty sharp corners, but he never sacrifices clarity and expressiveness. In the scene where the maid servant catches the Galilean burr in Peter’s voice, Figure 39, and asks if he be not a fol- lower of Jesus, we find Duccio’s method quite at its best. Nothing could be better than the sudden turn of the girl with one foot on the steps. Fine, too, is the concentration of the crowd on the exciting problem of gossip. Well-observed, their actions as they warm their feet and hands at the fire. Vivid, too, the impulsive gesture of Peter as he denies the charge, The place, a court yard with a staircase leading right into the picture above, which represents the court room where Jesus is being questioned, is most elaborately planned. One looks back through a portal into farther spaces. All this was so new and interesting that I presume the Sienese have never noticed to this day that the seated group would never fit in the space assigned to it and that the positions-of the figures SIENA AND MEDIAVAL STYLE 69 are ambiguous. The picture does admirably its work of telling a story spiritedly, and that is enough. Duccio’s Calvary, Figure 41, is remarkable for breadth, spectacular effectiveness, and a measured pathos. As usual Fic. 40. Duccio. The Marys Fic. 39. Duccio. Peter denies at the Tomb. — Opera del Duomo. Christ.— Opera del Duomo, Siena. he multiplies actors and incidents while keeping the orderli- ness of the arrangement. The slightness of all the forms, their little weight and uncertain balance are apparent. And there is, on the same principle of taste, a similar attenuation of emotion. Where Giotto at Padua gave stark tragedy, Duccio offers a gentle flutter of restrained grief. Such is the average of these narratives, clear, picturesque, circumstantial, infused with a generalized and never very intense emotion. There are some, mostly composed with few figures, which reveal a great fastidiousness of arrangement. In such a composition as the Marys at the Tomb, Figure 40, Duccio reveals himself as pure zsthete, as consummate mas- ter of linear composition. The motive is essentially insignifi- cant, merely that the Marys shrunk at the sight of the angel at the tomb, but out of that motive of withdrawal is wrought through the little panel a lovely rhythm to which everything contributes — the rise of the cliffs and their crinkly edges, the contrasting angles of the tomb and its impossibly tilted 70 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING lid, the reciprocal curve of the angel. We grasp in the picture a general truth which reaches far beyond Duccio and Siena, Fic. 41. Duccio. Calvary. — Opera del Duomo. that a too conscious struggle for style precludes any complete expression of emotional significance. For this picture is as trivial as a narrative as it 1s exquisite as a decoration. Duccio, who disappears from our sight about the year 1318, SIENA AND MEDIAVAL STYLE 71 fixed once for all the character of the Sienese school. In narrative it was to adopt the placid and tender tone of legend, most unlike the urgent and dramatic mood of Giotto. The Sienese artist was too reverent to raise the question how did Fic. 42. Simone Martini. Madonna in Majesty. Fresco. — Palazzo Pubblico, Siena. this happen, and how did the persons feel; he asked rather “How do we feel about it as believers?”? The beauty of the work, then, is not that of outer reality but of revery and meditation. It never has the tang and variety of good Floren- tine narrative painting, but within its lovingly modulated monotony, Sienese narrative painting is supremely charming. Duccio also started in Siena a somewhat worried and petty concern with accessories, architecture, complications of per- spective. He inaugurated a tradition of material splendor in gilding, tooling, delicate graduation of color which remained the glory of Sienese painting for nearly two centuries. So 72, HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING far as we know he painted only in tempera on panel, and the Sienese generally were to triumph in this feminine form of work rather than in the masculine methods of fresco. Finally Duccio took over from Byzantine art and perfected cer- tain finesses of highly simplified and abstract composition, a pure zstheticism distinctly Sienese and wholly alien to the warm humanism of Florence. You will find this austerely lovely style at its best in Simone Martini, and surviving as late as Sassetta and the middle of the fifteenth century. After Duccio, Sienese painting divides itself into two ten- dencies, one aristocratic, chivalric and esthetic, deriving from his decorative manner; the other popular, narrative and realistic, deriving from his minutely staged scenes on the back of the great altar-piece. Of the aristocratic style Simone Martini is the greatest exemplar, of the popular style, the brothers Lorenzetti. Simone Martini was born in 1283 or thereabouts. We first meet him as an artist in the great frescoed Majesty of the Virgin, Figure 42, completed in 1315 for the Palazzo Pubblico, Siena. The arrangement is like that of Duccio’s Majesty, finished only five years earlier, and the facial types are generally those of Duccio. But the great fresco gains clarity and impressiveness from the added space, from the picturesque motive of a canopy, from the isolation and eleva- tion of the Madonna above her escort, and from the rich Gothic forms of the throne, which are a novelty in painting, While most of the faces show the orientalism of Duccio, the Madonna has the level-browed, intent character of Gothic art, and the Child is realistic. Gothic again is the graceful border with its fine medallions, and the bright colors of the whole. It is the most splendid enthroned Virgin in the world, and she is conceived chivalrically as a sort of tournament queen with her paladins upholding a canopy, and angel pages on their knees offering roses and lilies. SIENA AND MEDIAVAL STYLE 75 To the Sienese this was a political picture, as a rhymed inscription in Italian shows. ‘The saintly patrons of Siena address the Virgin: “Angelic flowers, roses and lilies With which the heavenly meadow is adorned, Delight me less than do good counsels. ‘But sometimes I see such as verily Despise me and my city betray, And gain praise the more for evil words, With such as merit condemnation.” The Virgin answers the saints patrons somewhat evasively: “Fix my delights in your minds, So that I shall, as ye wish, Fulfil your honorable requests. But if the powerful molest the weak, Oppressing whether with shame or harm — Let not your prayers be made for these Nor for whomsoever betrays my city.” In Simone’s work this great Majesty is an exception. He preferred generally to work on a more restricted scale, to burn the lamp of zsthetic sacrifice. I can merely allude to the great idealized portrait of St. Louis of Toulouse, in S. Lorenzo, Naples. It was painted for King Robert of Anjou, whose kneeling figure appears in the picture, sometime after 1317. The thing is resplend- ent in gold and azure, adorned Fic. 43. Simone Martini. St.Martin by curiously twisted Gothic Knighted. — Lower Church, Assist. borders; in sentiment it is impassive as a Buddhist painting. 74. HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING About the year 1325, we may surmise, Simone was called to Assisi to fresco the Chapel of St. Martin in the Lower Church. He set upon the walls so many fairy tales, tender and sprightly in sentiment, provided with the few essential | Fic. 44. Simone Martini and Lippo Memmi. The Annunciation. — Uffizi. accessories that a rapid story-teller would need. What more charming than the boy Martin praying while they bind on him the equipment of a knight, Figure 43, and musicians sound a fanfare! What more gallant than the lad setting out on crusade against the Teutons who lurk in a cleft of the background! This gracious childlike quality, quite akin to the tender phase of Duccio, is exceptional in Simone, who habit- ually is the strenuous decorator. His sparse and austere methods appear clearly in the commemorative fresco of Guidoriccio, hired general of Siena, and conqueror of Sassoforte. It is in the Palazzo Pubblico SIENA AND MEDIAVAL STYLE 76 and duly dated 1328. Nothing is realistic but the horse and rider. They are isolated, hold alone a field made up of pure symbols for camps, and fortresses and craggy hill-tops, yet the martial effect is unmistakable and the composition most quaintly impressive. 7 The quintessence of Simone’s later art is in the famous Annunciation of the Uffizi, Figure 44. In order to justify the most nervously exquisite of linear arrangements he has chosen the least significant moment of the event. His Virgin is merely a sullen princess resenting an intrusion; the Gabriel, an etherialized courtier pleading a cause with apologies. But the contrast of the advancing and shrinking motives gave Simone precisely what he wanted. He builds up areas richly colored or brocaded, bounded by sharp curves, relieved by flutters and spirals of flying drapery, and accentuated by such details as the olive twigs and the lily which have the crisp incisiveness of finest metal work. As a triumph of pure decoration Gothic painting has nothing better to show than this lovely panel which was finished in 1333 for the chapel of Sant’ Ansano at Siena. It has little quality of heart in it, and no reverence save that of consummate work- manship. 7 Great honors awaited Simone. He was called to the exiled papal court at Avignon in 1339, met Petrarch, painted Pe- trarch’s Laura and is lauded in one of the poet’s sonnets. Of Simone’s work at Avignon we have only a few small panels scattered between Antwerp, Paris, Liverpool, and Berlin. The compositions, most of which belonged to a composite altar-piece depicting Christ’s passion, waver between his old simple style and a crowded and animated mood reminiscent of Duccio, and influenced by the Lorenzetti. Simone is un- able to resist the universal tendency towards diffuse narrative, and in so far as he yields to it, he is less than himself. Christ Bearing His Cross, in the Louvre, exemplifies the extravagance 76 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING and morbidness of this latest manner, Figure 45. His strength lies in sacrifice and abstraction, his real affinities are the contemporary Buddhist painters of China and Japan, though of course he knew nothing of them. He died in 1344, leaving behind him a tradition of fastidious artistry which was potent in Siena for over a cen- tury. As late as 1450, Lorenzo Ghi- berti informs us in his “‘Com- mentaries,”? the Sienese regarded Simone Martini as their greatest painter. He differed from them, preferring, himself, Ambrogio Lorenzetti. ‘This was an emi- nently Florentine choice, Am- brogio’s warmth, concreteness, and elaboration were on the whole Florentine. He worked for several years at Florence, must have known Giotto, cer- tainly studied him with discern- ing admiration. With his elder brother, Pietro, Ambrogio Lorenzetti gave to Duccio’s tradition of detailed narrative painting its perfected form. They were great fresco painters, and most characteristic as such. In panel painting they are less original, but they bring into this highly conventional art a great ardor and curiosity. They represent the popular average of Siena as Simone Martini represented its aristocratic minority. We first meet Pietro Lorenzetti as an artist in the altar- back at the Pieve, Arezzo, ® Figure 46, which was finished in 1320. It is an ancona, or compartmented piece and the most splendid that has come down in Romanesque form. The fig- Fic. 45. Simone Martini. Christ bearing His Cross. — Louvre. SIENA AND MEDIEVAL STYLE 77 ures are of two sorts. The Madonna is of intent Gothic type, and the fine motive of holding off the Christchild at elbow length in order to see him better is borrowed from Giovanni Pisano, who in turn took it from French Gothic sculpture. Fic. 46. Pietro Lorenzetti. Madonna with Saints, 1320. — Pieve, Arezzo. So are the forms above in the Annunciation new and graceful, while the little boxed room with its plastic column is also novel. The Assumption of the Madonna in the highest pin- nacle is probably the earliest occurrence of this famous Sienese theme in painting. But all the figures of saints in the three orders of the side panels are taken almost without change from Duccio’s great altar-piece. It would be interesting to trace Pietro’s emancipation through a dozen panels. No one better combined dignity with grace, and feeling, and splendor. 78 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING His work in fresco is fragmentary and confused with that of his younger brother. We are certain of nothing except a frag- ment of a deeply felt Calvary in the Church of St. Francesco, at Siena. Many critics ascribe to him the agitated and wildly Fic. 47. Pietro Lorenzetti, or Follower. St. Francis receiving the Stigmata. Fresco. — Lower Church, Assisi. picturesque frescoes of the Passion in the left transept of the Lower Church at Assisi.9 But this, I think, is a mistake. Pietro is never in his certain works so lively and indecorous and casual. We have to do with an artist influenced by Duccio working about 1330, Pietro himself may appear as the Stigmatization, Figure 47, and one or two of the other simpler compositions. The other frescoes are chiefly interesting as showing the dangers of the panoramic method of Siena. Take the Last Supper, Figure 48. The theme is simply lost in the fantastic richness of the accessories. It is hard to find Christ or Judas, for the eye seeks the radiating rafters or ee a SIENA AND MEDIZVAL STYLE 79 the scullery where cats lurk and eager scullions wipe the dishes. In the Birth of the Virgin, dated 1342, Figure 49, Pietro spoils a carefully studied and well-felt picture by elaboration Fic. 48. School of Pietro Lorenzetti. The Last Supper. Fresco. — Lower Church, Assisi. of the setting. The frame is conceived as the plastic front of a Gothic room within and behind which, spaces are multiplied confusingly. Here the pedantic preoccupation with the prob- lem of space offends the eye and destroys the unity of what in a simpler setting would be a monumental composition. It illustrates the dangers of that smaller realism which from Duccio down afflicted the more progressive painters of Siena. Such a picture enables us to appreciate the tact and thought- fulness with which Ambrogio Lorenzetti approached his narrative themes. Ambrogio Lorenzetti was born about the beginning of the century. In 1331 and later he painted remarkable frescoes 80 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING for the Church of St. Francis. These if complete would afford the most interesting comparisons with Giotto at Florence, but the two that remain are among the best narrative paintings Fic. 49. Pietro Lorenzetti. Birth of the Virgin. — Opera del Duomo, Siena. of the time. What will first strike the observer in the story of St. Louis of Toulouse renouncing his throne as he takes the Franciscan vow, Figure 50, is the variety and orderliness of the emotions. The devotion of the saint is well offset by the intense, melancholy curiosity of his brother Robert, who becomes king through the sacrifice. The audience is divided into admiring Franciscans and idly marveling courtiers, the ee SIENA AND MEDIAVAL STYLE SI whole well dominated by the kindly and reverend figure of the Pope. Remarkable is the methodical division of the spaces. A slender column establishes the picture plane and sets the figures back. A sort of desk in a hollow square de- Fic. 50. Ambrogio Lorenzetti. Prince Louis of Toulouse receives the Franciscan Vow. — San Francesco, Stena. fines and isolates the monastic group, while the courtiers have their appropriate location in a third plane of alcoves. Florence has next to nothing of this sort at this period, and it may be noted that this careful division of spaces is not mat- ter of display and curiosity as in Duccio, but is logical and effective as regards the persons of the narrative. Of similar significance, but more dramatic and picturesque, is the martyrdom of the Franciscan missionaries before the Sultan of Morocco. The elaborated spaces make for clarity, the entirely professional andimpersonal cruelty of the Moorish tyrant and his bodyguard is splendidly caught and effectively 82 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING contrasted with the courageous submission of the martyrs. Lorenzo Ghiberti praises the energy and character of this work, and the observer of today feels as deeply its romantic appeal. All the figures are set on receding platforms, the Fic. 51. Ambrogio Lorenzetti. Madonnain Majesty. — Massa Marittima. problem of space is solved along lines of intelligent literalism. It would be a pleasure to dwell on the Madonnas of Am- brogio. The tragic Madonna of 8. Francesco, Figure 33, the Madonna with St. Dorothy and St. Lucy, in the Siena Academy, the Virgin in Mr. Dan Fellowes Platt’s collection are among thebest. Nootherearly Italianso combined nobility with motherly warmth. His splendor and sweet dignity may best be felt in the Majesty of the Virgin, Figure 51, in the little town of Massa Marittima. The central motive, Mary and the Child em- bracing, 1s almost Ambrogio’s invention. Herings the changeson it in lovely modulations, while always retaining monumen-_ tality. This picture is as stately as Duccio’s Majesty, and SIENA AND MEDIEVAL STYLE 83 as resplendent as Simone Martini’s, while having qualities of ardor and fancifulness all its own. The fairy-like Virtues on the steps of the Madonna’s throne especially show the rich vein of pure fantasy which accompanied Ambrogio’s robust- ness. The picture may be dated about 1336 or later. Previous to its painting Ambrogio had passed some years at Florence, where he must have studied and known Giotto, and where he himself influenced powerfully the beginnings of the new panoramic style. Whatever frescoes he himself did there have perished, and the only memorials of his visit are certain delightful little panels telling with vivacity and utmost cir- cumstantiality the legends of St. Nicholas. At Florence he must have analyzed Giotto’s great political frescoes, now lost, which depicted in symbols good and bad government. ‘These were surely the inspiration for the political symbols and illus- trations which Ambrogio, in the year 1337 and later, painted in the great hall of the Palazzo Pubblico at Siena. The most famous is the Allegory of the State. The Com- mune sits enthroned, above in the air are the theological vir- tues — Faith, Hope and Charity; seated at the side are the four secular virtues — Prudence, Temperance, Justice, and Fortitude — and with them two additional personifications useful to a state — Magnanimity and Peace. The graceful re- laxed figure of Peace, Figure 52, with her filmy drapery is famous. Below the platform on which the Commune sits with attendant virtues, are the grim, disciplined forms of men-at-arms and a throng of magistrates and citizenry. At the left aresym- bolized Concord and Justice as the supporters of a well-ruled state. Here the symbolism is childishly obvious. Concord holds her smoothing plane. From her hand go strings which bind in fellowship a group of citizens below and lead above to the figure of Justice. Still higher is Wisdom. Justice deals punishment with one hand and grants aid with the other; the Middle Ages never admitted that Justice was merely puni- 84. HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING tive. The figures of Justice and Concord are superb,— Am- brogio’s Madonna type on a heroic scale. As a pictorial representation of the finest medizeval ideas of statecraft, this fresco is of incomparable interest. As a decoration it is hardly successful. ‘The theme has hampered the artist, the handling of the figures in several scales with the largest above, produces confusion and _ topheaviness. Beautiful in the parts, it is disappointing in the whole. Far better merely as decoration is the companion fresco which represents the Effects of Good Government, Figure 53. We have a peaceful city, the entrancing spectacle of Siena as she was about the year 1339. Girls are dancing a carol in the foreground with the quaintest dignity, mounted merchants are passing, and if the picture were better preserved, we should as they still call themselves ce b see the mechanics — or “‘artists’ in Italy — working cheerily in their shops. In its richness without confusion, this is the very triumph of the panoramic realism which Ambrogio made popular throughout Italy. There are many more frescoes in this series, mostly by imitators of Ambrogio. The Sienese region is full of works by him or by his faithful followers. His panel pictures are in many galleries of Europe and America. ‘They all confirm the record of Ghiberti that Ambrogio had the habits of a nobleman — a great sympathy, a fine scrupulousness, a real magnanimity. Certain contemporaries seem greater, Giotto surely, Simone Martini perhaps, but no Italian painter until Raphael himself reveals so complete and harmonious a devel- opment. We find no trace of the brothers Lorenzetti after 1348. Presumably they perished in the great plague of that year. For a century after the plague year, 1348, the painters of Siena imitated either the narrative realism of Ambrogio or the decorative sparseness of Simone Martini. It is customary to align them as of one camp or the other. We may indeed SIENA AND MEDIAVAL STYLE 85 Fic. 52. Ambrogio Lorenzetti. Fic. 164. Luca Tomme. — The Peace, from the Fresco of Good Assumption of the Virgin. — Government. — Palazzo Pubbli- Farves Coll., New Haven, Conn. co, Siena. Fic. 53. Ambrogio Lorenzetti. Results of Good Government — The Peaceful City. Fresco. — Palazzo Pubblico, Siena. 86 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING say that such painters as Lippo Memmi, Andrea Vanni, and Naddo Ceccarelli faithfully echo Simone, while such a master as the influential Bartolo di Fredi, who is traceable as late as 1388, seems completely Lorenzettian. But most of the painters follow freely both tendencies, employing Simone’s formulas in altar-pieces with few figures, and Ambfogio’s in narrative. Such eclecticism produced abundantly works of charm, for delicate sentiment and ornate workmanship, but rather few works of originality. Perhaps because of willingly accepted limitations, the average is higher than that of Florence. Throughout Italy it was a more popular style than the Floren- tine. It dominated the coast region from Naples to Valencia, penetrated into Umbria and the Adriatic marshes, and even got a temporary foothold in Florence itself. It fitted in better with medizval ideals than the art of Giotto and Orcagna, which implied classical antiquity and anticipated the human- ism of the Renaissance. On the whole Sienese art runs down after the Lorenzetti died, losing the robustness which Am- brogio had learned of Giotto, but its decline is gentle and in- terrupted by beneficent reactions towards its established glories. We may pass rapidly, and chiefly considering types, the fifty-odd years between the Lorenzetti and the new century. Luca Tommé is credited with an exquisite little Assumption, Figure 54, in the Jarves Collection at Yale University. The picture, though it may be as late as 1370, repeats loyally the formulas which Pietro Lorenzetti invented nearly fifty years earlier. Perhaps Bartolo di Fredi, a rather superficial and overfecund artist, best represents the average condition as the fourteenth century closed. In such a panel as the Adoration of the Magi, in the Siena Academy, Figure 55, we see the familiar theme for the first time expanded in a Lorenzettian sense. It becomes a pageant, probably under the influence of contemporary mystery plays. It is best conceived in the little scenes in the background; the facial types and the simplified SIENA AND MEDIAVAL STYLE 87 setting on the whole recall Simone Martini. In other narra- tive pictures Bartolo vies with Ambrogio Lorenzetti in com- plication of planes and architecture. On the whole he is a rather faint echo, but his note while thin is also true. The declining century produced only one robust painter in Siena, the mysterious Barna whose damaged frescoes of the Fic. 56. Barna. The Transfigura- tion. — Collegiata, S. Gemignano. Fic. 55. Bartolo di Fredi. Adora- tion of the Magi. — Siena. Passion we see in the Collegiate Chureh of San Gemignano. The forms are those of Simone Martini, the compositions even more sparse than his, denuded of all accessories, and power- fully impressive for this reason. The mood is brusque and tragic, with nothing of Sienese sweetness. Barna seems a kind of provincial Giotto misplaced and unrealized in the Sienese country. In the fresco of the Transfiguration, Figure 56, he rises to sublimity. Fra Angelico will merely repeat him in San Marco sixty years later. Vasari tells us that Barna died from a fall from his painting scaffold in 1381, and that he was then young. If so, his originality was tremendous, for he cleared away ruthlessly all the delightful but trivial stage furniture so diligently collected by Duccio and the Lorenzetti. | Modern criticism ascribes to him several panels, and I venture 88 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING to add to the list the simple and stately Marriage of St. Cath- erine in the Boston Museum of Art. Certainly it is one of the most serious creations of the period. The type of the Christ and the concise and characterful arrangement seem to mark Fic. 57. The Three Living and Three Dead, detail from the Loren- zettian fresco, The Triumph of Death. — Campo Santo, Pisa. it as a fine Barna. The base is interesting, representing the composing of a blood feud, and Miracles of St. Michael and St. Margaret. While the simple pattern continues the tradi- tion of Simone, Barna avoids Simone’s linear grace-notes. The finical element of the predecessor yields to a kind of real- ism. Barna is really the critic of the Sienese school. He silently insists that one may be decorative without too much artifice, and dramatic without overtaxing the stage carpenter, A very solitary and elevated spirit, to whom full justice has not yet been done. Most remarkable among the works inspired by the Loren- zetti is the coarsely effective Triumph of Death, Figure 57. in the famous cemetery cloister, Campo Santo, at Pisa. It represents the hazards of the mortal life in view of certain death and judgment. At the left a royal hunting party 1s a SIENA AND MEDIAVAL STYLE 89 stopped short by the sight and stench of three festering bodies in coffins. The Hermit, Saint Macarius, points the obvious lesson that kings and lords and fair ladies will turn to dust. In the centre, miserable folk beckon and cry to Death to descend and put them out of their distress. The harridan death ignores the prayer and flies over a pile of corpses towards a gay garden party. Death loves to cut down the young and gay and happy, leaving the old and crippled to prolonged sorrow. In the upper left hand corner you have monks going about their quiet pursuits. The whole adjoining fresco is given up to the lives of such desert saints. At the upper right are angels and fiends struggling for little nude forms that represent human souls. This motive is a sort of overflow from a picture of the Last Judgment. The grim moral of the three pictures is that the worldly life is one of mortal peril, which may best be avoided by renouncing the world and join- ing a monastic order. The work was completed about 1375, is in the rougher following of the Lorenzetti, and has been famous ever since it was painted on the cloister wall. En- tirely Sienese in its conception, in its ruggedness it transcends the usual softness of the school. It is the last significant work of the 14th century. Siena passed into the fifteenth century without greatly changing her art. In the work of such traditional figures as Taddeo Bartoli one may observe a certain coarsening of the tradition. Mere splendor tends to replace the old delicacy, narrative painting becomes ever more complicated and con- fused. The latter tendency is manifested in frescoes which Domenico di Bartolo painted, between 1440 and 1443 for the Hospital of the Scala, Figure 58. Their crowded pictur- esqueness grows legitimately out of the Lorenzettian tradition, as does the elaboration of architectural accessories. But the work also implies a certain knowledge of the current Floren- tine discoveries in linear perspective and in architecture. A go HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING small ingenuity runs pretty wild in these decorations, valuable as they are in picturing the times. About the time these frescoes were designed, a renovation of Sienese painting was being made along divergent lines by Fic. 58. Domenico di Bartolo. Clothing the Naked, from fresco series, the Seven Acts of Mercy. — Scala Hospital, Siena. Stefano di Giovanni, nicknamed Sassetta," and by the eager eccentric, Giovanni di Paolo. In both cases we have a reac- tionary reform. Sassetta restudies devoutly Simone Martini and the Lorenzetti, infusing his own tender mysticism both into decoration and narrative. In a manner he combines the two great currents of Siena’s past. We may best approach him through the triptych of the Birth of the Virgin in the Collegiate church at Asciano, Figure 59. It is his earliest work painted not much later than 1428 when, being thirty five years old, he joined the Painters’ Guild. The picture is conceived in the strictest Lorenzettian fashion, the frame being treated as the front or extension of the painted archi- tecture. Aside from this carefully constructed setting, with its successive spaces, the casual and familiar distribution of SIENA AND MEDIAVAL STYLE QI the figures suggests strongly Pietro Lorenzetti. But the rich accessories in Sassetta’s hands are delicately selected, the humble gestures have an artless grace, the secondary figures such as the brocaded handmaid entering from the rear are Fic. 59. Sassetta. The Birth of . the Virgin. — Asciano. Fic. 60. Sassetta. Marriage of St. Francis to Poverty. — Chantilly, France. fascinating in their own right. An air of alert gentleness runs through the picture. It is shared by persons of all ages. Such episodes as the chatting of two old men before a respect- fully listening urchin add nothing to the story but strongly reinforce the faery charm of the whole. Winsomeness has supplanted the monumental quality of the older school. Above in the side gables are the scenes of the passing of the Virgin’s soul and her funeral procession, both conceived in the manner of the Lorenzetti. But the familiar forms are singularly ani- mated by a new spirit of tenderness. By a paradox these little stories are really more like Duccio than any intervening work. Sassetta painted seven years on his masterpiece, the now Scattered ancona for the Franciscan Church at Borgo San 92 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING | Sepolcro. The central panel was a St. Francis in ecstacy, now in Bernard Berenson’s collection. On the back were eight of the legends of the “Fioretti.”” The panel was finished in 1444. Especially delightful is the panel at Chantilly which Fic. 61. Sassetta. Temptation of St. Antony. — Farves Coll., New Haven, Conn. represents St. Francis’s mystical betrothal with Poverty, Figure 60. This scene is before Monte Amiata, spaced off from the group by checkerboard fields. The maidens, Chas- tity and Obedience, sway lily-like beside their more resolute sister, Poverty, upon whose timidly offered hand the little saint firmly fixes a ring. Above, the celestial trio rises over the mountain line, Poverty turning a regretful face to her humble bridegroom. The simple pattern with its swaying lines derives from Simone Martini, but there is none of his SIENA AND MEDLEVAL STYLE 93 petulant superiority in it, none of his nervousness. The realm is not the airless heights of a pure zstheticism but a very human dreamland. Again Duccio at his best is the closest analogy. Bernard Berenson in his admirable little book 4 Painter of the Franciscan Legend well describes the technical perfection of such work as this. It is conceived in ‘ which have in themselves an energy and vitality, that, whether they are representative or calligraphic, give off values of move- ment, and values of movement have the power to suggest the unembodied, life unclogged by matter, something in brief that comes close to the utmost limits of what visual art can ‘outlines do to evoke spirit.” Apart from these sublimated reveries of Sassetta which express themselves in utmost delicacy of line, hue, and touch, he had a refreshing, drastic, almost a humorous side, which may be exemplified in a Temptation of St. Antony, Figure 61, in the Jarves Collection at New Haven. Beside his coral-red hut in a desert bounded by a wood that seems the world’s end, the Saint starts away from a demure and very plain little girl. He is perplexed, divining rather than see- ing the tiny bats’ wings which mark her as a demon. The horizon is so curved that one almost feels the old earth swing- ing unconcernedly beneath this dilemma. A picture full of grotesque and authentic imagination, most true to the hob- goblin tradition of the expiring Middle Ages. Sassetta died in 1450, and his two long-lived pupils, Sano di Pietro (1406-1481) and Giovanni di Paolo, (1403-1482) kept something of his influence alive for still thirty years. _ Sano needs few words. He took nothing from his master but certain formal patterns, fine gilding and blithe colors. He repeats himself tediously, there are over fifty of his panels in the Siena Academy alone, yet is so genuine and unpre- tending that one forgets his lack of delicacy and insight. A little Coronation of the Virgin, at New Haven, may sufh- 94 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING ciently represent his decorative phase. It is a nosegay of fair colors on burnished gold. In narrative painting he is Loren- zettian without the finesse of his master. At least he helped prolong a lovely tradition beyond its natural term, and that Fic. 62. Giovanni di Paolo. Young St. John Baptist goes to the Desert. — Formerly Charles Butler Coll., London. is his chief merit. “‘A famous painter and a man wholly dedicated to God” — (Pictor famosus et homo totus deditus Deo) — we read in his death notice. Siena knew how to ap- preciate a traditionalist. Giovanni di Paolo, on the contrary; suffered not. from defi- cient originality but from its excess. He selects restlessly from the older pictures. You will find pure Duccian figures in his paintings of the fifties. He studies the sparse decorative perfections of Simone Martini and exaggerates their nervous- ness. He drives expression into caricature, seeks strength in distortion, was the post-impressionist of his day. His extrava- gance is unpleasing in his larger pieces, but is piquant enough SIENA AND MEDLEVAL STYLE 95 in his numerous small panels. One of a pair in English private possession shows the Youthful St. John jauntily setting off for the desert, with a quite cubistic treatment, Figure 62, of Fic. 63. Matteo di Giovanni. Saint Barbara with Saints. — S. Domenico. the lines of the fields. The motive is still more ingeniously employed in one of a remarkable set of pictures belonging to Mr. Martin Ryerson of Chicago. Giovanni’s predilection for distortion and grimace is shown in The Baptism of Christ, a pendant to the story of the youthful John, both being parts of one predella. Giovanni died in 1482 at the advanced age of seventy-nine, having faithfully preserved the old Gothic tradition while making it a vehicle of his own resolute eccentricity. The slight concession which Siena made to the Renaissance was inaugurated by Lorenzo Vecchietta, active from about 96 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING 1440 to 1480. He was primarily a sculptor and his silver altar-back was deemed worthy, in 1506, to displace the great Majesty of Duccio from the high altar of the Cathedral. Fic. 64. Matteo di Giovanni. Massacre of the Innocents. —S. Agostino. Vecchietta chiefly shows the effect of his studies as architect and sculptor in a severe regard for anatomy, and in the Re- naissance character of his architectural settings. He painted for the Cathedral of Pienza a majestic Assumption, his mas- terpiece. There are numerous frescoes by him at Siena; he is perhaps most agreeable in little stories elaborately set amid rich architecture, but he lacks the sprightliness of the true natrative tradition. “‘He was a melancholy and solitary per- SIENA AND MEDIAVAL STYLE 97 son,’ writes Vasari, “and always sunk in thought.” He did something to give to the Sienese painting of the end of the century a new and complicating thoughtfulness. Fic. 65. Benvenuto of Siena. Assumption of the Virgin. — Metropolitan Museum, New York. Far the most versatile painter at Siena in the second half of the fifteenth century was Matteo di Giovanni.2 He was not a native, but born about 1430 at Borgo San Sepolcro in upper 98 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING Umbria. There he worked for a time with that stern realist Piero della Francesca. Thus Matteo brought to Siena better training than his fellows had, but he soon fell contentedly into the ways of the place. His madonnas and female saints Fic. 66. Girolamo di Benvenuto. Love bound by Maidens. Birth Salver. — Farves Coll., New Haven, Conn. have a new touch. They are more girlish and fragile than their predecessors, more exquisite, more fashionable. The type is represented in dozens of panels of which Enthroned Saint Barbara, at Saint Domenico, dated 1477» Figure 63, is a fine example. In such work Matteo continues is tradition of Sassetta along somewhat superficial lines of prettiness. He is far more Original in the several versions of the Massacre of the Inno- SIENA AND MEDLEVAL STYLE 99 cents, in which seeking a maximum of intensity he achieves only a very interesting sort of caricature. The picture at S. Agostino, Figure 64, dated 1482, is perhaps the best of the group. We are in the realm of the grisly fairy tale, at an ogre’s sports. The crowding, tumult, ornate architecture are simply Matteo’s attempts to refurbish the old Lorenzettian tradition. His real quality best appears in the outlines pre- pared for the figure decoration of the pavement of the Cathe- dral. In general his is an engaging but entirely undisciplined talent, oscillating after the fashion of the moment, alike in Florence and Siena, between mere prettiness and sheer rest- lessness. He died in 1495, Michelangelo’s star being already in the ascendent over neighboring Florence. A kind of petrification of the traditional charm of Siena is in the work of Benvenuto di Giovanni, scholar of Sassetta. He cultivates a resplendent impassivity, is severe without much background of knowledge. His stiffness is gracious enough, like that of an aristocrat who maintains amid diff- culties the dignity of an older school. His sense of formal pattern and skill in modeling in a very blond key may be enjoyed in his versions of the favorite theme of the Assump- tion. One of the best of these, dated at the end of the century in the year 1498, is in the Metropolitan Museum, Figure 65. Benvenuto was born in 1436 and died about 1518. He might, had he chosen, have studied the whole realistic develop- ment from Fra Angelico to Leonardo da Vinci, but his painting keeps a chill virginal quality quite apart from life, its prob- lems and allurements. His son Girolamo continued the manner with less monu- mentality until his death in 1524. ‘To his early activity be- longs the delightful salver, Love Bound by Maidens, Figure 66, in the Jarves Collection at New Haven. It is merely the tray on which the gifts were presented to a young mother during the visits of congratulation. It was painted for some member 100 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING of the famous Piccolomini family, presumably about the year 1500. The stern maidens who are plucking and binding the stripling Love, doubtless are personifications of Chastity, Temperance and the like. In the middle distance a knight rides off free to adventure since Love is safely bound. It is an odd theme for a gift to a young bride and mother, but the Italians never required consistency in their compliments. The daintiness of the treatment is typical for Renaissance painting at Siena, which never assumes a robust or realistic or humanistic accent. There is a refinement which is the harbinger of death. It appears in Siena in the person of Neroccio di Landi. He sublimates the style of his great predecessors, Simone and Sassetta, adding freely the more delicate ornamentation of the Renaissance. There is a peculiar pallor in his coloring and tension in his modelling. It is an art of nerves and ec- stasies, wholly etherial. An admirable Annunciation in the Jarves Collection at New Haven shows the rich setting, the odd blend of precision with a languor that marks Neroccio as true grandson of Simone Martini. There are many little panels of Madonnas with saints of amber translucency. They have the startling vividness and irreality of an hallucination. And there is a portrait of a girl in the Widener Collection, Figure 67, which is of a superlatively delicate prettiness. Neroccio was born in 1447 and died in 1500. With him passed the special fragrance of Sienese art. Until 1475, Neroccio was in partnership with one whose ambition went far to destroy what Neroccio and Siena stood for. Francesco di Giorgio was born in 1439. With an ambi- tion and resolution wholly un-Sienese, he mastered the arts of painting, sculpture, architecture and engineering. He met Leonardo da Vinci at Pavia, worked for the tyrants of Milan, competed for the facade of the Cathedral of St. Mary of the Flower at Florence. As architect and engineer it appears SIENA AND MEDIAVAL STYLE IOI that he became a cosmopolitan, in painting it was hardly so. He is most delightful in his early phase which is represented by a bride chest in the Wheelwright collection, Boston. It represents Prince Paris insolently appraising the charms of the rival goddesses, and at the right riding Troywards in dis- regard of the despair of forsaken (none. The classical theme is tinged with medizvalism, natur- alized as Sienese. Later pictures, such as [he Nativity, Figure 68, in the Sienese gallery, show Fran- cesco uneasy, twisting his figures for grace and display of knowl- edge, working over the old land- scape formulas in a semi-realistic sense, adding classical architec- ture, generally trying to break ve ieee ; : Fic. 67. Neroccio di Landi. Por- the bounds of the old idealism. trait of a Girl. — Widener Coll., The result is restlessness or at Elkins Park, Pa. best an ambiguous charm. Siena is beginning to regret her isolation, to make vain efforts to overtake the tide of human- istic realism, to envy Florence, and even Perugia and Cortona. From the point of view of the Renaissance she was two generations behind, and no longer indifferent to the fact. Not merely Francesco di Giorgio tries to do in a decade the work of a century, but such younger contemporaries as Fungai and Pacchiarotti look to Florence or Umbria. Siena was given no time to reconstruct, and her old beautiful art could not readily assume new forms. Siena never assimilated the Renaissance. It invaded her, killed her native art and sub- stituted one without local flavor. Before Francesco di Giorgio died, in 1502, he had seen Luca Signorelli called to Siena and the clever decorator Pintorricchio. Siena no longer trusted 102 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING her own artists. Francesco probably took little note of the advent in 15o1, of a young Piedmontese painter, Antonio Bazzi."3 nicknamed Sodoma, yet with Sodoma _ remained | what little future there was in Sienese painting. Sodoma brought to Siena the knowledge of Leonardo da Vinci, the new draughtsmanship in light and shade. He assimilated the sensibility of Siena but coarsened it. No painter of the time was more overtly sentimen- tal. His famous St. Sebastian at Florence tells all that need be known about him, — his con- LF siderable skill, his exaggerated pathos, his clever use of poise and balance, his sober modern tonalities. His sentimental pow- er is at its height in the fresco Fic. 69. Sodoma. Vision of St. : Catherine of Siena. Fresco— at §. Domenico, Siena, which S. Domenico, Siena. represents S. Catherine swoon- ing at the vision of her lover, the Christ, Figure 69. Sodoma worked indefatigably in and about Siena till 1549. The few local painters of a progressive sort, Domenico Beccafumi, Girolamo del Pacchia, either directly imitate Sodoma or draw from similar alien sources. The only man of genius Siena produced in these years, Baldassare Peruzzi (1481-1536), soon went to Rome where in architecture he held his own with all comers, whereas in painting he became a modest imitator of Raphael. In the ten years after 1500 the old art perished. Siena from being the last radiant exemplar of the glory of the medi- zeval spirit sunk to the estate of a fourth class station of the SIENA AND MEDIEVAL STYLE 103 Renaissance. Her idealism could not bear the test of reality. Her domain had been that of legend and fairy tale and dream, she had ruled it exquisitely for two centuries until sheer taste had absorbed her little strength. She had left unforgettable Fic. 68. Francesco di Giorgio. Nativity. —S. Domenico, Siena. records of her most precious feelings, but little record of her outer activities. Think how portraits abound in Florentine and Venetian art after 1450! There are practically none at Siena. So it would be futile to go to Siena for a greater under- standing of the active life. But if you would requicken the sense of legend, live over again the tenderness mankind. has ever felt for the beautiful past, hear some faint blowing of the horns of elfland — if you want this experience, then go to The gracious City of the Virgin and you shall find fulfilled the generous motto over her main portal — Siena will open her heart wide to thee. 104. HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING ILLUSTRATIONS FOR CHAPTER II A SONNET TO THE SPENDTHRIFT CLUB by FOLGORE DA SAN GEMIGNANO translated by DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI “T give you horses for your games in May, And all.of them well trained unto the course — Each docile, swift, erect, a goodly horse: With armor on their chests and bells at play Between their brows, and pennons fair and gay; Fine nets and housings meet for warriors, Emblazoned with the shields ye claim for yours, Gules, argent, or, all dizzy at noon day; And spears shall split and fruit go flying up In merry counterchange for wreaths that drop From balconies and casements far above; And tender damsels with young men and youths ~ Shall kiss together on the cheeks and mouths And every day be glad with joyful love.” How VENvuS FARED IN SIENA Ghiberti, in his commentaries (ed. Frey, Berlin 1886, p. 57 ff.) tells how a marble Venus, bearing the name of Lysippus was dug up at Siena. ‘“‘T saw it only as drawn by a very great painter of the city of Siena, who was called Ambrogio Lorenzetti. This drawing was kept with greatest care by a very old Carthusian. This brother was a goldsmith, and his father, and was a designer and delighted greatly in the art of sculpture; and he began to tell me how that statue was discovered as they were making an excavation where now are the houses of the Mala- volti; how all those instructed and versed in the art of sculpture, with the goldsmiths and painters ran to see this so marvellous and artistic statue. Every one praised it greatly, and also the great painters who then were in Siena — to every one it seemed absolutely perfect. And with all honors they set it upon their fountain, as a most splendid thing. All gathered to place it with greatest rejoicing and honor and they a SIENA AND MEDIA‘VAL STYLE 105 fixed it magnificently upon that fountain, which statue reigned there but passingly.” “For as the city had many adversities in the war with the Florentines, and the flower of the citizenry were assembled in council, a citizen rose and spoke about the statue in this tenor: ‘Gentlemen and citizens, having considered that since we have found this statue it has always gone wrong with us, and considering that idolatry is forbidden by our faith, we must believe of all the adversities which we have that God sends them for our errors. And behold in truth that since we have honored this statue we have always gone from bad to worse. I am certain that so long as we keep it in our territory it will always go wrong with us. As a councillor I would advise that it be taken down and shattered and split up and be sent to be buried on the soil of the Florentines.’ “Unanimously they confirmed the words of their citizen and put them in execution, and the statue was buried upon our soil.” A PROCESSION ON THE COMPLETION OF Duccio’s MAJESTY “On the day that it was carried to the Duomo the shops were shut; and the Bishop bade a goodly and devout company of priests and friars should go in solemn procession, accompanied by the Nine Magistrates and all the officers of the Commune and all the people; all the most worthy followed close upon the picture, according to their degree, with lights burning in their hands; and then behind them came the women and children with great devotion. And they accompanied the said picture as far as the Duomo, making procession round the Campo as is the use, all the bells sounding joyously for devotion of so noble a pic- ture as is this. And all that day they offered up prayers, with great alms to the poor, praying God and His Mother who is our advocate, that he may defend us in His infinite mercy from all adversity and all evil, and that He may keep us from the hands of traitors and enemies of Siena.” Translated in Edmund G. Gardiner’s The Story of Siena, p. 178, from the Anonymous contemporary chronicler published by A. Lisini in Notizie di Duccio. 106 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING A CONTRACT FOR AN ALTAR-PIECE BY PIETRO LORENZETTI ‘Master Pietro, son of the late Lorenzetto, who was of Siena, solemnly and willingly promises and agrees with the venerable Father Guido, by God’s grace Bishop of Arezzo, who stipulates in the name and stead of the people of St. Mary of Arezzo — to paint a panel of the Blessed Virgin Mary, . . . in the centre of which panel shall be a likeness of the Virgin Mary with her Son and with four side figures according to the wish of the aforesaid Lord Bishop, working in the backgrounds of these figures with finest gold leaf, 100 leaves to a florin, . . . and the other ornaments of silver and of best and choicest colors; and using in these five figures best ultramarine blue; and in the other adjoining and surrounding spaces (panels) of this picture to be painted likenesses of prophets and saints, according to the wish of this Lord Bishop, with good and choice colors.” “Tt must be six braccia long and five braccia high in the middle, apart from two columns each a half braccia wide, and in each should be six figures worked with the aforesaid gold, and the work shall be approved by this Lord Bishop... . ‘“‘And he [Pietro Lorenzetti] must begin this work according to the wish of this Lord Bishop, immediately after the wooden panel shall have been made, and must continue in this work until the completion of this picture, not undertaking any other work &c. And therefore the said Lord Bishop Guido promises to have given and assigned to him the panel made of wood; and to pay him for his wages for the picture and for colors, gold and silver one hundred and sixty Pisan lire; that is the third part at the beginning of the work, the third part at the middle of the work, and the remaining third part when the work is finished and complete &c.”’ “Done in the church of the Holy Angels in Arcalto outside of and next to the cemetery.” Translated and slightly abridged from Borghesi and Banchi, Nuovi Documenti per la Storia dell’ Arte Senese, (Doc. 6, p. 10) Siena, 1898. This contract well illustrates the elaborateness and strictness of such agreements. It may be compared with the picture itself (Fig. 46). Apparently the artist persuaded the Bishop to give up the plan of twelve prophets and saints on two side pilasters, and made instead a greater number (15) of figures in the upper arcade and pinnacles. MASACCIO AND THE NEW REALISM Fic. 70. Andrea del Castagno. David, Slayer of Goliath. Parade Stueld. — Widener Coll., Elkins Park, Pa. 108 CHAPTER III MASACCIO AND THE NEW REALISM Ghiberti, Brunellesco, and Donatello about 1400 begin to study Nature and the Antique — The new secular spirit— Discontent with the old pictorial style expressed in reaction by Lorenzo Monaco —in cautious reform by Fra Angelico —and Masolino — in revolutionary reform by Masaccio — The Cassone painters as illustrators of contemporary manners — Masaccio and the new structure in light and shade — The Problem of the Brancacci Frescoes — Masaccio’s enduring influence — The early Florentine Real- ists — Paolo Uccello and Perspective — Andrea del Castagno and Anatomy — Domenico Veneziano and Oil Painting— Alesso Baldovinetti. In the two earlier chapters we have considered what Giorgio Vasari calls the vigorous childhood of Italian painting. We are now to observe its splendid youth. The story appropriately begins with three young men and the year 1401 and with a baby, later nicknamed Masaccio, who was born that same year. The three young Florentines represent the new time- spirit. The lucky one, Lorenzo Ghiberti, has just won a competition for the new bronze doors of the Baptistery, and has in that one commission more than twenty years of happy work ahead. Ghiberti is sensitive and thoughtful beyond the wont of the older craftsmen artists. He writes of an antique statue: “It has sweetness of modelling which cannot be caught either in a strong or a dim light, only the hand and touch can find it.” Ghiberti is a critic and analyst as well as a creator. ’ In his “Commentaries,” a product of his old age, he writes: “Thus I have always sought for first principles, as to how na- ture works in herself, and how I may approach her, how the eye knows the varieties of things, how our visual power works, how visual images come about, and in what manner the theory 109 I1O HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING of sculpture and painting should be framed.” This is the mood of the Renaissance in its most serious aspect. This student mood was fully shared by two young friends of Ghiberti. Donatello, the sculptor, and Brunellesco, later the designer of the dome of the Cathedral at Florence, had lost in the competition for the Baptistery doors. ‘They ac- cepted defeat magnanimously, joined forces and went to Rome, where their persistent way of poking among the ruins got them the name of the treasure seekers. Such indeed they were, but the treasure they sought was not gold, but the secrets of the ancient sculptors and architects. So Donatello refined and perfected the rugged realism he had from nature. As early as 1416 he was to carve the alert and noble St. George for Or San Michele. Brunellesco’s life dream was that lightest and loveliest of domes which is still the architectural crown of Florence, and almost incidentally he threw off designs that filled Florence with elegant colonnades and churches which renewed the dignity and joyousness of the best Roman build- ing. A resolute spirit, Brunellesco once tramped the sixty miles from Florence to Cortona to see a newly excavated statue. Not incidentally, then, but by hardest study, Brunel- lesco worked out a correct practice of linear perspective. This needed resource for the painter was now available when any one had the sense to ask for it, and all the time young Masaccio was growing up in San Giovanni up the Arno. Such is the immediate background for the forward move in painting which begins in 1422, or thereabouts, and runs through fifty years of eager experimentation. As in the first revival the sculptors and architects had shown the way to the painters, so it was again. But there is also a remoter social and commercial background for the Early Renaissance which we must consider briefly. The great plague of 1348 cuts Florentine history sharply in two. It marked an ac- celeration of gayety and worldliness, of sports and pageantry. MASACCIO AND THE NEW REALISM III The chronicler Matteo Villani! noted with amazement that the plague had caused not repentance but dissipation. He was shocked to see the old toga-like costume of the Floren- tines give place to the bobtailed jerkins and parti-colored hose borrowed from wicked France. Heritages were many and heirs few. You saw the gowns of gentle and noble ladies on backs of hussies or worse — the new wives. People ran to “‘ the sin of gluttony, to feasts and taverns, delicate viands and games.” As for the poor folk, they no longer wished to work at their trades, they expected the costliest food, they married “ad libitum.” So began that loosening up of the old bour- geois morals which culminated in the carnivals of the end of the fifteenth century and in the libertine muse of Lorenzo the Magnificent. All this meant an inspiring spectacle for the artist to record, and plenty of lavish patronage, but also it meant a disintegrating tendency for art. Painting is great in Florence in the measure that it escapes the mere expansive- ness of the times and seeks discipline. As if to assert the permanency of the spirit of discipline, the very year that set Matteo Villani in despair, 1348, gave him also a chapter on the founding of the Studio, a school of higher learning which eventually became the University of Florence. And the course of art for most of the fifteenth century was to be a constant interplay and rivalry between the Florence of the tavern and race-course and the Florence of the Studio, with a final victory for the latter. | Oddly enough, the new luxury and gayety and the new scholarship conspired to make the old painting inadequate. The panoramic style of the fourteenth century was too simple and unornate for the Frenchified Florentines; for the new generation of strenuous artists, it was too slight and unskilful. All the finer spirits at the beginning of the fifteenth century are malcontents. Their unrest expressed itself, according to temperament, in progress or reaction. The dominating artist II2 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING of the moment was a reactionary, Don Lorenzo Monaco,? Camaldolese monk. ‘Turning from the superficiality of the current Florentine style, he sought his corrective at Siena, his birthplace, in the decorative exquisiteness of Simone Mar- tini and the narrative warmth and breadth of the Lorenzetti; and he imports these qualities into Florence in an art as aris- tocratic and retrospective as that of our own Pre-Raphaelites. In his hands Gothic painting takes a new and unwarranted lease of life. He is a brilliant colorist, a fastidious designer, an austere spirit. Even his great Sienese exemplars have hardly surpassed his masterpiece, the Coronation of the Vir- gin, in the Uffizi. It is dated 1413. In the richness of the Gothic frame, the profusion of small incidental figures, the festooning curves of the swaying saints and angels, and formal symmetry of arrangement, it well represents the most florid type of Gothic painting as developed at Siena. It is hard to realize that this lovely medizval work was painted at the moment when Brunellesco and his friends were already turning sharply to nature and to the vision of Hellas. But Lorenzo was a cloistered man, and appropriately a vo- tary of past perfections. His devout mood is best expressed in the gracious Annunciation, Figure 71, which has happily never left its original altar in the Church of the Trinita. Here Lorenzo follows the Lorenzettian canons of space. A girlish delicacy 1n the obedient Virgin is a new note, to be echoed more sweetly by Lorenzo’s best follower, Fra Angelico. Lorenzo died in 1425. Masaccio had already created the new style of painting, but for a couple of decades faithful disciples of Don Lorenzo carried on his style. A lover of Plutarchian parallels and contrasts would swiftly pass from Don Lorenzo Monaco to Masaccio. But one may better understand the new movement by taking first men who gradually and normally accepted the new knowledge. Such are Fra Angelico and Masolino, who began as Gothic painters MASACCIO AND THE NEW REALISM 113 Fic. 71. Lorenzo Monaco, Annun- ciation. — Trinita. Fic. 72. Fra Angelico. Annunci- Fic. 73. Fra Angelico. Coronation. ation and Adoration of the of the Virgin. — Louvre. Magi. — Museum of S. Marco. 114 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING and ended as Renaissance masters. They show us better the average drift of the times than does so revolutionary a figure as Masaccio. Fra Angelico? was born in 1387 and at twenty entered the religious state as a Dominican at Fiesole. How soon Fra Giovanni, not yet nicknamed Angelico, became a painter we hardly know. But four little pictures designed to inclose in their frames relics of the saints may represent his beginnings. Three are at San Marco, Florence, one in Mrs. John L. Gard- ner’s collection at Boston. The Little Annunciation with an Adoration of the Magi, Figure 72, may represent the work. It is refined, tender, of jewel-like freshness of color, graceful in linear arrangement, at first sight wholly Sienese in inspira- tion, and directly dependent on Lorenzo Monaco. A kind of veracity under the richness of the expression marks the work as after all straightforward and Florentine. The date may be about 1425, Fra Angelico, being in his middle thirties, and in his art about a century behind the times. In his early Gothic manner he conceived some of his masterpieces, such as the Coronation of the Virgin, with its glimpse of a celestial cloud land; and the whimsically beautiful Last Judgment. Both are at the Museum of San Marco. One can believe the report of Vasari that each day Fra Angelico prayed before touch- ing brush to such masterpieces. Such pictures have the hush and charm of a celestial dreamland, a meditative beauty quite un-Florentine. . All the time Fra Angelico was placidly and intelligently studying the new realistic movement launched by Donatello and Masaccio. He adopts what suits him, rejecting heavy shadows which would dull his Gothic coloring, but adding freely realistic details in anatomy, drapery, and architecture. The Coronation of the Virgin in the Louvre, Figure 73, though it may be only a few months later than that of the Uffizi, no longer takes place in a cloudland before lucent gold, but in a MASACCIO AND THE NEW REALISM 115 quite practicable architecture imitating the niche which Michelozzo designed in 1423 for Donatello’s St. Louis of Toulouse. The forms too are more substantial, more mun- Fic. 74. Fra Angelico. Madonna dei Linaiuoli. Originally an outdoor tabernacle. — Museum of S. Marco. dane. Soon the architectural accessories become of Renais- sance type, and as Mr. Langton Douglas has shown, every new invention of Michelozzo for a space of ten years is promptly reflected in the painting of Fra Angelico. His greatest Ma- donna, that of the Linen Guild, Figure 74, painted in 1433, is almost plastic, recalling the severe sweetness of Orcagna. The picture is really cumbered by the rich hangings, which with the slender swaying angels in the bevel of the frame are al- ready an anachronism. In the Descent from the Cross, Figure 75, we find Fra Angelico skilfully adopting the new dis- 116 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING coveries in anatomy and landscape. ‘The treatment is broad and panoramic in the tradition of the Lorenzetti but all the details are carefully studied from nature and not furnished by formula. A deeply-felt scene thus gains verisimilitude, Fic. 75. Fra Angelico. Deposition. —S. Marco. comes out of the realm of legend and becomes an actuality. The panel was finished in 1440, and, now that Masaccio was gone, there was no living painter who could have put into it with equal knowledge so much feeling. The building of the great Dominican Convent of San Marco between 1437 and 1444 opened to Fra Angelico his great op- portunity. It was the gift of Cosimo de’ Medici, now unoficial ruler of Florence, who had his good reasons for wishing to assure the occasional repose of his busy soul in this world and its permanent repose in the next. He often sought seclusion in the convent and doubtless saw in progress the fifty or more frescoes that Fra Angelico made to adorn it. Fra Angelico was painting for deeply religious men, for scholars who had a MASACCIO AND THE NEW REALISM 117 the Scriptures at their finger tips, and for this reason perhaps he rejects all smaller realisms, reducing his compositions to the mere figures. Thus the San Marco frescoes are more con- cise even than those of Giotto, and they reach at their best Fic. 76. Fra Angelico. Dominicans receive Christ as Pilgrim. Guest house door.—S. Marco. a simple sublimity as yet unattained in Italian art. Highly formal and decorative, they are free from consciously aesthetic taint. Sometimes I think Perugino learned much at San Marco and that we may thus regard Fra Angelico as indirectly a leading influence on Raphael. The sparse, effective method may be illustrated in the fresco set over the door of the guest quarters, the Forestiera. It represents a pilgrim Christ being received by Dominican brothers. Figure 76. In the stranger we entertain The Lord Himself is the simple lesson. The figures are set against a conventional blue background but are constructed with the authority of the new learning. In the Chapter House nearby Fra Angelico painted, about 118 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING 1440, a great Crucifixion, Figure 77. The three laden crosses stand out sharply against a murky sky. ‘The setting is a mere platform, on which the familiar forms of Mary and the beloved Apostles are almost lost in a throng of witnesses of every age. We have the Latin Fathers, and their succes- ‘Fic. 77. Fra Angelico. Mystical Crucifixion. Chapter House. —S. Marco. sors—St. Dominic and St. Francis among others. The arrangement is highly formal, the mood that of meditation; the sharper tragedy of the theme is not insisted on. The characterization of the saints is precise and fine, the drawing of their forms admirable. Had the composition been set against a Gothic, blue background, the mood would have seemed merely sentimental. What gives it, with all its ab- stractness, an almost sensational tang of reality is the arching sky, slaty above and an ominous orange behind the figures. The expedient brings an element of definite place and time of day for this rendezvous of saints at a mystically re- newed Calvary. In the cells of the convent, Fra Angelico and his helpers painted no less than forty-three frescoes. These were in- tended for the private devotions of the brother occupying the MASACCIO AND THE NEW REALISM 119g cell, and the subjects were probably chosen not by Fra An- gelico himself, but by his cloister mates. The best are con- ceived like the frescoes of the lower story. The background is just a veiled sky, there are no accessories, the figures loom in an indefinite space. Majestic is the Transfiguration, Figure 78, very lovely the Coronation of the Virgin. The angelic painter draws the maximum effect from the simplest patterns and briefest means. There is the measured and simple dignity of the early Christian mosaics with a warmer and more personal feeling. Fra Angelico, when he wishes, can be elaborately realistic. He is so in the garden scene where the Risen ‘ Fic. 78. Fra Angelico. Trans- Christ gently rebuffs the Mag- figuration, fresco in acell at S. dalen, in the crowded Adoration Marco. of the Magi, which tradition assigns to Cosimo de’ Medici’s cell, and in the Annunciation, Figure 79, in the corridor with its graceful Renaissance Joggia. In this more circumstantial vein, Fra Angelico is delightful, but I think below his best. In all the frescoes at S. Marco, however, Fra Angelico appears as a wholly Florentine figure with an art based at once on the study of nature and on an understanding admiration for the masterpieces of Giotto and Orcagna. Something of his mediaevalism, of his Sienese manner, persists in the numerous little predella panels, such as those telling delightfully the story of the doctor saints, Cosmo and Damian, and the series with the life of Christ which adorned the doors of the plate lockers of the Church of S. Marco. With their fully developed pictorialism, their careful regard for the minor realisms of setting, these little pictures are the 120 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING prelude to his last phase at Rome. They are also the last Florentine pictures that observe those traditional iconographi- cal forms which had persisted for four centuries. Fra Angelico ever refused to make money or accept promo- Fic. 79. Fra Angelico. Annunciation. Fresco.—S. Marco. tion, but became despite himself a celebrity. In 1445 he was ordered to Rome by Pope Eugenius IV. The frescoes which Fra Angelico then made in the Vatican are lost. There was an escape to Orvieto, where Fra Angelico painted half the vault of the Chapel of S. Brixio, which Signorelli was later to com- plete. Fra Angelico was peremptorily recalled to Rome in 1447 by the new Pope, Nicholas V, who was planning a new chapel in the Vatican. We see it today still radiant with the legends of St. Stephen and St. Lawrence that Fra Angelico thoughtfully composed more than four hundred years ago. Modern critics have generally agreed in finding Fra Angelico’s masterpieces in this chapel. If they mean his fullest display MASACCIO AND THE NEW REALISM I2I of knowledge, the opinion is incontestible. Nowhere else has Fra Angelico invented such complications of architecture, interiors, street perspectives; nowhere has he drawn better figures in greater variety. Such frescoes as the lunette with Fic. 80. Fra Angelico. St. Stephen Preaching, the Saint before the Council. Fresco. — Chapel of Nicholas V., Vatican. St. Stephen defending himself before the Jewish doctors and preaching to the people, Figure 80, or that depicting St. Lawrence giving alms to cripples and poor folk before a ba- silica, are learned and rich. But does not their very rich- ness obscure both the decorative and emotional appeal? Personally I tend to lose the figures in the complexity of the setting. Any of Fra Angelico’s little predellas tells its story more feelingly and clearly, and no less ably. Under the pressure of competition at Rome, Fra Angelico for the first time is ostentatious. To please the Pope he revives in more specious form the trivialities of the old panoramic style. Had he grasped Masaccio’s invention of aerial perspective and construction in light and dark, Fra Angelico might have Ize HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING carried off his elaborate settings successfully. As it is, they confuse the eye by too many linear elements, and only mildly delight the mind. Even the sensitive mood of legend, which is noteworthy in these frescoes, is better represented in the smaller panels. In fairness of Gothic fresco coloring, however, they are unsurpassed. From the point of view of tendency, these frescoes are pro- foundly instructive. They show the irresistible drift towards the formation of a new panoramic style, a drift that even Fra An- gelico, cloistered saint and ex- quisite self-critic, was unable to escape. In spite of his record and better knowledge, he be- comes an inaugurator of that Be eee eee picturesque, undisciplined, and decentralized manner of narra- tive which was to be represented by Ghirlandaio, Botticelli, and their contemporaries. In his later years Fra Angelico declined the archbishopric of Florence and died at Rome in 1455. [he tombstone which shows the emaciation of his perishable form is in the Roman Church of the Minerva; his imperishable monument is his frescoed convent home of S. Marco at Florence. Of the traditional artists Fra Angelico is by far the most — important, but his contemporary Masolino of Panicale must be considered, partly because tradition makes him the master of Masaccio, partly because of the problems which cluster about his work. The picture which is here drawn of him represents my own investigations, and differs at several points from the views of Berenson and Toesca. If we judge Masolino MASACCIO AND THE NEW REALISM 123 only by the work that is unquestionably his, he is not an im- pressive figure. He inherits the grace of the late Gothic style, and he adds rather partially and inconsequentially the new discoveries in anatomy and linear perspective. Chance took him away from the centre of things, Florence. He worked mostly in Lombardy, distant Hungary, provincial Tuscany, and Rome. He has industry and charm, but no- where shows much intelligence. On the whole he is a poorer story-teller than his Gothic predecessors, and only their fair equal in panel painting. Had Vasari not ascribed to him, I believe erroneously, the early miracles of St. Peter in the Church of The Carmine, at Florence, the general historian of art would need to pay little attention to Masolino. But he has been entangled in one of the most important of artistic problems, that of Masaccio, so we cannot ignore him. Masolino * was born in 1384, and, according to Vasari, was trained by the mysterious Starnina. We have no very early works to show his progress, and it is merely a good guess that the radiant Annunciation, Figure 81, in the possession of Mr. Henry Goldman, New York, may be considerably earlier than 1420. It shows the gentleness and animation which are constant in Masolino. It combines the Sienese calligraphic manner with those smaller realisms of inscenation which ulti- mately derive from Duccio. It has coloristic audacities of its own in the spotting of brightest vermillion. It gives small hint of the Renaissance. At a later date than 1420, by which time ordinary perspective began to be understood, I doubt if Masolino would have indulged in that preposterous and un- necessary central pillar which starts above in middle distance and ends below in the picture plane. A Madonna at Bremen, dated 1423, shows him still as Gothic as Lorenzo Monaco, _ who indeed seems to have influenced him dominatingly. In this same year, it is likely that he painted the frescoes in the Collegiate Church at Castiglione d’Olona, a lovely 124 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING village at the foot of the Alps. Masolino had to deal with re- fractory spaces, the narrow triangular sectors of the apse. This has caused elongation of the figures and piling up of fantastic architecture merely to fill the spaces. The mood is gentle and graceful, the treatment quite Gothic. These six stories of the Virgin must have satished Masolino’s hu- manist patron, Cardinal Branda Castiglione; for several years later he re-employed the painter to decorate the ad- joining Baptistery. Masolino at forty, in the Collegiate Church, was still completely Gothic. If we may believe Va- sari, at that age he suddenly mastered the new style. Only on such a theory can he have painted the Adam and Eve and the St. Peter reviving Tabitha, in the Brancacci Chapel, which are in the new chiaroscuro technic. Since Masolino, years after the time when he was working in that chapel, is still incompletely modern as regards light and shade, it is easier to suppose that what he actually painted in the Brancacci Chapel, about 1424, was merely the vault and the three lu- nettes, which have since been destroyed. Thus all the frescoes now visible in this famous chapel would be by Masaccio or his continuer, Filippino Lippi. Such was the view of the excellent critic Cavalcaselle more than fifty years ago. How- ever that be, Masolino by 1427 was at Buda (now Budapest), where he worked for that extraordinary Florentine exile and soldier of fortune, Pippo Spano. After that trip, we hear no more of Masolino at Florence—rather oddly, since the Brancacci Chapel, which he had begun, still had three unpictured spaces after Masaccio’s death in 1428. Apparently the Brancacci family did not consider Masolino competent to complete the work he had begun. If so, they were wise. We next find Masolino, after an interval of more than ten years, decorating the Baptistery at Castiglione d’Olona for his old patron, Cardinal Branda. The date is 1435. By this time Masolino had learned a good deal, but had hardly as- MASACCIO AND THE NEW REALISM 125 similated his new attainments. Whether as decoration or as story-telling, the stories of St. John the Baptist are at once confused and pretentious, with little to recommend them save the loveliness of their Gothic color, the prettiness of the heads, Fic. 82. Masolino. Baptism of Christ, detail of fresco. —Baptistery, Castiglione d’Olona. and certain vivacious and well-observed gestures. In the great fresco of the Baptism of Christ, Figure 82, the inci- dental nudes are so carefully anatomized that they distract from the general effect, while the deep river valley unhappily draws the eye away from the figures in the foreground. A similarly pictorially inept use of foreshortened Renaissance colonnades appears in the opposite fresco depicting the Feast of Herod and the delivery of the head of St. John to Herodias. If it were not for the physical discomfort of travelling to the end of those interminable colonnades and returning to note what is happening nearby in them, these stories themselves 126 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING would seem vivacious and well-conceived, the female heads attractive, the color gay and pleasing. The method of com- position is still Lorenzettian and the modern architectural features inorganic. A few years later Masolino was swept to Rome by the great wave of rebuilding and redeco- rating which accompanied Pope Martin V’s return from Avignon. There in the Chapel of the Sacrament, in the venerable Basilica of S. Clemente, which had formerly been Cardinal Branda’s titular Church, Maso- lino achieved his maturest work. Fic, 83. Masolino. St. Catherine ; disputing with the Pagan Doc- Completely repainted, we may tors. Fresco. —S. Clemente, Rome. still see the legends of St. Cath- erine, and a finely theatrical Calvary by Masolino, and as well legends of St. Ambrose by a follower of Masaccio. Here Masolino’s gift as a story-teller is at its best. He has learned to subordinate his accessories, and the childlike character of his themes enlists his talent in its most engaging aspect. Such a fresco as St. Catherine urging the mysteries of the faith before the Roman doctors, Figure 83, is well-felt and skilfully composed, and withal most flimsily drawn. It is incredible that a man who could do the Tabitha in the Brancacci Chapel at forty should have relapsed to this level at fifty-five. The evidence of the armor® worn by the horsemen in the Calvary proves that that fresco, and presumably the entire decoration of the chapel, cannot be earlier than 1440, while of course it cannot be later than Masolino’s own death in 1447. To this later period belongs, I believe, the diptych at Naples MASACCIO AND THE NEW REALISM 127 which represents two themes rare in early Florentine painting, the Assumption of the Virgin, and the Miracle of the Snow, Figure 84. The latter scene shows Pope Liberius tracing the foundations of the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore which were indicated by a miraculous snow-fall in midsummer. It is delightful as story-telling, and some of the minor figures are entrancing, as is the landscape. Since Michelangelo and Giorgio Vasari once admired this pic- ture together at Rome, we should not grudge it our ad- miration. Nor should we fail to note the curious defects in construction. The heads of the attendant figures are set on the shoulders like a ball on a post. You could blow any of these heads off without overtaxing Fic. 84. Masolino. Pope Liberius tracing the snow-marked plan of your lungs. The picture shows Santa Maria Maggiore.— Naples. the utmost of which Masolino was capable. It reveals him as lightly touched by the new learning and faithful to the old panoramic ideals of narrative which had come down from Taddeo Gaddi and the Lorenzetti. Logically we should next consider Masaccio, but first we may well give an eye to a minor sort of narrative painting which worked in the direction of contemporary realism. ‘This was domestic painting as distinguished from ecclesiastical or civic. In a prosperous Florentine home the chest was the most important article of furniture. In the fifteenth century its front was pictured with races, pageants, feasts, battles, or 128 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING the new themes from classical mythology. Every patrician bride normally received two such painted cassoni to contain her trousseau. For example,’ Giovanna di Filippo Aldobrandini when she married Tommaso di Berto Fini, in 1418, received — two bride chests depicting the races on St. John’s day. A complete chest in the Bargello, Florence, shows the riders carrying to the Baptistery the palzi, or lengths of brocade which were the prizes. The front panel of the companion chest is in the Holden Collection, at Cleveland, and com- memorates with extraordinary vivacity and fidelity the race itself, Figure 85. The winner is just preparing to touch the palio which hangs from the ceremonial car at the finish. Jesters, policemen, eager women, and impatient urchins who pelt the losers make up a remarkable picture of contemporary customs. Besides the pictured chests, a well appointed room had at the height of a sitter’s shoulder similar but larger panels which were called Spalliere. And still higher there was, on a still larger scale, what were called cornice panels. These too were contemporary or mythological in subject mat- ter. Where many a room thus had three courses of pictures from the floor to the ceiling there was abundant opportunity for the narrative painter and remarkable stimulus to inven- tion. The richness and complexity of this household decora- tion doubtless influenced all narrative painting, making for the sprightliness which dominates the end of the century. Besides these chest and wall panels, pictured salvers were prepared to celebrate the birth of a patrician child. Such wooden salvers were used to convey the congratulatory gifts which were offered with appalling promptness to every young mother. These Deschi da parto, or birth plates, as the Italians called them, bore pictures alluding either to love and beauty or to childbirth. One of the earlier mythological salvers is in the Bargello and represents the Judgment of Paris. As yet the artist is not sufficiently audacious to display the god- MASACCIO AND THE NEW REALISM — 129 Fic. 85. School of Uccello. A Horse Race. Detail from a Cassone Front. — Cleveland, O. Fic. 86. Masaccio. Birth of St. John Baptist. — Desco da Parto, Berlin. 130 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING desses in classical nudity. The most famous of all birth- plates may serve as our introduction to the greatest artist of the first half of the century, Masaccio. It is in the Berlin Museum, the subject is the Birth of St. John the Bap- tist, Figure 86, and the date should be about 1422. In the excellent proportions of the Renaissance portico, in the gravity and mass of the figures, it shows the beginnings of a new and more truthful style, based not on previous artistic formu- las but on direct and masterful observation of nature. Mr. Berenson justly calls it “‘a little giant of a picture.” Masaccio ® was born December 21, 1401, at San Giovanni up the Arno. His real name was Tommaso di Ser Giovanni di Tommaso Guidi. And the slightly slurring character of his nickname was apparently given for absent-mindedness, un- tidiness, and a certain clumsiness of person. ‘Tradition as late as Vasari declared that Masaccio lived in a world of intense speculation concerning his art. ‘Contemporary tax-returns show that he died deeply in debt and that he never really knew how much he owed. ‘Tradition again insists that he never troubled to collect payments due him unless his need of money were extreme. | All the same he was one of the most original minds of all ages, and on the formal side, one of the most revolutionary. He came to Florence early, probably . learned his elements under Masolino, but really drew more from the sculptor naturalists of Donatello’s sort. In particular he frequented the surly architect Brunellesco and from him learned the new art of perspective. January 7, 1422, being: twenty-one years old, Masaccio was matriculated in the Druggists’ Guild as a licensed painter. By this time he surely had made‘his great discovery and“taken his great decision. Reviewing the paint- ing of his contemporaries and predecessors, he judged that it was all based on unnatural conventions. We can imagine him ‘in the Spanish Chapel viewing the carefully charted and con- MASACCIO AND THE NEW REALISM 131 toured and colored groups, and saying impatiently “things don’t look like that.” And in truth the older painting at its best was a select inventory or formal description of what the artist saw, and not a representation. One can imagine Ma- saccio exclaiming, as Francisco Goya was to do more than three centuries later, “Lines, always lines, I don’t see them in nature.” And, as a matter of fact, there are no lines in nature, just the meeting of areas variously colored and lighted, contrasts of tone which the eye instantaneously interprets as form. Young Masaccio, then, makes the radical innovation that the brush should work according to nature’s laws, distributing color and light and dark so as to give the swiftest and truest representation of mass and distance. Besides functional light and shade, Masaccio introduced into painting the idea of aerial perspective. He saw that distant objects diminished not merely in size but also in definition. He felt the air as a palpable veil between the object and the eye, and he painted not simply the object but, as well, its veil. By a swift impulse of sheer genius this moody lad fixed ideals of naturalistic painting which were to remain until yesterday and the Im- pressionists. In fundamental principles Velasquez marks no great advance on Masaccio. It is only in fresco painting that Masaccio fully reveals his powers. So passing with mere mention such panels as The Healing of a Demoniac, in the John G. Johnson Collection, Philadelphia, the widely scattered parts of the altar-piece for the Carmelites at Pisa, dated 1426, and the grim Madonna with St. Ann in the Uffizi, the student will best turn directly to the Carmelite Church at Florence and enter that sanctuary of art, the Chapel of the Brancacci. The Church itself was dedicated April 19, 1422. Shortly after that date, young Masaccio did in fresco the dedicatory proces- sion with many portraits. Its realism produced a profound G2 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING impression. Nevertheless it was heedlessly destroyed after a century or so. By 1424, according to all probability, Masaccio was associated with Masolino in the decoration of the Bran- cacci Chapel. It was dedicated to St. Peter, and the prescribed subjects were drawn from the “Acts of the Apostles” and ‘‘The Golden Legend.” The vaults which contained the four evan- gelists and the three lunettes, which depicted The Calling of Peter and Andrew, the Tempest-tossed Ship of the Apostles on Galilee, and Peter denying his Lord, were by Masolino. Unhappily these upper frescoes have been destroyed. The Chapel now has only two rows of frescoes in twelve pictures. Of these three and a part of a fourth, all in the lower row, are certainly by Filippino Lippi, who about 1484 completed the chapel, probably with the aid of Masaccio’s designs. Three in the upper row, are ascribed by many critics to Masolino. According to this view, which is largely based on the opinion of Vasari, Masaccio would be responsible for only five pictures and most of a sixth. Other critics, whose views I share, be- lieve that Masaccio painted eight of the pictures and most of a ninth. The difference of opinion, then, concerns three pictures which many think unworthy of Masaccio’s genius. The problem cannot be fully debated here. The grounds of my opinion, which was that of the great Italian critic Caval- caselle, will appear as we review the frescoes themselves. In general color effect these frescoes are strangely unlike their Gothic predecessors. They have nothing of the flower- bed gayety of the Spanish Chapel, of Lorenzo Monaco, or of Masolino elsewhere. The effect is of a very rich smokiness, a kind of monochrome from which only subdued colors emerge. Yellow-browns and silvery grays predominate. There are no hard contours. The relief is salient, but one form blends in- sensibly into another. The edges of the figures are established not by lines but by contrast of values, the contour is often completely lost. The strong assertion of light and dark in a MASACCIO AND THE NEW REALISM 133 few structural planes builds out the forms from an investing shadow. Indeed the whole chapel recalls not the Gothic fresco painters, but such far later artists as Velasquez, Rembrandt, or even Whistler. The method of the painter, whoever he was, is completely modern, and uniform throughout the chapel. He sacrifices minute definition to generalizations for mass; and color, to emphatic construction in light and shade. To obtain relief in the figures and distance in the backgrounds is the main concern. It is in intention a luminist art and a modelling art. The procedure is nearly uniform throughout the Brancacci Chapel, though it grows abler from fresco to fresco. It is a method that Masolino never commanded, not at Castiglione d’Olona ten years later, nor still ten years later at San Clemente, Rome. Hence I can only believe that the admitted inequalities in the Brancacci Chapel merely repre- sent the swift development of Masaccio’s genius, and certain interruptions in the work itself. The first fresco, in the nave alongside, the entrance of the chapel, depicts our first parents at the moment of the Tempta- tion in the Garden of Eden, Figure 87. It is stilted and awk- ward, yet withal dignified. The theme, which indeed has sel- dom been a happy one for any artist, has not greatly interested the painter. He has made it an occasion for studying the nude. We have what the modern student calls an academy. As such, it is able. The construction is highly simplified and is wholly in masses of light and dark, the contour is freely effaced. The mystery of background foliage is well suggested, the placing of the head of the serpent between the tree and the figures is a perfect example of the new art of aerial perspective. No painter but Masaccio had even the notion of such an effect at this moment. Technically the handling of this detail is just the same as that of the vastly more beautiful angel in the Expulsion from Eden, Figure gt. Finally, the impassive mask of the Eve is identical with 134 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING that of the Virgin, in Masaccio’s panel in the Ufhzi. We presumably have to do with an experimental phase of Masac- cio about the year 1423-5. About that time Masolino prob- ably was called to Buda to work for the extraordinary Fic. 87. Masaccio. The Tempta- Fic. 91. Masaccio. The Expul- tion. — Brancacci Chapel. sion. — Brancacci Chapel. Florentine soldier of fortune, Filippo Scolari, better known by his nickname of Pippo Spano. If Vasari is right, Masaccio had been required to prove his ability to continue the work by painting a St. Paul near the bellcord of the Church, in competition with a St. Jerome by Masolino. Both are lost. MASACCIO AND THE NEW REALISM 135 However that be, Masaccio probably succeeded to the work in 1425, his twenty-fourth year, and the next fresco after the Adam and Eve may well have been the adjoining subjects of Fic. 88. Masaccio. St. Peter raising Tabitha and healing the Cripple.— Brancacci Chapel. Peter raising Tabitha from the Dead and healing a Cripple, Figure 88. As a whole the composition is somewhat marred by inadvertences and afterthoughts. It shows the influence of Masolino in the trite and conventional gestures of the mourners about the bier, and in certain strained facial ex- pressions, notably that of the turbaned bystander. Such survivals are precisely what one would expect in a young painter just emancipated from his master. ‘The entirely Masolino-like pair of strollers in the centre seem to be due to an afterthought. The first intention is registered in the un-_ naturally straight back of St. Peter’s companion, in the centre. The fresco was apparently to have been cut into two compart- ments by a pilaster at that point.2 When the plan was aban- doned in favor of putting two episodes in one space, the two un- related figures had to be added to All space and provide a transi- tion. Oneisa little ashamed of pointing out small defects in what in all essentials is a noble and impassioned work. ‘Technically there is nothing better in the Chapel than the establishing of the city background. It has scale, admirable atmospheric 136 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING placing, dignity and pictorial significance. How anybody who knows Masolino’s niggling and haphazard treatment of such architectural features at Castiglione d’Olona can imagine that he had earlier created this grandiose setting remains a mys- tery to me. Even more remarkable are the gravity and gran- deur of the Peter and the Tabitha. Here we are reminded of Giotto. Masaccio must often have pored over the Stories of St. John in Santa Croce, and while he by no means adopted Giotto’s shorthand indications for mass, he did adopt Giotto’s sense for classic dignity, beautifully calculated order, and moderation. As we continue through these remarkable fres- coes we shall see continually that the quite ruthless innovator that was Masaccio was also a reverent traditionalist. The particular form of his art was settled between nature and himself, as Leonardo da Vinci later justly observed; the spirit of his art derived mostly from Giotto. It was highly impor- tant for the whole ongoing of art in Italy that so revolutionary a spirit was tempered by the finest respect for the great classic tradition. And in this great fresco of St. Peter’s miracles one may see how a quite homely and drastic realism can be invested with abstract power and dignity. How different it all is from the small and often charming vivacity which Masolino displays at Castiglione d’Olona and at Rome. Like the Temptation, the Tabitha is more linear and color- ful than the other frescoes of the Chapel. The painter has not quite mastered the radically new method of construction in light and shade. Thus there is a technical break between the Tabitha and the frescoes on the back wall, which are in a more developed manner. We may assume an interruption in the work. Indeed we need not assume it, for records prove that for most of the year 1426 Masaccio was occupied with the great altar-piece for the Carmelites at Pisa. On October 15, 1426, Masaccio solemnly engaged not to do any other work until the altar-piece should be finished. We may believe MASACCIO AND THE NEW REALISM 137 then that the work in the Brancacci Chapel was taken up anew towards 1427. The four frescoes on the back wall, which are divided into two groups by the window, are the first of the new work. Of these the most remarkable is St. Peter Baptizing, Figure 89. The drawing is magnificent. Light and dark, without aid of the line, create so many bosses and pits which not merely establish form but suggest the gravest emotions. A few well chosen and well placed figures give the sense of a multitude. Mountains tower in gigantic scale, one feels the run of the little river from its distant source amid high ravines. The simplest modulations of light and dark, so many sweeps of a broad brush, establish the constructional planes of the figures and the mountains. All the early Italian writers mark with wondering admiration the expressiveness of the shivering man waiting his turn at the left. It is the smallest merit of the picture. Masaccio in this great composition commands a homely and impressive majesty, and therein shows himself ‘true successor of Giotto, but he also reveals a power of syn- thesis entirely modern and hardly excelled since his day. One has only to turn to Masolino’s Baptism at Castiglione d’Olona, Figure 82, with its niggling insistence on details, to appreciate the gulf between the master and the pupil. Across the window from Masaccio’s Baptism is St. Peter Preaching. The same towering, mountain background is used. The somewhat linear treatment of the faces has led Mr. Berenson, with other critics, to ascribe this fresco to Masolino. It seems to me merely less strenuously seen, because the subject offers little inspiration. Masaccio has lent the theme real dignity, and, in the eager face of the nun at the front of the audience achieves an unusual sweetness. Technically there are good but not compelling reasons for supposing this fresco may have been done among the first, about 1425. 138 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING The lower scenes at the back of the Chapel are, at your right, St. Peter healing the Sick, by the mere fall of his shadow and, at the left, St. Peter giving Alms. In both cases we have Florentine street scenes with a classic air lent by the solemn figures of the apostles. We feei the figures as far or near, and the air that veils them. There is great intentness in the poor folk, and a rugged im- personality in St. Peter and St. James. They are not in- dulging personal compassion so much as fulfilling a divine mission. Again the combination of a drastic realism with a stylistic majesty is what makes these frescoes unique. They contain vivid portraits, among these the traditional portrait of Masolino, a gentle, heavy, middle-aged face, bearded, and crowned with a sort of tuque— just the man to have con- ceived the charming but loosely organized compositions at Castiglione d’Olona. What Masaccio looked like we may see in the upper fresco on the right wall. He is the alert and determined figure im- personating St. Thomas, at the left of the group. The story of the Tribute Money, Figure 90, is one of the grandest creations of European art.. If, as Leonardo da Vinci asserts, the highest task of painting is to show by the pose and ges- tures of the body the emotions of the soul, this is one of the greatest paintings. It is remarkable for the dignity lent to an apparently unpromising theme. The story is simply that Christ is required to pay the denarius when there is no money in the company. By a miracle Peter finds the coin in the mouth of a fish and pays it to the tax-gatherer. How the creative imagination has magnified this slender theme! Ma- saccio has formed a group of potent and formidable indivi- duals, these simple men are fit to shake a world. He has shown them in a moment in which discouragement and determina- tion blend. A technicality threatens to check the salvation of the world. He has discriminated between the assured au- MASACCIO AND THE NEW REALISM 139 thority of the Christ and the wrathful energy of St. Peter. He has invested the majestic forms with massive draperies Fic. 90. Masaccio. The Tribute Money. — Brancacci Chapel. Fic. 89. Masaccio. St. Peter Fic.92. Masaccio. The Trinity, Baptizing. — Brancacci Chapel. Fresco. — Santa Maria Novella. grandly disposed in simple folds. He has given even the tax- gatherer the grace of a Roman athlete. Finally he has set the austere company before a noble river plain upon which 140 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING press the slopes of lofty mountains, while the undulating crest of a remoter range almost bars off the sky. All objects, human and inanimate, bear firmly on the ground and are wrapped in an enveloping atmosphere. In the quality and arrangement of the figures, it all derives from Giotto; in the vastness of the scale, the introduction of mystery and dis- tance, it is wholly Masaccio’s own. Vasari rightly praised the harmony and discretion with which these powerful assertions of form are made, and sees here the beginnings of the modern style of painting. The organizing power of Masaccio is at its height in the Tribute Money. His emotional intensity is fully involved only in the Expulsion from Eden, Figure 91, the adjoining fresco in the nave of the church. Before the sword of a se- renely inexorable angel, Adam and Eve stalk forth into the unknown. Their bodies cringe as they move, with shame and grief. An ominous light reduces their bodies to so many pits of shadow and bosses of light. Drawing of such accurate economy will only rarely reappear in the world, in Leonardo da Vinci, in Rembrandt, in Honoré Daumier. The desperate emotion is well contained within the oblong, in a monumental balance. Remorse in the two first sinners has its shades. The man’s head is pressed into his hands in an attempt at restraint, while Eve’s is thrown back in anguished ululation. The high emotional pressure is new, and symptomatic, and significantly it 1s contained within monumental bounds. The Italian Renaissance in its striving for expressiveness will rarely fail to keep expression noble. ‘The ingrained classicism of the Florentine point of view is never more favorably repre- sented than in a subject like this which seeks a maximum emo- tion on terms of order and lucidity. What remains of Masaccio is in a sense anticlimax. Very stately is the fresco in this chapel, of the Resurrection of the Prince of Tyre and St. Peter enthroned. The beauty is MASACCIO AND THE NEW REALISM = IgqI that of fine arrangement and characterization. The grace- ful nude boy and about ten distinguished figures behind him were added to the composition, presumably from Ma- saccio’s designs, full fifty years later. They are the work of Filippino Lippi, who also added some portraits at the left of this fresco. He also filled the three unpainted panels, in an excellent imitation of Masaccio’s style. Evidently Ma- saccio was called rather abruptly to his last sojourn at Rome. For the fresco of the Raising of the Boy could have been finished in a fortnight. I have omitted a fine fresco of a Pieta in the Collegiate Church at Empoli, though I believe it to be a splendid example of Masaccio’s early style, and I can only mention for its magnificent architectural setting in Brunellesco’s new style the fresco of the Trinity in Santa Maria Novella, Figure 92. It is of his latest manner and of extraordinary gravity and mass. In 1428, being only twenty-six years old, Masaccio drops out of sight at Rome. Some report that he was poisoned, others that he was slain in a street brawl. We really know nothing about it. What we do know 1s that in the recorded history of art no painter had achieved so greatly in so short a time. Within six short years Masaccio created that method of painting which stood uncontested till the advent of luminism only forty years ago. And he not merely illustrated the method of construction in light and dark, painting in atmos- pheric values rather than in lines and charted areas, but he also expressed in the new technic both the noblest tradi- tional emotions as also. poignant new emotions quite his own. In one superb aggressive he had moved three genera- tions into the future. For a hundred years the most intelli- gent and ambitious artists in Florence as a matter of course studied and copied in the Brancacci Chapel to form their style. Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, Leonardo da Vinci, Michel- 142 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING angelo, Raphael, Andrea del Sarto thus paid homage to the untidy youth from Castel San Giovanni, and even the icono- clasts of today, for whom Leonardo da Vinci and his peers are scarcely artists at all, envy the gravity and force of Masac- cio. He is the real father of modern painting, which is most true to itself when it tempers an ardent curiosity as regards natural appearances with a respect for the great traditions of moderation and taste. Masaccio’s successors, very wisely, did not closely imitate him. They saw he was an unsafe and unapproachable model. By a swift impulse of genius, and apparently without analytical study of anatomy and topography, he had mastered the broad effects that register form. Details he neglected. He gives the action of hands and feet, not their articula- tions, the scale of landscape and not its component parts. For men of lesser genius, these shortcuts were dangerous. While using Masaccio as inspiration, they had to verify his discoveries through analytical studies before those innova- tions could become generally available. The process of veri- fication and minute research occupied about fifty years and may be said to be complete with the maturity of Leon- ardo da Vinci, say about the date of The Last Supper, 1498. The successors of Masaccio may be divided into two groups as they quietly adopted and popularized the immediately available part of his discoveries, or strenuously carried his work forward. ‘To the moderate progressive group belong Fra Filippo Lippi and Benozzo Gozzoli, and still later Ghir- landaio; the experimentalists are birds of quite a different feather. f These Florentine realists may be divided into two genera- tions. The first asserts itself before the middle of the fif- teenth century, and is trained chiefly under the influence of such sculptors as Donatello, Brunellesco and Ghiberti. These painters work at the problem of light and shade, anatomy, MASACCIO AND THE NEW REALISM 143 and perspective, accepting in their art the guidance of sculp- ture. Ihe second generation of realists come to their own after the middle of the century, are mostly trained as silver- Fic. 93. Paolo Uccello. Battle of Cavalry. — Louvre. smiths, and work at the new technic of oil painting, at land- scape and at the figure in action. Both groups relatively neglected the important matter of composition. Most of the realists sacrificed pictorial effect the better to master de- tail, but they also accumulated that vast body of knowledge upon which rests the glory of the High Renaissance, and no- body can understand the progress of Florentine painting without following sympathetically their great effort. Of the first generation, the quaintest figure is Paolo Uccello. Born in 1397, he soon gave himself fanatically to the study of the new science of perspective, especially to feats of fore- shortening. His pictures are so many experiments and have a petrified inertness. Yet at his best he commands dignity and a considerable decorative power. About the year 1435 he painted for the Medici palace several battle scenes, three of which are respectively in the Louvre, Figure 93, National Gallery and Uffizi. The last, representing the Florentine victory of San Romano,'shows the style. The forms are squared, in a 144° HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING fashion anticipating modern Cubism, in order to simplify the problem of placing and foreshortening. Corpses and lances are deliberately pointed at the spectator to offer so many problems in perspective. The landscape is minute and topographical. The decorative coloring is bold and origi- nal with interesting dissonances of oranges, russets, and greens. It is quite splendid after the unreal fashion of a tapestry. Paolo’s masterpiece is the equestrian portrait of Sir John Hawkwood, Figure 94, the English soldier of fortune and occasional captain of the Florentine army, which is in the Cathedral. It is painted in gray-green touched with color, and simulates a tomb. ‘The date is 1437. Since Roman times no equestrian monument of equal dignity had been created, and one is inclined to suspect that Uccello profited by pre- liminary studies of Donatello, his close friend, which later developed into the superb Gattamelata statue at Padua. Ucello has a lighter vein illustrated by furniture panels at Oxford, (a Hunt), at Paris, and Vienna, (St. George and the Dragon), but his most ambitious work is the decoration of the lunettes in the great cloister of Santa Maria Novella. The stories are drawn from the Old Testament, were started by Paolo, about the year 1446, and continued by several assistants. [he medium was gray-green, terra verde, and the place accordingly is called the Green Cloister. Uccello’s manner may be best sensed in the fresco of the Deluge, in which the endeavor to set problems in perspective clashes unhappily with the desire to present a scene of terror. The figures are felt one at a time, there is little relation be- tween them, and the picture has small merit apart from its probity in the rendering of details and a sort of abstract earnestness. Uccello lived on till 1475, an indulged eccentric, ignored by the public and ridiculed by his greater friends. His zeal for perspective was unabated with age, and many a night MASACCIO AND THE NEW REALISM 145 Fic. 94. Paolo Uccello, ‘Tomb ee a ele Fic. 96. Andrea del Castagno. Portrait of a young man. — }. P. Morgan Coll., N.Y. se ae Fic. 95. Andrea del Castagno. Fic. 97. Andrea del Castagno. Pippo Spano. — Sant’ Apollonia. Tomb portrait of Niccold da Tolentino. — Cathedral. 146 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING his much-tried wife lost sleep as he murmured in the small hours — “‘O! thou dear perspective!” Far the most powerful of these early realists is Andrea del Castagno.” His aggressive and truculent forms savor of Donatello without Donatello’s fineness. He searches the secrets of anatomy, locates and describes the muscles and sinews, depicts a world ruled by force of arm. Although he builds in heavy shadows, after Masaccio’s fashion, he re- tains an outline that vibrates with nervous strength. His truthful sternness still wins approbation. He was born about 1390. We meet him first in full maturity, perhaps about the year 1435, as decorator of the Villa of the Pandolfini. To strengthen the ambition of that proud race, he painted in their great hall nine figures of heroes and heroines noted in war or in the arts. Recently transferred to the Convent of Sant’ Apollonia, which already had a Last Supper and a Calvary by Andrea, you may see the austere forms of Dante, . Petrarch, and Boccaccio, of Esther, Queen Thomyris and the Cumean Sibyl, of the warrior Farinata degli Uberti, Niccol6 Accaiuoli, and Filippo Scolari. This potent and melancholy figure of Pippo Spano, Figure 95, whom we al- ready know as the patron of Masolino, at Buda, is the most striking representation that painting has given us of those masterful Italian soldiers of fortune who managed war and government for the less advanced nations. Pippo Spano had gone to Buda as a clerk and had quickly become a eeneralissimo, Obergespann of Temesvar. For King Sigis- mund of Hungary he stemmed the Turkish onslaught, did much to save Central Europe for Christianity. As he stands thoughtfully confident, holding the scimitar, the weapon of his foes, he is the beau ideal of that Italy soon to be immortal- ized by Machiavelli, in which virtue meant successful force, and both were on sale. A man’s portrait, Figure 96, in the collection of Mr. J. P. Morgan, New York, has an even more MASACCIO AND THE NEW REALISM 147 sinister intensity. Equally remarkable for its heroic aggres- siveness is the young David adorning a tournament shield in the Widener Collection, Figure 70. In the fresco of the Crucifixion, now in S. Apollonia, Andrea reveals great knowledge linked to tragic expressiveness. No tenderness veils the appalling theme. An athlete suffers stoically while his mother and cousin shudder with grief. Of its ruthless kind it is a great masterpiece and quite un- forgettable. In 1456 Andrea painted for the Cathedral the equestrian portrait of the partisan leader, Niccolo da Tolentino, Figure 97. It is a companion piece to Uccello’s Hawkwood, and like it simulates statuary, in monochrome. It is more martial and restless, in the toss of the horse’s head and the snap of the rider’s cloak. It suggests not ceremonious dignity, but noise and impending action. It may very powerfully have influenced Verrocchio twenty years later when he modelled for Venice the Colleoni statue. The truculence of Andrea’s manner led to a false and scandalous tradition, promulgated by Vasari, that he slew his rival Domenico Veneziano out of jealousy. As a matter of prosaic record, Domenico Veneziano survived his alleged assassin’s death, in 1457, by all of four years. Domenico came down from Venice somewhere about 1438 and brought with him a new technical method. He finished the pictures, which he began in tempera, with veilings or glazes in an oil or varnish medium. He avoided the old frank Gothic coloring in favor of pale tonalities which oddly fore- cast our modern open-air school. The new method permitted of bolder brushwork and successive over paintings. For the moment it wrought havoc with the old conventional beauty, but it offered the painter new resources and refinements, and eventually made possible the triumphs of Leonardo and Titian. | 148 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING On the whole, Domenico is merely the shadow of a great name, for we have only a handful of works by him, and those perhaps unrepresentative. The altar-piece of St. Lucy, in Fic. 98. Domenico Veneziano. Madonna with St. Lucy. — Uffizi. the Uffizi, Figure 98, is novel only in its acid and original dissonance of deep rose and pale green. The rugged St. John the Baptist shows an attempt to obtain force of modelling without exaggerating the shadows. This tendency persists in such disciples of Domenico as Baldovinetti and Piero della Francesca, and rules in Florence until Leonardo’s definitive application of Masaccio’s methods. In the profile portraiture of the period Domenico was a master, as shown in an ad- mirable female portrait in Mrs. 'John L. Gardner’s collec- tion, Figure 99. Many similar heads, which we can hardly ascribe to particular masters, seem to derive from Domenico. One of the most beautiful is in the Poldi Pezzoli Museum at Milan. All of Domenico’s pupils and imitators excel in a minute and topographical style of landscape of which he was probably the inventor. It may be studied in Piero della Francesca, in the Pollaiuoli, in Baldovinetti, and there is even a trace of it in the spacious Alpine background of the Mona Lisa. MASACCIO AND THE NEW REALISM 149 Domenico died in 1461. By that time Florentine realism was emerging from its first phase, and was beginning to in- vestigate with its new resources the facts of motion. It was the moment, too, when certain realists sought to regain the Fic. 99. Domenico Veneziano. Fic. 100. A. Baldovinetti. Ma- Portrait of a Girl.— Coll. Mrs. donna. — Louvre. Fohn L. Gardner, Boston. grace which had largely been sacrificed in the struggle for sheer knowledge. Alesso Baldovinetti" well represents this moment in a lovely Madonna in the Louvre, Figure 100, which shows in perfection the new topographical landscape and that juvenile graciousness which was to be the staple of the coming genera- tion of artists. Baldovinetti was born in 1425, and this love- liest of all his pictures may represent him about the year 1460. He had been an assistant of Fra Angelico, but in a long career, he died in 1499, he fell behind the times. He taught Domenico Ghirlandaio his elements, and profoundly influenced Andrea Verrocchio and Antonio Pollaiuolo. Thus he keeps a sure if modest place in the progress of Florentine art. 150 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING In this chapter we have been dealing in a rough way with the Florence of Cosimo de’ Medici. Under his astute and delicate rule from behind the political scenes, Florence de- veloped in wealth, splendor, and worldliness. The old piety was waning or assuming merely esthetic forms. Greek studies were beginning to pave the way for an enlightened and sceptical humanism and, withal, a revival of the pagan sense of beauty. And when the new beauty came, it was greatfully mindful of those who had made it possible. Leon- ardo da Vinci lauds Masaccio. He expresses the immense debt that art owes to the first conscious realists. ‘They did good and harm, but to Florence at least they opened the only way of progress. For whatever art may be elsewhere, in Flor- ence it was fruitful only as it was intellectualized. Good theory, good practice — such was the creed imposed by the early realists and later formulated by their great scion, Leon- ardo. I do not offer it as a universal formula, but in these days when pure spontaneity —that is no theory — and false theory divide the field, the old Florentine credo is at least worthy of consideration by all who produce art and by all who love it. Baldovinetti was untouched by these new stirrings which are associated with the rule of Lorenzo de’ Medici, but he dimly forecasts the grace that was soon to come. ‘This new spirit and its exponents must be the theme of our next chapter. Sei a te MASACCIO AND THE NEW REALISM ISI ILLUSTRATIONS FOR CHAPTER III VASARI ON MASACCIO Vasari’s general estimate of Masaccio’s importance is still sound. “With regard to the good manner of painting, we are indebted above all to Masaccio, seeing that he, as one desirous of acquiring fame, per- seived that painting is nothing but the counterfeiting of all the things of nature, vividly and simply, with drawing and with colours, even as she produced them for us . . . This truth, I say, being recognized by Masaccio, brought it about that by means of continuous study he learned so much that he can be numbered among the first who cleared away, in a great measure, the hardness, the imperfections, and the difficulties of the art, and that he gave a beginning to beautiful at- titudes, movements, liveliness, and vivacity, and to a certain relief truly characteristic and natural; which no painter up to his time had done .. . And he painted his works with good unity and softness, harmonizing the flesh-colours of the heads and of the nudes with the colours of the draperies, which he delighted to make with few folds and simple, as they are in life and nature .. . “For this reason that chapel has been frequented continually up to our own day [1554] by innumerable draughtsmen and masters; and there still are therein some heads so life-like and so beautiful, that it may truly be said that no master of that age approached so nearly as this man did to the moderns. His labours, therefore, deserve infinite praise, and above all because he gave form in his art to the beautiful manner of the times.” Vasari then names twenty-five artists who studied Masaccio’s fres- -coes. From De Vere’s translation of the Lives, Vol. II, p. 189, 90. LEONARDO DA VINCI ON MASACCIO Leonardo da Vinci uses Masaccio as the example of a painter who goes to nature rather than to other men’s painting. That Painting declines and deteriorates from age to age, when painters have no standard but painting already done. “Hence the painter will produce pictures of small merit if he takes for his standard the pictures of others. But if he will study from natural objects he will bear good fruit; as was seen in the painters after the Romans who always imitated each other, and so their art declined E62 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING from age to age. After these came Giotto the Florentine who — not content with imitating the works of Cimabue; his master — being born in the mountains and in a solitude inhabited only by goats and such beasts, and being guided by nature to his art, began by drawing on the rocks the movements of the goats of which he was keeper. And thus he began to draw all the animals which were to be found in the country, and in such wise that after much study he excelled not only all the masters of his time but all those of many bygone ages.” “Afterwards this art declined again, because everyone imitated the pictures that were already done; thus it went on from century to cen- tury until Tomaso, of Florence, nicknamed Masaccio, showed by his perfect works how those who take for their standard any one but nature — the mistress of all masters — weary themselves in vain.” J. P. Richter ‘‘ Literary Works of L. da V.,” Vol. I. p. 660. But Leonardo approves also imitation of antiquity (Richter, Vol. II, {{1445). ‘‘ The imitation of antique things is better than that of modern things.”” He would probably have sanctioned Masaccio’s devout study of Giotto. The warning is against slavish imitation of immedi- ate predecessors. VASARI ON PAOLO UCCELLO The admirable and self sacrificing ardor of these first realists is best exemplified in the case of Paolo Uccello. “For the sake of these investigations [in perspective] he kept him- self in seclusion and almost a hermit, having little intercourse with anyone, and staying weeks and months in his house without shaving himself. And although those were difficult and beautiful problems, if he had spent that time in the study of figures, he would have brought | them to absolute perfection; for even so he made them with passing good draughtsmanship. But, consuming his time in these researches, he remained throughout his whole life more poor than famous; where- fore the sculptor Donatello, who was very much his friend, said to him very often—when Paolo showed him Mazzocchi (facetted head- fillets) with pointed ornaments, and squares drawn in perspective from diverse aspects; spheres with seventy-two diamond-shaped facets, with wood-shavings wound round sticks on each facet; and other fan- tastic devices on which he spent and wasted his time — ‘Ah, Paolo, this perspective of thine makes thee abandon the substance for the shadow; those are things that are only useful to men who work at the in- MASACCIO AND THE NEW REALISM 153 laying of wood, seeing that they fill their borders with chips and shav- ings, with spirals both round and square, and with other similar things.’ ” Vasari, in Schele de Vere’s translation; Vol. II. p. 132, 3. AN APPRAISAL OF BALDOVINETTI’S FRESCOES Here I may illustrate a common practice of the times in an appraisal of Baldovinetti’s frescoes in the choir of the Trinita by fellow artists including Benozzo Gozzoli, Cosimo Rosselli and Pietro Perugino. “In the name of God — on the 19 of January 1496 (n. s. ’97) We Benozzo di Lese, painter; and Piero di Cristofano da Castel della Pieve, painter; and Cosimo di Lorenzo Rosselli, painter, chosen by Alesso di Baldovinetto Baldovinetti, painter, to see and judge and set a price on — empowered by a contract which said Alesso has with M. Bongianni de’Gianfigliazzi and his heirs — a chapel pictured in Santa Trinita of Florence — that is the choir of the said church, having seen, all together and agreeing, having examined all the costs of lime, azure, gold and all other colours, scaffolds and everything else, including his work, we judge from all this that the aforesaid Alesso should have one thousand broad gold florins. “‘And for clearness and truth of the said judgment I Cosimo di Lorenzo aforesaid have made this writing with my own hand this aforesaid day, and so I judge; and here at the foot they will sign with their own hands that they are agreed with what is above written, and so judge. Benozzo di Lese &c. I Piero Perugino &c. Translated from Herbert Horne’s edition of Alesso’s Ricordi in Bur- lington Magazine, Vol. II. (1903) p- 383. At Meer telerO LIPPI- AND THE NEW NARRATIVE STYLE CHAPTER IV FRA FILIPPO LIPPI AND THE NEW NARRATIVE STYLE After Masaccio two tendencies, — towards prettiness and vivacious narrative; towards strenuous research — Fra Filippo Lippi celebrant of Gay Flor- ence — Benozzo Gozzoli and Pageantry — Antonio Pollaiuolo and human dynamics — Piero della Francesca and impersonal observation of ap- pearances — Dissolving tendencies in the new panoramic style — illus- trated by the early frescoes in the Sistine Chapel — Perugino’s return to simple symmetries — The Cassone painters once more — Domenico Ghirlandaio and spectacular narrative — His portraits— The charm of the slighter narrative style. In the last chapter we have dealt chiefly with innovators and reformers. Whether in art or life, these are not always the most agreeable companions. The charming person 1s generally a traditionalist, or a tactful profiteer by other men’s discoveries. So the popular favor has ever gone not to the strenuous artists of Masaccio’s type or Castagno’s, but to devotees of the charm of common folk and things, like Fra Filippo Lippi; to masters of pageantry and incident, like Benozzo Gozzoli; or to chroniclers of the festal richness of Florence in her short prime, like Domenico Ghirlandaio. These artists, while by no means giants, are highly representa- tive of their times. They one and all aimed to please, and amply succeeded. Their importance in the history of art 1s rather slight; in the history of taste, on the contrary, they are very important. And it is from that point of view that we shall do well to consider them. These three masters cover the last two-thirds of the fifteenth century. They exemplify 157 158 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING the taste of the new-rich merchants who flourished under the benevolent tyranny of the Medici. Alongside of these gracious and adaptable spirits, struggled the continuers of the realistic reform — Antonio Pollaiuolo, who first systematically studied the anatomy and dynamics of the human form; Andrea Verrocchio, who imbued accuracy and power with grace; Sandro Botticelli, who explored soli- tary roads of sentiment and wrought out of the ruggedness of the realists strange forms of recondite beauty. At all times we find the endeavor for artistic adaptation running along- side the passion for sheer discovery, and producing its own triumphs. It is this complicated, dual process which makes the richness and continuity of the Early Renaissance. If we compare the seventy-two years between the beginnings of Masaccio, say 1422, and the death of Ghirlandaio, in 1494, with the century and a half preceding, we shall note an ex- traordinary acceleration both of production and progress. There are no gaps and rests; each generation makes its dis- coveries and cashes them in. Architecture, sculpture, classi- cal scholarship develop with a whirling rapidity which by no means precludes taste and reflection. In an almost reck- less expansion of emotion, experience, and creative activity, Florence keeps her head though she risks losing her soul. And the true harbinger of this intoxicating new life is one who often lost his head and whose soul remains enigmatic, the wayward and fascinating painter-monk, Fra_ Filippo Lippi. ! He was the first Italian painter to care greatly for the look of everyday people. Born about the year 1400, he was early orphaned and thrust willy-nilly into the Carmelite Order. As a young man he must have seen Masaccio painting those titanic designs in the Brancacci Chapel. From Masaccio Fra Filippo learned his trade, rather by observation than by direct instruction. But he cared for far different things. FRA FILIPPO LIPPI AND NARRATIVE STYLE 159 He really follows the tender narrative vein of Lorenzo Monaco. To the grandeur of miracle-working apostles, he preferred the Fic. 102. Fra Filippo Lippi. Madonna in Adoration. — Berlin. gentle quaintness of the old man who kept the shops and practiced the trades of Florence; to the matronly dignity of Masaccio’s women, he preferred the shy and alluring sweet- ness of the Florentine girls about him; to the majestic sweeps of mountain and valley in Masaccio, the intimate appeal of the cypress groves, the little ledges and trickling springs. In technique, too, he avoided the bold short-cuts of his master. 160 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING He hung on to the line, loved details, described everything with solicitude. It is an art of amiability and curiosity, gener- ally disregardful of that grand style towards which in her greater moments Florence ever aspired. The advent of Fra Filippo in the Florence of Giotto and Orcagna and Masaccio, was like that of an irresistibly attractive youth in a solemn company. He loosened everything up. Unconsciously he demoralized the assembly; for two generations the art of Florence was to be boyish and _ girlish. That is its charm and its limita- tion, and the difference between A ce ae Cine. ae the Early Renaissance and the Golden Age will be largely that the latter will prefer to depict with the gravity of maturity a world that has grown up. One of the earliest and most exquisite panels by Fra Filippo was painted shortly after 1435 for the private chapel of Cosimo de’ Medici’s new palace, and is now at Berlin. The theme, young Mary kneeling before her Divine Infant, Figure 102, is a favorite with the Florentine artists of this century. Per- haps no one has conceived it more delightfully than Fra Filippo. The picture gets its peculiar sweetness from the gentle, girl- ish figure of the Maiden Mother, its quality of romance from the ledgy background watered by springs and spangled with modest flowers, its tang of reality from the chubby and stolid Christchild and the boyish St. John the Baptist. You could almost see such a thing today along the shaded upper Mensola when a young Florentine mother has taken the children for a Sunday picnic. For the old Gothic conventions and the Peart eeO LIPPI AND NARRATIVE STYLE 161 bare majesty of Masaccio’s painting, Fra Filippo has sub- stituted the everyday joys of a feeling eye, and the charm of closely-observed little things. In most of his pictures this familiar quality is marked. Fic. 104. Fra Filippo Lippi. Coronation of the Virgin. — Uffizt. His saints are not types, but people of the Florentine middle class. An early Madonna in the Ufhzi, Figure 103, shows the Virgin as a slight girl with her ash-blond locks elaborately dressed and braided for a holiday. She is almost overborne. by her sturdy Son, an exacting brute, one may imagine, while the attendant angel is a grinning street Arab caught in the intervals of mischief. Such pictures with their win- someness and actuality worked powerfully to break down both the old Gothic decorum and the new sublimity of Masaccio. To grasp the novelty of Fra Filippo’s most famous panel ‘picture, The Coronation of the Virgin, painted for the nuns of Sant’ Ambrogio in 1441, Figure 104, and now in the Ufhzi, one has only to recall the devoutly formal and simple version of the subject which Fra Angelico painted about the same 162 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING time for the convent of San Marco. The composition of Fra Filippo, on the contrary, is radiantly informal. We breathe the air of the commencement at a very nice girls’ school, with adoring friends and proud relatives moving at the edges of the ceremony. Indeed God the Father has merely the air of a benevolent trustee or visiting minor celebrity awarding a prize to the best girl. It is all like the crowning of a Rosiére in a French village. Robert Browning in one of the most admirable poems in ‘““Men and Women” makes Fra Filippo promise “YT shall paint God in the midst, Madonna and her Babe. Ringed by a bowery, flowery angel-brood, Lilies and vestments and white faces, sweet As puff on puff of grated orris-root When ladies crowd to church at Midsummer.” Our picture is evidence enough that the time has come to Florentine art when youth shall be served. Monastic vows, and in fact duties of any sort, bore lightly on Fra Filippo. He tasted the forbidden sweets of life reck- lessly, and worked only when the rare mood urged. He was in and out of the good graces of the Medici. Called to Prato to fresco the choir of the Collegiata, in 1455, he was nine years achieving what a steady workman would have done in two. But in the meantime Fra Filippo had run away with the nun, Lucrezia Buti, shuffled off his monastic vows (through the indulgence of the humanist Pope, Pius II), married and settled down as the father of a family. His random joyous course was nearly run, and his last frescoes at Prato show a kind of discipline that is foreign to his earlier work. In 1464 he completed the Feast of Herod and the Funeral of St. Stephen, frescoes which forecast the sort of narrative painting that was to mark the close of the century. About the brutality of the Feast of Herod, Figure 105, Fra = FRA FILIPPO LIPPI AND NARRATIVE STYLE 163 Filippo has cast a dreamy glamour, as indeed Giotto had be- fore him. The youthful guests are absorbed in Salome’s dancing. Following the sculptors of the day, Fra Filippo has made her slight and graceful, as she trips a careless measure. Fic. 105. Fra Filippo Lippi. Feast of Herod. Salome’s Dance. Fresco. — Collegiata. Prato. The air is simply that of a gentle society. The grim motive of the delivery of the head of John the Baptist to Herodias is gently emphasized by the charming act of two little hand- maids who clutch each other for fright. The sprightliness of the invention, the generalized idyllic charm of the feeling, the rich variety of accessories, the youthful timbre of the whole — make this not merely one of the best but also one of the most characteristic narrative mural paintings of the Early Renaissance. It strikes the note which will be echoed by Fra Filippo’s apprentice, Sandro Botticelli; which will be exaggerated by Fra Filippo’s son, Filippino, and distantly imitated by many another Florentine successor. If the Feast of Herod best exemplifies the element of homely poetry and inventive grace in Fra Filippo, the Burial of St. Stephen, Figure 106, just opposite in the choir proves that he was not oblivious to the high and decorous prose of his 164 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING master Masaccio. In formality and power of construction few painters then living could have equalled it, and those few could not have rivalled its spacious architectural setting and its suggestion of atmosphere. At first sight it seems: nearly equal to the Tribute Money or at least to the Tabitha. On more careful survey it is less noble, more insistently pa- thetic, and in every way more loosely knit. In particular the portraits at the sides have little but a mechanical rela- tion to the theme. Masaccio himself had admitted a similar gallery of mere bystanders in The Miracle of the Prince, but had he lived to complete the fresco, he would doubtless have brought the portrait figures into some relation of interest in the miracle. Fra Filippo virtually waives that problem and merely flanks his real subject with bordering groups of persons of contemporary importance. As a matter of fact, the Florentine donor was no longer humble-minded and content to appear among the saints in miniature and unobtrusive — guise. He now insisted in being painted to the life with his family, friends, and dependents, —a complacent, incongru- ous apparition amid the humility or heroism of the saints. Fra Filippo made the sensible adjustment that the donors should serve as a sort of human frame for the religious pic- ture in the centre. This solution became tiresomely standard and lasted for fifty years or so, until the High Renaissance had authority enough to impose considerations of taste and self-effacement even upon wealthy. donors. In 1465 Fra Filippo was called to Spoleto, and there having started a lovely apse decoration, A Coronation, for the cathe- dral, he died and was buried. Quite unconsciously he had temporarily shattered that intellectual formalism which is the very essence of Florentine art, and had inaugurated that moral and artistic holiday which is made visible in the paint- ing of Botticelli and Ghirlandaio and audible in the songs of Lorenzo de’ Medici. FRA FILIPPO LIPPI AND NARRATIVE STYLE 165 This holiday mood is strong in Benozzo Gozzoli, and he spread it through Umbria and the Sienese country. Born in 1420, for a time an assistant of Fra Angelico, Benozzo’s task was to depict with more vivacity than insight the splen- Fic. 106. Fra Filippo Lippi. Funeral of St. Stephen. Fresco. — Collegiata. Prato. dors and humors of life. This he does, whether his theme be the legend of St. Francis, as at Montefalco in 1462, the Caval- cade of the Magi, Florence, 1469, the Life of St. Augustine, San Gimignano, 1465, or the doings of the Old Testament Patriarchs and Matriarchs, at Pisa, 1468-1484. He is always sunny, profuse, witty in an obvious way; and not without his tinge of the poetry of youth. He loves gardens, court- yards, forests, and equally well palaces, colonnades, crowds and incidents. He is indefatigably panoramic, and his fres- coes, if hardly good pictures, are at least good pickings, for their abundant and often refreshing detail. | Very splendid is that pageant of the Wise Men from the East, Figure 107, which he painted about 1469? for the private chapel of Cosimo de’ Medici’s palace. The gorgeous pro- cession winds about the walls, moving over the mountain roads and through the forests which you may still see up 166 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING the Arno valley towards Vallombrosa. ‘Their goal was the little panel over the altar where Filippo Lippi painted the Madonna reverently kneeling before her Son, Figure 102. This little picture was flanked by choirs, in fresco, of singing angels. For the oldest of the Three Kings Benozzo chose, according to tradition, the unfortunate Emperor John Palaeo- logus, who thirty years earlier had come to Florence on the vain mission of uniting the Eastern and Western branches of the Christian Church. The youthful kings are said to portray Giuliano and Lorenzo de’ Medici. What we really have is a pictorial version of those religious pageants or representations which were common at the times. Many times Florence had seen her patricians in such a cavalcade. Benozzo’s fresco in its undiminished loveliness of color and gold — the Medici ap- parently either ordered few masses or burned few candles in their family chapel —is a most precious relic of bygone -splendors. Indeed they passed before Benozzo himself, for he lived on till 1498, four years after Lorenzo the Magnif- cent’s death, and the year of Savonarola’s martyrdom; the year, too, when Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper was being finished. Few artists have had such emphatic intimations that their world and they themselves were obsolete. It is in every way to be hoped in Benozzo’s case that he was at once too cheerful and too unintelligent to grasp the situation. This may be fairly supposed of a man who was content for fifty years of a swiftly moving world with what could be learned from Fra Angelico. Of course some painters declined to keep holiday and fever- ishly pursued the lines of realistic investigation laid down by Castagno and his contemporaries. The most notable of these is Antonio Pollaiuolo.2 He was trained in sculpture under Ghiberti, and worked most variously, at sculpture, painting, engraving, glass designing, and even embroiderers’ patterns. Everywhere he pursued with an almost ferocious intensity FRA FILIPPO LIPPI AND NARRATIVE STYLE 167 the secrets of anatomy and especially of the human body in violent action. He conceived the body as a powerful machine and rejoiced to display its mechanisms — knotted muscles, Fic. 7 Benozzo ee tail r i i. ae Riceardi ope ; ae Fic. 108. Antonio Pollaiuolo. Martyrdom of St. Sebastian. — London. straining sinews. He chose his subjects with this sort of dis- play in mind: Hercules and his feats, the archers setting their bows and crossbows for the slaying of St. Sebastian, nude men in deadly combat with dirks and axes, nude men wildly danc- ing. Nearly all these works suffer from their avowed experi- mentalism, but all are alive with a tingling not to say brutal energy. Antonio Pollaiuolo is the ancestor of all the strong painters who for over four centuries have delighted to appal the mild and sheeplike throng with wolfish antics. He is the first artist who is a specialist, pursuing his own ends in disregard of the surrounding public. As a matter of fact, Antonio’s muscular paganism fitted in fairly well with the notions of a Florence that worshipped power. The Medici ordered the twelve feats of Hercules for their palace, about 168 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING the year 1460. The great pictures are lost, but little copies by Antonio himself give an idea of their truculent force. In the Uffizi are Hercules crushing the breath out of the earth- born demigod Antzus, and Hercules slaying the Hydra. The tension, ardor, and ferocity of these tiny pictures are extraordinary. They seem to enhance our own _ physical life. At New Haven is the panel of Hercules shooting the Centaur Nessus, who races across a ford with Deinaira on his back. The background is an exact picture of the Arno valley looking from the west towards Florence. ‘The rep- resentation of the run of the river is extraordinary. Pol- laiuolo had adopted Domenico Veneziano’s miniature con- ception of landscape, but has introduced swing and motion. Equally remarkable is the Arno landscape in the Martyr- dom of St. Sebastian, Figure 108, which was painted in 1475. It has the defects of an experimental and academic perform- ance, is a show piece. The executioners are even repeated, to show both front and rear aspects. All the same, its power is impressive and beyond the range of any artist then living, with the possible exception of Piero della Francesca. In painting Pollaiuolo’s accomplishment is so even, and in draped figures so ugly, that we may well pass the series of Virtues which with his brother Piero he did in 1469 for the Mercan- tile Court, and consider his great engraving known as the Ten Nudes, Figure 109, the odd decorative disposition of which is imitated by Botticelli in the Allegory of Spring; and the fresco of Dancing Men, in which Pollaiuolo successfully vies with the convivial and Bacchic themes of the Greek vase painters. The group is odd and effective as pattern, and inspired by a joyous energy. Painting only claimed a fraction of Antonio’s effort; often he merely made the sketch and left the execution to his rather tame brother, Piero. At the end of his life he was called down to Rome to make the bronze tomb for Sixtus IV. There he FRA FILIPPO LIPPI AND NARRATIVE STYLE 169 died in the year 1498, being sixty-three years old. While his own achievement was somewhat cramped and limited, he had made the most valuable contributions to the art, or rather to the science of painting. He had inspired a titan Fic. to9. Antonio Pollaiuolo. Fighting Men— “The Ten Nudes.” Engraving. like Signorelli and a poet like Botticelli, and in certain aspects Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo only continued and per- fected his work. As late as Benvenuto Cellini’s day his sketches were passed about the studios for the instruction of young painters in anatomy. A kindred strenuous spirit, Piero della Francesca,‘ affords an interesting contrast to Pollaiuolo. Though an Umbrian, he belongs spiritually to Florence. For Piero the world was a frozen thing. He investigated with utmost zeal the mathe- matical basis of perspective, producing on that topic a la- borious and quite unreadable book. He studied anatomy and construction in light and dark, and all the atmospheric problems therewith associated. To attain atmospheric en- 170 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING velopement, he sacrificed color. His pictures exist in silvery grays, suggesting the blondness and tonal unity of modern open-air painting. The drama of life never engrossed him. His world is passionless and almost motionless, coldly im- pressive. Although he practiced all refinements of modelling, he never made those relaxations of contour which suggest move- ment. His figures are finely con- structed and beautifully placed but emotionally unrelated. They merely exist rather splendidly, as do some of Manet’s figures. In- deed the warning of George Moore Fic. 110. Piero della Francesca. aS regards Manet applies equally ae ees se — Borgo S. to Piero. It is futile to seek from him anything but fine painting. Of his origins we know next to nothing. He was born about 1410 in the Umbrian town of Borgo San Sepolcro. For several years after 1439 we find him at Florence as a paid assistant of Domenico Veneziano, whose pale tonalities and topo- graphically minute landscape reappear throughout Piero’s work. His austere power is best represented in the bleak Resurrection, Figure 110, which he painted in 1460 for his native city. The stalwart Conqueror of Death has an appari- tional impressiveness. He comes with power from beyond the grave. He dominates the world as represented by the sleeping athletes of the guard. A most potent effect is ob- tained without sacrifice to sentiment. ‘There is a similar de- tachment in the Baptism of Christ, in the National Gallery, London. Its pearly loveliness of color is in odd contrast to its evasions of anything like warmth or tenderness. It is less an event than a magnificently posed scene. The landscape FRA FILIPPO LIPPI AND NARRATIVE STYLE 171 is a liberating and informal feature, a skilful adaptation of - the method of Domenico Veneziano and Pollaiuolo. It is as crisp and calculated as a Japanese print, yet it gives its effect of space and breadth. Fic. 111. Piero della Francesca. Battle of Constantine, detail from fresco. — S. Francesco, Arezzo. Piero’s great opportunity came about 1465 when he painted in the choir of San Francesco at Arezzo ten stories from the Legend of the Holy Cross. For stark impressiveness it is hard to match them in Italy in this century. Only Masaccio and Leonardo da Vinci will at all bear the comparison. On analysis, the power rests mostly on the seriousness with which Piero takes his technical problem. There is little real grief or pathos in the Last Days of Adam, it is merely impersonally solemn. Even of the admirable fresco which represents Constantine in the uneasy dream in which he saw the vision of the cross, there is no warmth, no unexpected or emotional quality. So 172 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING it is throughout the series; in the Queen of Sheba visiting Solomon, even in the splendid battlepiece, the Victory over Maxentius, Figure 111, the obvious sentiment of the theme is ignored, the figures have a kind of splendid unrelated existence that requires no apology or explanation. It is an effect that recalls the best archaic Greek sculpture. Taken all in all, Piero is a fOrmidable and enigmatic figure, an exception in a eager and emotional age. His truth to his vision is what counts. One feels it in the portrait of the human- ist sovereign and captain of Urbino, Federigo da Monte- feltro. It was painted about 1472 and is in the Uffizi, Figure 112. How sternly honest it is, and what a presentation of a powerful and beneficent personality. Even the little decora- tive picture on the back of the panel, a Triumph of Fame, has an effect beyond its scale and obvious intention. It sug- gests wide dominions and heavy responsibilities manfully met. Piero della Francesca lived out his life mostly in Umbria and far from the artistic centre of things. ‘There is a self- suffcing quality in this voluntary isolation. He lived on to great old age, dying in 1492, and unless his declining years were perturbed by the faintly rising star of Leonardo da Vinci, he might boast himself, in the words of his and Leonardo’s friend, Fra Luca Pacioli, “‘the monarch of his times in the science of painting.” We must leave for the Umbrian chapter such sturdy con- tinuers of Piero della Francesca’s experimentalism as Melozzo da Forli and Luca Signorelli. What is more important to note in leaving him is that such triumphs as his in fresco painting were highly exceptional in the second half of the fifteenth century. The successes of the period are in the minor art of panel painting. The fantasies of Botticelli, the best portraits of Ghirlandaio, the early panels of Peru- gino and Signorelli and Leonardo da Vinci —these are the a FRA FILIPPO LIPPI AND NARRATIVE STYLE 173 outstanding things. In mural painting Florence actually retrograded, not merely as compared with the days of Masac- cio, Fra Filippo and Fra Angelico, but even as compared with the earlier days of Andrea Bona- iuti, Agnolo Gaddi and Spinello Aretino. The fact has been ob- scured by the superficial gain in small realism, in sprightliness, and mere prettiness, but in all the serious qualities of monu- mental design the decadence is unmistakable. The favorite dec- orators simply executed on a large scale the sort of compo- sitions that would have been charming on the front of a bride- chest. In the general enthusiasm for the parts of pictures the ; ; Fic. 112. Piero della Francesca. sense of pictures as a whole Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, despot of Urbino. — Uffizi. seemed in danger of being lost. The undiscriminating enthusiasm for the primitive painting of the Early Renaissance which has ruled for two generations has so clouded critical opinion on this point, that I must be at some pains to make my case good. Perhaps I can do no better than to review some of the frescoes which Pope Sixtus IV ordered about 1481 for the new chapel of the Vatican Palace. He summoned to the Sistine Chapel the best available artists from both Tuscany and Umbria. By the measure of their success we may esti- mate the mural painting of the time. Originally the decorative scheme, later amplified by Michel- angelo, required sixteen scriptural stories, in which the deeds of Moses were parallelled by those of Christ. The two first and two last subjects, on the end walls, have been destroyed, 174 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING but we still see the twelve on the side walls. In general they all show the old Gothic coloring, are mostly vivacious in a confused and over-rich way, and lack unity of pattern and dramatic coherence. Fic. 113. Assistant of Perugino. Baptism. Fresco.— Sistine Chapel. One of the most admired is the Baptism of Christ, Figure 113, by Pintorricchio, (or, as Venturi suggests, Andrea of Assisi) who here works as Perugino’s assistant. ‘The story is told in the centre and reinforced by a spacious landscape which is confusingly full of attractive features. The theme is mechanically stretched to fill the space by adding at both flanks groups which have slight or no connection with the sub- ject. These groups are interestingly diversified with fine portraits of the Pope’s relatives, the Roveres, and by the alert forms of children. The effect is fairly restful and idyllic, but the pattern is mechanical, and the emotional effect of the real theme is frittered away in the accessories. The method of enlarging a stock composition by adding portrait groups is standard for the Sistine Chapel and for the period. Masaccio FRA FILIPPO LIPPI AND NARRATIVE STYLE 175 had tried it more effectively in the Miracle of the Boy, and Filippo Lippi had made it seem almost organic in The Funeral of St. Stephen. Pintorricchio, if it be he, is more superfi- Fic. 114. Botticelli. Moses in the Land of Midian. Fresco. — Sistine Chapel, Rome. cially alluring for his richness and variety, but really stands on a far lower plane of design than his predecessors. If this mechanical symmetry is the standard method, there are significant exceptions in the Sistine Chapel. The more sensitive spirits, Botticelli and Luca Signorelli, reject so trite a solution. Botticelli’s Moses in Midian, Figure 114, offers a delicate evasion, by promoting a minor motive to be the central theme. All the incidents that are dramatically im- portant —the slaying of the Egyptian taskmaster, and the adoration of the Burning Bush from which Jehovah spoke — are done with the most energetic feeling, but are relegated to the background and edges of the composition. The pic- ture is really the fine grove in which Moses gallantly helps the nymph-like daughters of Jethro to draw water. A fan- 176 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING tastic idyl is foisted off on us as a substitute for one of the decisive moments in the Providential order. Botticelli is so winning in his evasion, that it seems almost unfeeling to note that no Gothic painter would have done anything so Fic. 115. Signorelli, Design only. Last Days of Moses. Fresco. — Sistine Chapel, Rome. shifty. His success is not merely at the expense of the ex- pression of his real theme, but also at the expense of the order and dignity proper to mural design. Having ordered a canto of an epic, the Pope received a delicious madrigal. His con- tentment is characteristic of the zsthetic casualness of the times. Signorelli, in the Last Days of Moses, Figure 115, makes a similar but less egregious evasion. His centre of interest is the nude youth in the foreground, but he does give a certain prominence to the scenes where Moses invests Joshua with authority, and where both view the Promised Land from Mount Horeb. Though without much emotional accent, the crowds are agreeably: disposed and diversified by grace- ful forms of women and children. Only the design is by Sig- FRA FILIPPO LIPPI AND NARRATIVE STYLE 177 norelli, the execution being by an assistant, Don Bartolommeo della Gatta. The picture is more delightful for such passages as the Apollo-like nude youth and the mother with her chil- dren in the right foreground than it is as a whole, though: it is full of idyllic charm, and inadequate only when one con- siders the gravity of its theme. ) In his Calling of Peter and Andrew, Figure 116, to be fishers Fic. 116. Ghirlandaio. Christ calling Peter and Andrew. Fresco. — Sistine Chapel, Rome. of men, Domenico Ghirlandaio makes a skilful and impres- sive use of that approved mechanical symmetry which has already been noticed in Pintorricchio’s Baptism. Every- thing is well centralized, the river view is a welcome outlet, the stereotyped bystanders on the flanks at least are telling portraits and, while not bound into the central motive, have withal a gravity that sufficiently accords with it. ‘The ar- rangement is lucid, and the surplus accessories fairly well subordinated. A rather perfunctory quality in the central scene of homage and dedication reveals Ghirlandaio’s scanty imagination. His impressiveness has a certain dullness about it. 178 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING Few words need be spent on the picturesque and irrespon- sible confusion which reigns in Cosimo Rosselli’s Destruction of Pharaoh’s Army in the Red Sea, Figure 117. Cosimo was one of the older painters in the chapel, forty-two years old. Fic. 117. Cosimo Rosselli. Destruction of Pharaoh’s Army. Fresco.— Sistine Chapel. Yet a juvenile sensationalism and uncalculated restlessness ‘prevail, and his attempts at vivacity and grace are as un- happy as his striving for effects of terror. It may well be that his eccentric young pupil, Piero di Cosimo, gave this fresco its febrile energy and its theatrical landscape. Certain it is that the three other frescoes by Cosimo are unmitigatedly dull. Oddly it was he alone who won the praise of Pope Six- tus, mostly for his profuse introduction of gold ornament. We have seen in the Sistine Chapel a mechanical and rather perfunctory symmetry, various clever evasions of an idyllic sort, and a picturesque disorder side by side. The most am- bitious decorative scheme of the time seems to result in a kind of artistic bankruptcy. But fortunately the Sistine Chapel contains its own self-criticism and remedy, in the FRA FILIPPO LIPPI AND NARRATIVE STYLE 179 extraordinary fresco by Pietro Perugino, Christ delivering the Keys to Peter, Figure 118. Perugino is an Umbrian from Citta della Pieve, thirty-five years old, and with a certain amount of Florentine training. He has, like Masaccio sixty Fic. 118. Perugino. Christ giving the Keys to Peter. Fresco. — Sistine Chapel, Rome. years before, looked at the art of his times and found it want- ing. He has had the lucidity to see that the malady is sur- plusage and disorder. Hence, he argues, the remedy is sim- plicity and order. To this he adds a sense of vastness. In this picture the temple platform, a vastness made by man, is set within the vastness of a river valley made by nature. The foreground group is arranged in a formal half military order which is cunningly made easy and flexible by differences of posture and gesture. Every tilted head and pointed foot has its reason. Without undue insistence, all the apostles are interested in the rite which ordains their chief. Here is no casual pleasure ground in which you may delightfully look about, here is a definite vision of a momentous act which you must see swiftly, completely, and precisely as the artist in- 180 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING tends you shall see. It is the only well-considered design among these frescoes. It points the simplest and surest way by which the exuberance of the Early Renaissance might be disciplined into a noble order, and within twenty years the lesson was to be reread for all Italy by young Raphael of Urbino. Meanwhile the somewhat irresponsible exuberance of the new narrative painting.has after all its winning aspect, is a sign of an energy and enthusiasm that need not so much to be tamed as to be intellectualized. In discussing the last twenty years of the fifteenth cen- tury in Florence | am embarrassed by the richness of the field. Beside such typical figures as Botticelli and Ghirlan- daio, we have to do with such sensitive and morbid spirits as Filippino Lippo and Piero di Cosimo; with Andrea Ver- rocchio and a group of imitators of his fastidious manner, notable among them young Leonardo da Vinci; with ‘a host of secondary painters, particularly of furniture panels, and small altar-pieces, while if we consider rather artistic train- ing than accident of birth, we must reckon with the Floren- tine achievement the rugged triumphs of Luca Signorelli. But since the more distinctive and progressive of these artists are really precursors of the Golden Age, or symptomatic of the unrest that was its prelude, they may best be treated later. That will leave us only the painters who are fully representative of the festal moment of Lorenzo the Mag- nificent’s greatness — the furniture painters and Ghirlandaio. Those excesses of vivacity, those extravagances of in- vention, those juvenile graces which were a weakness in mural painting, were admirably in place in the decoration of chests and wainscots. The greater artists gladly accepted this little work, and some painters painted exclusively trousseau chests (cassoni) for young brides —an enviable occupation, for surely these fair young creatures had to be personally consulted. The subjects glorify love, magnify valor, celebrate Perio LIPPY AND NARRATIVE STYLE 281 the festal life of the day, its pageants, feasts, and dances. Of professional cassone painters Francesco Pesellino® (1422- 1457) is the most famous. He is bewitching in variety and sensitiveness of invention, in refinement of story telling, and in glamour of color. ‘Iwo admirable cassone fronts by Fic. 119. Francesco Pesellino. Cassone Front. Triumphs of Love, Chastity, and Death. — Mrs. Fohn L. Gardner, Boston. him are owned by Mrs. John L. Gardner, Figure 119. They represent the six triumphs described by Petrarch in so many Canzont. Love, Chastity, Death, Time, Fame, and Eter- nity are figured forth much as these themes were embodied in contemporary pageants, about the year 1450. The subjects were favorites for cassoni less because of their grave moral import than because Petrarch was Love’s accredited Poet Laureate. We have in the New York Historical Society the superb salver, Figure 119a, which was prepared against the birth of Lorenzo de’ Medici. Appropriately it shows knights acclaim- ing fame. ‘The date is 1448, the painter of the school of Domenico Veneziano. We often see the Queen of Sheba reverently approaching Solomon. It is the admonition that a young bride should seek wisdom. Battles and Roman triumphs are tediously common. They set a mark of valor for the bridegroom. Wed- ding Feasts are almost tautological on a bride-chest, but they afford charming pictures of the Florence that amused itself. Mythology often dignifies these painted stories, the refer- 182 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING ence being generally to that beauty which is institutional in brides. Thus we have in a spalliera panel in the Fogg Museum the Judgment of Paris, with the competing god- desses more modestly clothed than Ovid’s record justifies. 6 Aig, a aia ait Fic. 119a. Follower of Domenico Veneziano, perhaps Baldovinetti. Triumph of Fame. Birth Salver for Lorenzo de’ Medici. — WN. Y. Historical Society. The work is possibly an exceptionally amiable product of Cosimo Rosselli, and the date may be about 1475. The Rape of Helen, which was of course due to her fatal beauty, is a common if unedifying subject for bride-chests. So is Actaeon torn by the hounds of the Divine Huntress for his temerity in sur- prising Diana at her bath. A delightful panel in the pos- session of Mr. Martin Ryerson at Chicago recounts in many FRA FILIPPO LIPPI AND NARRATIVE STYLE 183 episodes the adventures of Ulysses from his escape from Polyphemus to his home-coming at Ithaca. The dalliances of the much-experienced wanderer are by no means con- cealed, but at least the scene opens with prominent display of the episode most creditable to him as a married man, the baffling of the Sirens, and closes with the exemplary figure of constant Penelope weaving her interminable web. Fic. 120, Bartolommeo di Giovanni under Botticelli’s direction. Nastagio degli Onesti’s Feast. Spalliera panel.— Spiridon Coll., Parts. In furniture painting we are generally in the realm of comedy. But we touch pathos in Boccaccio’s story of patient Griselda, at Bergamo, Modena, and elsewhere; while we ap- proach tragedy in the many versions of chaste Susanna as- sailed and traduced by the elders, and attain to notable melo- drama in Boccaccio’s grim vision of the spirit lover eternally harrying the miserable ghost of his merciless lady through the pine wood of Ravenna. The best of these panels is in the Spiridon Collection, Paris. The ghostly scene of the chase takes place before the picnic party, Figure 120, artfully arranged by Nastagio degli Onesti to prove to his unfeeling 184 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING lady that there is a penalty in the next world for being too cruel to a lover in this. The lesson Boccaccio tells us was effective, and they lived happily together ever afterwards. The panel was designed by Botticelli and painted by his assistant, Bartolommeo di Giovanni, for the wedding of a Bini groom and a Pucci bride in the year 1487. With it we take leave of Florentine furniture painting, an art too unpretentious to be considered at length in a general survey, yet too charming in itself and too representative of the heyday of Florentine wealth and gayety to be wholly neg- lected. Sandro Botticelli and Domenico Ghirlandaio mark in very different fashions the culmination and the close of the Early Renaissance in Florence. Botticelli is the poet of its nostalgia. He expresses not its joyous average, but the erotic and mys- tical subtilities of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Platonic Academy, and later the Apocalyptic hopes and despairs that gathered around Savonarola. He utters a discontent and ideality which in part are completely contained in his work and in part were only fulfilled in the rapidly approaching Golden Age. He is aristocratic and individual, hence we shall con- sider him in connection with his fellow intellectuel, Leonardo da Vinci. Domenico Ghirlandaio,’ on the contrary, is the most completely contented creature, imaginable. He never even dreamt of anything desirable beyond his Florence. He loved the local spectacle too dearly to represent it literally. He generally prettified it, more rarely he glorified it. Its mundane ideals were his. “Towards its people, its young men and maidens and grave merchants and magistrates he brought, without Fra Filippo Lippi’s sensitiveness, an equal curiosity and admiration. And Florence fairly deserved the adora- tion of such a man as was he. Wisely and generously ruled by Lorenzo de’ Medici, who exemplified not merely the practical virtues of the city but also her more engaging vices, author. FRA FILIPPO LIPPI AND NARRATIVE STYLE 185 of wise policy and of wittily dissolute songs; combining the self-respecting appearances of liberty with the advantages of benevolent despotism, abounding in new wealth, lavish in pleasure and spectacle, unre- strained by a religion which was becoming merely a social decency and a form of fire-insurance against a not impossible hell — Florence had reached a pitch of complacency and worldly well- being the like of which the world has perhaps never seen before or since. The menacing sword of the spirit was already swaying over it in the eloquence of a young Dominican monk at Fer- Pate tiem rorence’strod. the: fy, 131, Domenico Ghirlandaid. primrose path unconscious of St. Jerome. Fresco. — Ognissanti. the doom at hand for her. And Ghirlandaio was present to immortalize everything that was pleasant in her short prime. He was born in 1449, his father appropriately being a gar- land-maker for gay Florence. He was trained under Alesso Baldovinetti, but prudently declined to compromise his own bright coloring with the new technic of oil painting. He studied with profit the ornate narratives of Benozzo Gozzolli. One of his earliest frescoes, painted about 1470 in Ognissanti, already reveals the grounds of his later popularity. The - vivid portraits of the Vespucci family so crowd about a Ma- donna of Pity as to make her seem quite secondary. Somewhat later he painted the legend of Santa Fina at San Gimignano. MHere Gozzoli’s simpler vein is imitated, and the effect has a rusticity befitting the theme. Soon the bottega at Florence flourished mightily. There were two younger brothers to help, and all commissions were ex- 186 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING ecuted with businesslike dispatch. About 1480 we find him once more painting for the Church of Ognissanti. His St. Jerome there, Figure 121, is a beautifully groomed old prel- ate in a wonderfully kept study. The Saint is caught in an ROTOR REE SRE EE IDO UNNE EV BRE ARR TK ) Fic. 122. Ghirlandaio. The Last Supper. Fresco. — Refectory, Ognissantt. interval of work, searching perhaps for the right Latin word to render the Hebrew text before him. He is grave and not too stern. The colors are vivid without much regard for har- mony. Very little of the fire of the missionary who declined to subject the mysteries of God to the rules of the grammarian Donatus is suggested. One has only to look at Botticelli’s St. Augustine, opposite in the church, agonized by the burden — of thought, to realize that Ghirlandaio has cared nothing for the psychology of his theme, but has given us any comfortable old Florentine scholar placidly occupied in his scriptorium. A similar lack of emotional content mars the otherwise delightful Last Supper, Figure 122, which was painted that same year for the refectory of Ognissanti. . Pathos, not to say tragedy, is carefully kept out of the most solemn of scenes. The eye is likely to go first to the tree-tops and flying birds seen above the screen, then it becomes vaguely aware of a FRA FILIPPO LIPPI AND NARRATIVE STYLE 187 gentle company quietly feasting. Except for a faint trace of classicism in the costumes, it could be any governing board of any religious confraternity of the day, decorously enjoy- ing its annual dinner. ‘The qualities and defects of Ghir- landaio are fully apparent in this fresco — his lucidity and sweetness, his emotional nullity. The next year, 1481, Ghirlandaio painted in the Sistine Chapel at Rome Christ Calling Peter and Andrew. We have already considered this his nearest approach to monu- mental design. Shortly before the Roman trip he married, and when his wife Costanza died, after a decent interval, he repeated the adventure. The two wedlocks were blessed by nine children of whom one, Ridolfo, was to become in turn a notable painter. Such fecundity was worthy of the man who once sighed for a commission to fresco the seven-mile circuit of the walls of Florence. On his return from Rome Ghirlandaio decorated the great hall of the Palace of the Priors, and from now on merely a list of his commissions and patrons would be a blue book of the old aristocracy and new wealth of Florence. Thus in 1485 he contracted with Francesco Sassetti to do a chapel in the Trinita with Stories of St. Francis. Sassetti was confidential treasurer for Lorenzo the Magnificent, about the most important financial position in the world at the moment; a selfmade and ambitious man. He had tried in vain to get a finer chapel in a bigger church, but the patrician vested interests prevented. Still the chapel to the right of the Choir of the Trinita was no mean place, this Vallombrosan foundation being one of the oldest in Florence. Ghirlandaio took special pains with the frescoes, studying with intelli- gence Giotto’s famous versions of the stories at Santa Croce. He is most nearly monumental where he follows Giotto, as in the Death of St. Francis, but he also shows surprising feli- cities of his own. The scene where Pope Honorius III con- 188 HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING stitutes St. Francis and his fellows a monastic order, is remarkable for not only fine incidental portraiture, but for a nobility of space-composition faintly anticipating Raphael. One scarcely realizes the subject as such. All the Fic. 123. Domenico Ghirlandaio. Miracle of the Spini Boy. Fresco. — Trinita. dramatic features with which Giotto emphasized the eager- ness of the saint, the humility of his companions, the profes- sional dignity of the Pope and the half-veiled hostility of the papal court are absent. One’s eyes go over the group to the familiar grandiose prospect of the Piazza della Signoria at Florence, and one feels that never till now has he rightly ap- prehended its amplitude and splendor. Then there are sharp pleasant surprises. At the left is the ugly and fascinating figure of Lorenzo de’ Medici and behind him the gross apparition of Francesco Sassetti himself. And in front there are people coming up from a lower level, only their heads and shoulders emerging. The swarthy man who leads is Angelo Poliziano, greatest of humanistic poets, tutor of Lorenzo’s sons. And the boys are these gifted children destined to be popes, and granddukes. The combination of great spacious- ness and centrality with casual unexpected graces is so piquant and original, that I suppose Ghirlandaio may have hit upon it FRA FILIPPO LIPPI AND NARRATIVE STYLE 189 almost accidentally, owing to the inevitable relations of his Gothic lunette to the architectural forms in the fresco. In any case Ghirlandaio never again did anything as impressive. It is his greatest hymn of praise to the Florence that he so dearly loved. In the same chapel is a re- markable picture representing the Piazza of the Trinita with St. Francis resuscitating a boy of the Spini family, Figure 123. It has extraordinary bits of in- vention, but lacks the organi- zation of the fresco just discussed. The