ART IN THE THIRTEENTH AND FOURTEENTH CENTURIES
Turning from literature to the not distantly related field of art, let us glance at some of the tentative efforts which prepared the way for the succession of Florentine masters that were presently to take the lead in this field and hold it for some centuries.
The Renaissance, that is, the resurrection, in the beginning of the fifteenth century, of ideas and forms of classic antiquity, was preceded by individual efforts which, though often failing to reach the mark, ought to be taken account of in the history of this great revolution. The plastic memories of the Græco-Roman world have played in the preoccupation of the Middle Ages a more considerable rôle than is usually thought. Mere force of events put our ancestors in the presence of ancient chefs-d’œuvre, and they had to look at them whether they would or not. Some saw in them only idolatrous monuments, and have found fault with them as such. Others attributed to them magic virtues; some have given themselves up to the admiration they felt in looking at the immensity of Roman ruins, the richness of early materials, the perfection of the handiwork. These latter, it might be affirmed, are the most numerous. Even during the most sombre period of the Middle Ages, all Europe felt the fascination that Rome, the oldest city par excellence, exercised for twenty centuries. That which attracted from far and near thousands of visitors to the banks of the Tiber was not only the promise of indulgencies, a desire to pray on the tomb of martyrs, to contemplate basilics resplendent with gold and precious stones, but also memories left by the cæsars.
After having heard with a kind of incredulity the marvels of this incomparable city, one is further amazed by the number of its temples, palaces, baths, and amphitheatres. Have not reliable authors told us that she lately possessed thirty-six triumphal arches, twenty-eight libraries, 856 public baths, twenty-two equestrian statues in gilded bronze, eighty-four of the same in ivory, obelisks, and innumerable colossi?
Doorway, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence
From the twelfth century popular imagination laid hold of these pictures, transforming and amplifying them. Wondrous tales became current and were incorporated in works received as authoritative—the Descriptis plenaria Votius Urbis, the Graphia aurea urbis Romæ, and lastly the Mirabilia civitatis Romæ. Again at the end of the fifteenth century the valiant Charles VIII, wanting to give his subjects some idea of the town into which he had lately entered lance in hand, caused one of these records of another age to be translated for them. A few extracts will show with what strong faith these stories worthy of The Thousand and One Nights were received before the Renaissance:
“Inside the capital was the greater part of a golden palace adorned with precious stones and said to equal the third part of the world, in which there were as many statues of images as there are provinces in all the world. Each image had a tambourine round its neck, placed with mathematical art, so that if any region was in rebellion against the Romans, immediately the image of the province turned its back to the image of the city of Rome, which was the largest and dominated the others, and the tambourine at its neck sounded. Then immediately the Capitol guards told this to the senate, and people were forthwith sent to expugn that province.
“The horses and nude men denote that in the time of the emperor Tiberius there were two young philosophers, that is, Praxiteles and Phitas, who said they were so wise that anything the emperor said in his room, they not being there, could report word for word. And they did as they said, not demanding money for it, but to be always remembered, so the philosophers have two marble horses with their feet on the ground, which denote the princes of this century. And they who are naked on the horses denote that their arm, high and held out, and their bent backs speak of things to come, and as they are naked, so the science of this world was naked and open to their understanding.”
From admiration to imitation is only one step. Artists in their turn went to work and took without scruple from what was a common heritage. Doubtless many of these borrowings are unconscious or really only show up the immense inferiority of the copyist. But is the influence of the antique less striking? One must recall in this order of ideas the splendid creations of architects in the Roman period—the duomo, the campanile, and the baptistery of Pisa, the baptistery of Florence, and the basilica of San Miniato, the duomo of Lucca, and so many chefs-d’œuvre raised according to principles that innovators of the following age, the champions of Gothic style, were so audaciously to trample underfoot.
Nicholas Crescentius (son of the celebrated tribune) in the eleventh century, impelled by a desire to renew the ancient splendour of Rome, had the elegant little house at Ponte Rotto built of antique fragments. Similarly the emperor Frederick Barbarossa (1121-1190) had these former glories in mind, when he had graven on his seal a view of Rome with the Colosseum. But it was to his illustrious grandson Frederick II (1184-1250) that the honour is due of first pleading the cause of the Renaissance, and he should rightly be placed at the head of the precursors. We possess numerous witnesses of his love for the monuments of ancient art.
Now we see him striking Augustales, those curious imitations of Roman imperial money, bearing on one side an effigy crowned with laurels, with the epigraph AVG. IMP. ROM. and draped in the fashion of the cæsars; on the reverse an eagle with outspread wings with the epigraph FREDERICVS. Again he buys for a considerable sum (230 oz. of gold) an onyx cup and other curiosities. From Grotta Ferrata he takes away two bronzes, statues of a man and of a cow serving for a fountain, and carries them to Lucera. The church of St. Michael of Ravenna furnishes the monolithic columns he requires for his buildings at Palermo. Near Augusta in Sicily, he caused excavations to be made in the hope of discovering ancient remains. Once, it is true, yielding to urgent necessity he had several Roman monuments at Brindisi destroyed that he might use the materials in constructing a citadel. He tried just as he was departing for Palestine to make the town safe from any attacks, but political reasons outweighed his antiquarian scruples.
The work dreamed of by Frederick II as amateur was realised by his contemporary Nicholas of Pisa (1207?-1278) who, in the thirteenth century, held imitation of the antique as a principle, and used it as a mirror by which nature might be the more clearly shown. His attempt seems prodigious to us to-day; it supposes a power of initiative which Giotto, Brunelleschi, Donatello, and Van Eyck have hardly equalled. Imitation with him was not confined to accessories—ornaments, costumes, armour—nor to types, nor to proportions of figures, which are all stumpy, as in the Roman sarcophagi of the decadence. The spirit of his work recalls ancient models.
“Nicholas,” says M. Gebhardt,[n] “in the pulpits of Pisa and Siena, and in the shrine of San Dominico at Bologna, recalls the traditions of a great art with a naïve gravity and assured taste. He is hardly a neo-Greek or a superstitious antiquary, but is imbued with the most generous principles of antique sculpture—the harmonious ordering of the scenes, the skilful employ of space where many persons move in a narrow frame, the majestic tranquillity of pose, the finely ordered draperies, the noble heads. But his eye and hand still express the fashion of primitive sculpture; the movements express awkward timidity, the faces are sometimes heavy. He gives an impression of Roman work at the end of the empire. Nicholas of Pisa (Niccolo Pisano), if he discovered and studied the Greek, did not renounce nature, and, in his best pieces, he has returned to a study of life. It is in this that he shows himself an intelligent disciple of the ancients. Apart from Nicholas of Pisa, the Italian masters each put their own personality in the antique; none were servile copyists, and it is Nicholas, the first and consequently the least learned, whose chisel has left the most instructive reminiscences.”
One of the most noted pupils and collaborators of Nicholas, Brother Guglielmo of Pisa (born about 1238, died after 1313), was inspired with like principles, but not so strongly. In the pulpit of San Giovanni Fuorcivitas at Pistoia, he has succeeded better than his master, in reconciling pagan reminiscences with Christian ideas.
The historic sentiment is one of the distinctive traits of the school of Nicholas of Pisa. It has recourse not only to antique marbles as models of style, but to documents as well. Whilst, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, painters and sculptors gave the costume of the period to sacred characters, their predecessors of the thirteenth century tried to restore, aided by archæology, the costumes of Christ and his family, the apostles, martyrs, as absolutely as did the Renaissance champions two hundred years later. Fra Guglielmo has pushed these scruples very far; his apostles wear the toga, tunic, and sandals, and hold a rolled volume in the hand.
In the Descent of the Holy Ghost he seeks, moreover, faithfully to reproduce the types of the primitive church, above all in the figures of St. Peter, St. Paul, and St. John. As with the sculptors of sarcophagi in Rome, Milan, and the south of France, there is a complete absence of nimbi, showing to what extent Nicholas of Pisa and his like disdained mediæval tradition, at least as regards types, costumes, and attributes. In the scene just mentioned one remarks also the grouping of the apostles. They are placed in two ranks, one behind the other, just as in a curious mosaic in the chapel of St. Aguilino (church of St. Lawrence at Milan). An arrangement differing very little is found in another bas-relief on the pulpit—that is, Christ washing the disciples’ feet. The women’s dresses deserve special mention. In the Annunciation and Visitation, Mary and Elizabeth have the head half covered with a fold of their mantle so as to expose the forehead and the greater part of the hair. They might be Roman matrons.
In his quality as a member of the order of St. Dominican, Fra Guglielmo had more than once to reprove the too pagan tendencies of his master. The position of another disciple of Nicholas, Arnolfo of Cambio (died in 1310), the architect of the dome of Florence, was not less delicate, but for other reasons. One is surprised to see this master, the promoter of a style departing so singularly from antique tradition, returning to the latter when he exchanges the builder’s compass for the sculptor’s chisel. Let us hasten to add that the departure is not so great as one might think. In his tomb of the cardinal of Braye at Orvieto, Arnolfo has known how to give the Virgin a serene majesty, a simplicity which does not lack grandeur, without pushing imitation as far as his master. He shows still more entire independence in the tabernacle of St. Paul beyond the walls, near Rome. If one did not know Arnolfo to have been Nicholas’ disciple, it would be difficult to imagine it in looking at this hybrid monument.[i]
Without attempting even to name the other lesser schools of sculpture and of architecture that were beginning to make their influence felt, let us turn to culminating artistic achievements of the epoch, as represented in the work of the great Florentines Cimabue and Giotto.
The Tuscan School of Painters
It is an undisputed fact that the revival of painting, like that of sculpture, commenced in Tuscany. It is equally certain that about the middle of the thirteenth century, or a little later, which is the point at which improvement first manifested itself, the prevailing style was the Byzantine, introduced by Greek artists from Constantinople. But it has not by any means been clearly discerned wherein the peculiarities of that style consisted; and it has been usually assumed that it was a rude and defective manner which, as the first step in advance, the Italian painters had to discard. Materials are extant which justify a different conclusion, and evince that the introduction of this foreign taste, gross and faulty as it was, truly formed the first stage in improvement.
From the ninth century till the middle of the thirteenth, painting among the Byzantine artists differed from contemporary Italian works in several important particulars. In both quarters art was timidly imitative; but in the Eastern Empire the models from which it borrowed were more various than in the West, and the execution was usually better; the fashion of the drapery and ornament had a peculiar character of semi-oriental barbarism; and, while in both countries the drawing of the figure was generally bad, the common tendency of the Greeks was to lengthen it disproportionally, and that of the Italians to represent it as short and squab. But the most palpable distinctions were two in the technical treatment. First, in the oldest Italian paintings the vehicle of the colours is transparent, and the tone is therefore light and clear; in the works from Constantinople the tone is dark and yellowish, being produced by the use of some colouring matter which, if modern chemists have rightly analysed it, was wax. The second difference was this—that the Greeks, besides ornamenting their draperies richly with gilding, surrounded their figures with a golden ground; a barbarous practice, of which the oldest Italian works exhibit no trace. In those early productions of the thirteenth century, where we can trace the first ameliorations of art, we discover most, or all, of these peculiarities derived from the Greek style; some of them prevailed very long; and the most objectionable, the flaunting ground, was not entirely discarded even in the time of Raffaelle.
Campanile of Giotto, Florence
The oldest name celebrated in Italian painting is that of Cimabue, who, born about 1240, died in 1300. On the strength of his merit the Florentines claim the glory of having resuscitated art—a pretension which the school of Siena seems to have some right, in the person of Duccio, to contest with them. The works of Cimabue were Byzantine, in their style, in their colouring, and in their blaze of gold; and tradition says that he was taught in his youth by Greek artists. He improved, it is true, upon that school; but, though everything regarding him is obscure, there is no sufficient reason for believing that his improvement consisted in any departure from its principles. To him are commonly assigned some ill-preserved fresco paintings in the church of St. Francis at Assisi, which at all events give an idea of the masters from whom he learned; but his boldness and loftiness of conception are more clearly evinced by two rudely grand figures of Madonnas on wood, both at Florence, the more celebrated of the two in the church of Santa Maria Novella, the other in the Ducal Gallery.
From a Painting by Giotto
To this great artist succeeds the Florentine Giotto (1276-1336), whose history and works are somewhat better known. The Italian novelists have preserved anecdotes of his wealth, his ugliness, and his profane wit. The story which describes him as a shepherd boy, discovered by Cimabue drawing rude figures on a stone, is perhaps too picturesque to be true; and his undoubted pieces display a marked dissimilarity in spirit to those of his alleged teacher, while they deviate also from the Byzantine style in colouring, if in nothing else, having a clear rosy hue which indicates a return to the older Italian method, though it is also an improvement on it. In the theory of his art, however, Giotto departed essentially from all his predecessors. When we combine the criticisms of the older writers with the few pictures which still can be certainly or probably identified as his, we may describe his characteristics as consisting in an attempt, made under manifold difficulties, but attended with surprising success, to establish, instead of the rude, vague, devotional loftiness of Cimabue, a beauty derived from a closer observation of life, as well as enlivened by a better and less formal expression of ordinary human feeling. His only existing work, which is ascertained by a genuine inscription, is one in the church of the Santa Croce in Florence, containing five divisions, of which that in the centre represents the Saviour crowning the Virgin. The gallery of the Florentine Accademia delle Arti contains some small compositions of his, representing, in a fashion half religious and half comic, events from the history of St. Francis. Frescoes in the upper church of that saint at Assisi, assigned to Giotto by some critics, have been pronounced by others to be inferior, and unlike his genuine remains; but others on the vaulted roof of the subterranean part of the same building are undoubtedly his, and resemble the pieces of the academy both in execution and in spirit. Other pictures laying claim to his name occur in various galleries throughout Italy as well as elsewhere.[e]
Notwithstanding all the enthusiasm that has been bestowed upon the paintings of Giotto, it must frankly be admitted that these are to be regarded as remarkable only when viewed in relation to the art of the time in which they were produced. To extol them as masterpieces according to the standards that were developed by the later Florentines would be to throw criticism to the winds. But the architectural efforts of Giotto may be praised with less reserve. The Campanile of Florence has aroused the enthusiasm of most critics who have viewed it; Ruskin[k] declares that “of living Christian works, none is so perfect as the tower of Giotto.”
The same writer speaks with equal enthusiasm of Giotto’s work in another field: “Of representations of human art under heavenly guidance,” he says, “the series of bas-reliefs which stud the base of this tower of Giotto must be held certainly the chief in Europe. Read but these inlaid jewels of Giotto once with patient following, and your hour’s study will give you strength for all your life.” This may be held by colder criticism to be an over-enthusiastic estimate, but few who have come under the spell of the Campanile will wish to modify the eloquent words in which Ruskin characterises that structure as a whole.[a]
Ruskin’s Estimate of Giotto’s Tower
“The characteristics of power and beauty,” he says, “occur more or less in different buildings, some in one and some in another. But all together, and all in their highest possible relative degrees, they exist, as far as I know, only in one building in the world, the Campanile of Giotto. In its first appeal to the stranger’s eye there is something unpleasing—a mingling, as it seems to him, of over-severity with over-minuteness. But let him give it time, as he should to all other consummate art. I well remember how, when a boy, I used to despise that Campanile, and think it meanly smooth and finished. But I have since lived beside it many a day, and looked out upon it from my windows by sunlight and moonlight, and I shall not soon forget how profound and gloomy appeared to me the savageness of the northern Gothic, when I afterwards stood, for the first time, beneath the front of Salisbury. The contrast is indeed strange if it could be quickly felt, between the rising of those gray walls out of their quiet swarded space, like dark and barren rocks out of a green lake, with their rude, mouldering, rough-grained shafts and triple lights, without tracery or other ornament than the martins’ nests in the height of them, and that bright, smooth, sunny surface of glowing jasper, those spiral shafts and fairy traceries, so white, so faint, so crystalline, that their slight shapes are hardly traced in darkness on the pallor of the eastern sky, that serene height of mountain alabaster, coloured like a morning cloud and chased like a sea-shell. And if this be, as I believe it, the model and mirror of perfect architecture, is there not something to be learned by looking back to the early life of him who raised it? I said that the power of human mind had its growth in the wilderness; much more must the love and the conception of that beauty, whose every line and hue we have seen to be, at the best, a faded image of God’s daily work, and an arrested ray of some star or creation, be given chiefly in the places which he has gladdened by planting there the fir-tree and the pine. Not within the walls of Florence, but among the far-away fields of her lilies, was the child trained who was to raise that headstone of beauty above her towers of watch and war. Remember all that he became; count the sacred thoughts with which he filled the heart of Italy; ask those who followed him what they learned at his feet; and when you have numbered his labours and received their testimony, if it seem to you that God had verily poured out upon this his servant no common nor restrained portion of his spirit, and that he was indeed a king among the children of men, remember also that the legend upon his crown was that of David’s: ‘I took thee from the sheep-cote and from following the sheep.’”[k]