Giotto was born near Florence, in 1266. Employed as a boy in watching sheep, he is said to have been one day discovered by the artist Cimabue, as he was sketching one of his flock upon a stone. The painter, surprised at the promise shown by the boy, who was not more than ten years old, took him to Florence, and made him his pupil. Giotto’s earliest works were executed at Florence, and at the age of thirty he had already attained such fame that he was invited to Rome by Pope Boniface VIII., to take part in the decoration of the ancient Basilica of Saint Peter. The Navicella mosaic which he there executed, representing the Disciples in the Storm, is preserved in the vestibule of the present Saint Peter’s. The famous story of “Giotto’s O” belongs to this episode in his career. When the envoy sent by the pope to engage his services begged for some drawing or design which might be shown to his holiness in proof of the artist’s talent, Giotto, taking an ordinary brush full of color, and steadying his arm against his side, described a perfect circle on an upright panel with a sweep of the wrist, and offered this manual feat as sufficient evidence of his powers. The story shows the importance attached by a great artist to mere precision in workmanship, and teaches the useful lesson that genius, unsupported by the skill only to be acquired by discipline and labor, is wanting in the first condition which makes great achievements possible. This visit to Rome took place about 1298; soon afterward we find Giotto engaged on his frescoes in the church of Saint Francis at Assisi, a series of allegorical designs illustrating the saint’s spiritual life and character. In 1306 he was working at the fine series of frescoes in the Arena Chapel at Padua, which represent thirty-eight scenes from the lives of the Virgin and of Christ. We here see Giotto in the fulness of his powers; the incidents are treated with a charming simplicity and sentiment for nature, and he rises to great solemnity of style in the more important scenes. Important works by Giotto are found in many other places beside those mentioned above, including especially Naples, Ravenna, Milan, Pisa and Lucca. Perhaps the finest are those which have been discovered of late years in the Church of Santa Croce at Florence under coats of whitewash which happily had preserved them almost intact; the “Last Supper,” in the refectory of the convent attached to the church, is in remarkable preservation, and is a magnificent example of the style of the time. The twenty-six panels which he painted for the presses in the sacristry of the same church are good illustrations of his method of treatment; natural and dignified with the interest concentrated on the figures; the background and accessories being treated in the simplest possible manner, and hardly more than symbols expressing the locality in which the scene is enacted. Giotto was the first of the moderns who attempted portrait-painting with any success, and some most interesting monuments of his skill in that branch of art have been preserved to us. In 1840, discovery was made, in the chapel of the Podestà’s palace at Florence, of some paintings by Giotto, containing a number of portraits, among them one of his friend, the poet Dante; the portraits being introduced, as was usual among the early painters, and indeed frequent at all periods, as subordinate actors in the scene represented. Giotto was not only a painter; as a sculptor and architect he was also distinguished. Giotto died at Florence in January, 1337, and was buried with public solemnities in the cathedral. His style, though marked by the hardness and quaintness of a time when chiaro-scuro and perspective were very imperfectly understood, displays the originality of his genius in its thoughtful and vigorous design, and shows how resolutely the artist relied, not on traditions, but on keen and patient observation of nature.
FRA ANGELICO.
The earliest of the great fifteenth-century painters belongs in the character of his works rather to the preceding century. The monk Guido di Pietro of Fiesole, commonly called Fra Angelico from the holiness and purity which were as conspicuous in his life as in his works, was born in 1387 at Vicchio, in the province of Mugello. At the age of twenty he entered the order of the Predicants at Fiesole, and took the name of Giovanni, by which he was afterward known. His first art work was the illumination of manuscripts. Quitting the monastery in 1409, he practiced as a fresco-painter in various places until 1418, when he returned to Fiesole, and continued to reside there for the next eighteen years. In 1436 he again quitted his retreat, to paint a series of frescoes on the history of the Passion for the convent of San Marco in Florence. This work occupied nine years, and on its completion Angelico was invited to Rome. The chief work which he undertook there was the decoration of a chapel in the Vatican for Pope Nicholas V. In 1447 he went to Orvieto to undertake a similar task, but returned in the same year, having done only three compartments of the ceiling, and leaving the rest to be afterward completed by Luca Signorelli. He then continued to reside in Rome, where he died and was buried in 1455. The most striking characteristics of Angelico’s art spring from the temper of religious fervor with which he practiced it. He worked without payment; he prayed before beginning any work for the Divine guidance in its conception; and believing himself to be so assisted, he regarded each picture as a revelation, and could never be persuaded to alter any part of it. His works on panel are very numerous, and are to be found in many public and private galleries; of the finest of these are, a “Last Judgment,” belonging to the Earl of Dudley, and the “Coronation of the Virgin” in the gallery of the Louvre. After his death he was “beatified” by the church he had served so devotedly—a solemnity which ranks next to canonization; and Il Beato Angelico is the name by which Fra Giovanni was and is most fondly and reverently remembered. His style survived only in one pupil who assisted him at Orvieto.
LEONARDO DA VINCI.
Leonardo da Vinci belonged to the Florentine school, the fifteenth century, of which he was the first great example. Leonardo was the son of a notary of Vinci, near Florence, and was born at that place in the year 1452. He became the pupil of Andrea Verrocchio, the Florentine sculptor and painter, and progressed so rapidly that he soon surpassed his master, who is said to have thereupon given up painting in despair. Leonardo’s studies at this time ranged over the whole field of science and art; beside being a painter and a sculptor, he was a practiced architect, engineer, and mechanician; profoundly versed in mathematics and the physical sciences; and an accomplished poet and musician. The famous letter in which he applied to the Duke of Milan for employment, enumerates only a few of his acquirements; he represents himself as skilled in military and naval engineering, offensive and defensive, and the construction of artillery, and as possessing secrets in these matters hitherto unknown; he can make designs for buildings, and undertake any work in sculpture, in marble, in bronze, or in terra-cotta; and “in painting,” he says, “I can do what can be done as well as any man, be he who he may.” He concludes by offering to submit his own account of himself to the test of experiment, at his excellency’s pleasure. He entered the Duke’s service about the year 1482, receiving a yearly salary of 500 scudi. Under his auspices an academy of arts was established in Milan in 1485, and he drew round him a numerous school of painters. Of the many works executed by Leonardo during his residence at Milan, the greatest was the world renowned picture of the “Last Supper,” painted in oil upon the wall of the refectory of the convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie. Whether it was the fault of the wall or the medium used by the painter, the great picture rapidly faded, and by the end of fifty years had virtually perished. It is still shown, but decay and restoration have left little of the original work of Leonardo. The best idea of it is to be got from the old copies, taken while the picture was yet perfect; of these the most valuable is the one executed in 1510 by Marco d’Oggione, now in the possession of the Royal Academy of London. His other important achievement, while at Milan, was a work of sculpture, which unfortunately perished within a few years of its completion. It seems to have occupied him at intervals for eleven years, for the completed model was first exhibited to the public in 1493. All that we now know of it is from the numerous sketches in the Royal Collection at Windsor. The model was still in existence in 1501, after which nothing more is recorded of it. He also at this time made a model for the cupola of Milan Cathedral, which was never carried out. In 1499 Leonardo left Milan and returned to Florence. He received a commission in 1503 to paint the wall at one end of the Council Hall of the Palazzo Vecchio, the decoration of the other end being at the same time entrusted to Michelangelo. Leonardo’s picture was never completed, and Michelangelo’s apparently never begun; but the cartoons for their two compositions, known respectively as the “Battle of the Standard” and the “Cartoon of Pisa,” excited the greatest admiration, and were termed by Benvenuto Cellini “the school of the world;” both have been lost or destroyed; all that we know of Leonardo’s composition is gained from a drawing of it by Rubens in black and red chalk in the gallery of the Louvre, to which, though spirited enough, he contrived to impart the coarse Flemish character with which all his work is disfigured. In 1514 Leonardo visited Rome, and was to have executed some work in the Vatican, had not an affront put upon him by the pope given him offence and caused him to leave Rome. He went to the King of France, Francis I., who was then at Pavia, took service with him, and accompanied him to France, in the early part of 1516. He was, however, weakened by age and in bad health, and did little or no new work in France. In a little more than three years’ time, in May 1519, he died, at Cloux, near Amboise, at the age of sixty-seven.
Those pictures of Leonardo, which we may regard with confidence as the work of his own hand, fully justify the exceptional admiration with which he has always been regarded. He was excessively fastidious in his work, “his soul being full of the sublimity of art,” and spent years over the execution of some of his works. The painting of the portrait of Madonna Lisa is said to have extended over four years, and to have been then left incomplete. His mind also was at times equally bent on scientific matters, and for long periods he was entirely absorbed in the study of mathematics. For these reasons he produced but few pictures; if, however, he had left none, his drawings, which fortunately exist in large numbers, would suffice to account for the enthusiasm which his work has always excited. It is certain that we do not see his pictures in the state in which they left his easel; from some causes, unnecessary to discuss, they have blackened in the shadows, and the colors have faded. Vasari praises beyond measure the carnations of the Mona Lisa, which, he says, “do not appear to be painted, but truly flesh and blood;” but no trace of these delicate tints now remains.
Leonardo was the author of many treatises, some of which only have been published. The most celebrated is the “Trattato della Pittura,” still a book of high authority among writings on art.
MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI
Was born at Castel Caprese, near Arezzo, in 1475. In 1488 he entered the school of Ghirlandaio, the master giving a small payment for the boy’s services. His precocious abilities soon attracted the notice of Lorenzo de’ Medici, and until the death of that prince in 1492, Michelangelo worked under his especial patronage. His earliest drawings show a spontaneous power which made Fuseli say that “as an artist he had no infancy;” but for many years he confined himself almost entirely to sculpture; and some of his greatest achievements in that kind of art were executed before he undertook his first considerable work with the pencil. This was the “Cartoon of Pisa,” finished in 1505, and intended as a design for a mural picture to face that of Leonardo in the Council Hall at Florence. This cartoon is lost, but a copy in monochrome, containing probably the whole of the composition, exists in England. During its progress he had broken off to visit Rome, and execute some sculptural work for the pope; and in 1508 he went to Rome again to begin the great achievement of his life, the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel. The paintings of the ceiling illustrate the Creation and the Fall of Man, together with other scenes and figures typical of the Redemption. The middle part of the ceiling is divided into nine compartments, containing the “Creation of Eve” (placed in the center, as symbolizing the woman of whom the Messiah was born), the “Creation of Adam,” the “Temptation, Fall and Expulsion” in one composition, the “Separation of Light from Darkness,” the “Gathering of the Waters,” the “Creation of the Sun and Moon,” the “Deluge,” the “Thanksgiving of Noah,” and the “Drunkenness of Noah.” At the corners of the ceiling are four designs of the great deliverances of the children of Israel, the Brazen Serpent, David and Goliath, Judith with the head of Holofernes, and the punishment of Haman. There are six windows on each side of the chapel; the lunettes which surround them, and the spaces above them, are occupied by groups of the ancestors of Christ. Between the windows, at the springing of the vault, are colossal seated figures of the Prophets and Sibyls who foretold the coming of the Savior. They are arranged alternately as follows:—Jeremiah, Persian Sibyl, Ezekiel, Erythræan Sibyl, Joel, Delphic Sibyl, Isaiah, Cumæan Sibyl, Daniel, Libyan Sibyl; Jonah and Zachariah are placed one at each end of the chapel, between the historical compositions at the angles of the ceiling. These single figures are the most striking features of the design, and calculated skilfully to help the architectural effect. The side walls of the chapel, below the springing of the vault, had already been decorated with frescoes executed by Sandro Botticelli, Cosimo Rosselli, Ghirlandaio, Luca Signorelli, and Perugino. Michelangelo’s frescoes were finished toward the end of the year 1512. Vasari’s statement that he painted them all in twenty months without any assistance is undoubtedly exaggerated; it possibly refers to the completion of the first half of the ceiling.
For the next twenty years Michelangelo did little or nothing in painting; but in 1533, at the age of fifty-nine, he began the cartoons for the fresco of the “Last Judgment” on the wall behind the altar in the Sistine Chapel. This celebrated composition is entirely of nude figures, no accessories being introduced to add to the terror of the scene. Each figure throughout this vast composition has its appropriate meaning, and the power of design and mastery of execution are unsurpassed and unsurpassable. The picture was finished in 1541. Two frescoes in the neighboring Pauline Chapel, the “Conversion of Saint Paul,” and the “Crucifixion of Saint Peter,” which were finished in 1549, were his last paintings. He had accepted, in 1547, the position of architect of Saint Peter’s, stipulating that his services should be gratuitous. He continued to carry the building forward, altering materially the original design of Bramante, until his death, which took place in February, 1564. His body was taken to Florence, and buried in Santa Croce.