In the age when the republic of Florence bid one of her architects "build the greatest church in the world," all the fine arts rose simultaneously, and advanced with gigantic steps. Architecture and sculpture led the van, and had their chief seat in Tuscany, under the disciples of Nicholas of Pisa. Rienzi and Petrarch had been as diligent in the collection of gems and medals as in their search after classical manuscripts, and their example was not lost upon their successors. Poggio, Cosmo de Medici, and other illustrious private men gave origin to princely museums. The gallery of statues and other antiquities belonging to Lorenzo de Medici, and the academy annexed to it, constituted the great school in which, with many others, the genius of young Michael Angelo was formed. Berfoldo, the Florentine sculptor, an aged and experienced master, who had studied under Donatello, was the custodian of the Medician garden, and gave lessons to all the youthful cultivators of art. Poets hymned the praises of each splendid creation, and thus stimulated the most enthusiastic rivalry. Pindarus and Tirteus sang the glories of the Greeks, and why should not the bards of Florence enkindle in these young bosoms the love of a similar glory? It was a grand spectacle to behold the flower of Italian genius assembled, where chisel and hammer made the marble ring, and the emulative canvas glowed with most fascinating tints. Thus was this garden a lyceum for the philosopher, an arcadia for the poet, and an academy for the artist; and no quality that it could either elicit or impart was foreign to the mighty mind of Michael Angelo. He was the truest exponent of the fifteenth century, and should be regarded as the chief agent in substituting modern for mediæval art. He founded modern Italy immediately on ancient ruins, and did much to efface the memory of the middle ages. Marble was to Michael Angelo what the Italian language was to the greatest of Florentine writers; and with a mind as vast and free as that of Dantè, of whom he was the warmest admirer, he simultaneously illustrated supreme ability in all the liberal arts.
While a new life impelled art in Germany, France, and the Netherlands, during the eleventh century, the appreciation of sculpture had already begun in Italy; and, at the end of the succeeding century, it had reached the lowest point of ignorance. But in the thirteenth century occurred the incident which was the occasion of a favorable reaction. Among the multitude of ancient marbles brought home from the East by the Pisan fleet at the time of rebuilding the cathedral of Pisa, was a bas-relief representing two subjects taken from the story of Phædra and Hippolytus. Being used as a decoration in the front of that noble building, young Nicholas observed, admired, and emulated its artistic worth. His successful endeavors led to a complete revolution in sculpture. In the fourteenth century, Andrew of Pisa continued the work of his predecessors, and was aided in keeping the art in an elevated path by Orgagna, and the brothers Agostino and Agnolo of Siena. At the beginning of the fifteenth century, under Donatello, and Ghiberti, sculpture had again attained a high degree of perfection. Other eminent proficients united with these great leaders, and carried forward the auspicious development into Germany where the artistic centre of sculpture, in the sixteenth century was fixed at Nuremberg, the residence of Adam Kraft, Peter Vischer, and his sons, Veit Stoss, and the great Albert Durer. Before the close of this century, however, the Italian renaissance became universally diffused in Germany, France, and Flanders, and superseded whatever of originality the native artists had until then preserved. Thenceforth, throughout the whole domain of the mediæval age, arabesques, festoons of flowers and fruit, branches, animals, and human figures, arranged in the most fantastic manner, took the place of all high art, and the excellence of sculpture was at an end. During the whole of the sixteenth century, and a great part of the seventeenth, from Michael Angelo and Leonardo da Vinci to the death of Salvator Rosa, the fine arts underwent an irresistible and humiliating decline.
Bronze casting early attained high excellence at Florence, and further north-west. The gates cast by Ghiberti, for the church of S. Giovanni, are perhaps the finest that ever came from human hands; and those of the cathedral of Pisa are excelled by none save these, which Michael Angelo pronounced to be fit for the portal of Heaven. In Mosaics and Gem engraving, also, the Italians greatly excelled previous to the seventeenth century, so fatal to the arts, literature, and morals of that fated land. All the beauties of Christian art faded away one after the other, and that same century witnessed the apostacy of painting, as well as sculpture, which, after having abjured its high and holy office of civil and religious instructress, sought to derive its inspirations from the Pagan Olympus.
Mediæval Italy exulted in art generally, and especially in painting; but it was of a type utterly unlike that which the ancients produced. The Greeks loved art because it enabled them to embody the images which were inspired by direct intercourse with earth's fairest forms, and they used it simply as the minister of nature, and of beauty. But the Italians were imbued with more celestial sympathies, and employed beauty and nature chiefly as the vehicles of spiritual sentiment and exalted aspirations. In the fifth century pictorial art was gradually Romanized in the hands of early Christianity, and became transformed as it was transmitted toward the West. Mount Athos and Constantinople, were, for many centuries, the great sources of artistic activity, which imparted to painting a peculiar style. Long after originality in literature had ceased in the East, and national life was there unknown, the creation of pictures faltered not, but they were dry and heavy, like the immobile Byzantine government, and served only to preserve the elements of noble art, while Christianity itself was laying the foundations for the future unity of Europe among the progressive races. Down to the tenth century, art was absolutely controlled by this frigid conventionalism, but great improvements supervened as soon as an appreciative race had been prepared.
As the effete world beyond the Adriatic expired, the republic of Venice arose and inherited all that the superseded orient had preserved. In point of art, down to the thirteenth century, she may be considered almost exclusively a Byzantine colony, inasmuch as her painters adhered entirely to the hereditary models. But as Byzantium had condemned all the higher forms of plastic art, Venice could derive no assistance from that source, and, consequently, her sculpture bore an entirely new phase. The Venetian mosaics, especially, we may regard as the most legible record of the great transition and new creation which at this era transpired. As early as the year 882, large works in this compound style, in a church at Murano, represented Christ with the Virgin, between saints and archangels. With incomparably greater originality and force is this new type represented in the church of St. Mark, founded A.D. 976, the earliest mural pictures of which date back at least to the eleventh, perhaps even to the tenth century.
Mediæval painting perfected itself in the same way as ancient sculpture. The imperfect but severe and characteristic representations of primitive art became types, which later ages were slow to alter; they were copied and recopied until a great revolution in popular thought broke the fetters of conventional control. Such, in the olden times, was the victory over the Persians, the triumph of Greek independence; in the middle ages it was the struggle between the secular and sacred powers. As Æschylus and Phidias mark that epoch in the Periclean age, so Dantè and Giotto, with the Rhenish masters, form, in this respect, the great symbols of the age of Leo X. With them pure religious feeling is the most pervading impulse, and a sense of divinity habitually directs their hands; but the perception of the latter was more comprehensive, and rising above the narrow horizon of their predecessors, they soared beyond the periphery of actual life, and embraced the infinite. All leading spirits, like Dantè and Giotto, stood before the world, and, with the power of their genius, surveyed the whole extent of what was required by their age, religiously and politically. They were inspired by the belief which they glorified, and participated in benevolent struggles, not more by their writings than by their paintings. They extended the boundaries of the realm of art; its representations became richer and broader; the composition was rendered dramatical, the drawing and coloring natural; and a loftier development was occasioned by the discovery of monuments of the old civilization, which had been buried and forgotten for centuries. Art-elements which had before existed in a mummified state, now fell like over-ripe fruit; but not before the soil of the western world was sufficiently fitted to receive the precious seed.
After architecture, miniature drawing alone sustained the chief honor of art through a long course of centuries; and, without it, the history of painting could not be written. Born in the disastrous days of barbaric irruptions, miniature grew up within the shadow of the cloister, and contained within itself the germs of all the magnificence which the pencil of Italy finally produced. Enamored of solitude and contemplative life, the graphic industry of monks employed the darkest period of human history in preserving the precious fragments of the classics, while it adorned itself with the charms of liturgical poetry, and the wealth of biblical truth. Usually the same individual was at once a chronicler of pious legends, a transcriber of antique manuscripts, and a miniaturist, and his glowing lines were not more significant than the little pictures which gemmed the page. Above each vignette he was wont to wreathe a crown of flowers, that his written words might find an echo in the graces of his pencil; and the latter was a better interpreter of the author's heart than the barbarous idioms then spoken. The Idyl, the Eclogue, and the Epic, called forth all the power and graces of this refined art; and if Allighieri, in the Divina Commedia, records with honor the two great fathers of Italian painting, Cimabue and Giotto, he has not omitted the two most celebrated miniaturists of his age, Oderigi da Gubbio, and Franco of Bologna. This association of extremes was a proper one, since the ideas of large compositions lay inclosed in the smallest illuminations, like unfolded flowers, each shrined in its delicate bud.
Glass-painting sprang into existence simultaneously with miniature in the dark ages; and these inseparable companions were subjected to the same vicissitudes, and shared one common fate. The former was cultivated in Italy as early as the eighth century, as may be seen in the treatise on this subject and mosaic, published by Muratori; also in the work of the monk Theophilus, who flourished in the ninth century. Like miniature, it constituted the delight of the cloister for many an age, during which the cultivators of these twin-born arts produced many glorious monuments of their genius, when both species closed their career east of the Alps with Fra Eustachio of Florence. Perugino, Ghiberti, Donatello, and other artists of the highest order, frequently furnished designs at a later period; but in preparing and coloring glass, the Italians were greatly excelled by more western races. The fifteenth century was the most luminous period of the art; in that which succeeded, it reached its perfection on the Atlantic shore and died.
Mediæval painting, properly so called, emerged from the Byzantine types in the thirteenth century. The superstitious rigor of symbolism was then escaped, and the infant genius of true art attained the earliest movements of creative power. This is shown in the Madonna of Duccio, at Siena, dated A.D., 1220, and which is the oldest existing picture, or movable work, by an Italian artist. Next in date, and superior as art, is the Madonna by Cimabue, in the Novella at Florence. But even this seems rather a petrified type of womanhood, and could hardly be regarded as the flaming morning-star of a day about to spread from the bay of Naples to the borders of the Rhine, bright with the splendors of Giotto, Perugino, Raphael, Fra Beato, Leonardo da Vinci, and the sweet masters of the German school. It is not our purpose to note particularly the character and career of individual painters, but to remind our readers of the great and wonderful law of progress, in this as in every other respect. For example, while the two leading universities of Bologna and Paris arose to feed the lamp of science, art, following the general movement, and in the same direction, elevated itself to greater dignity of development and conception. Poesy lisped with the Troubadours, but they were sent to prepare the way for the manly utterance of the great Allighieri; and painting, associating itself with the bards, did not give Giotto to the world till Dantè was prepared to sing the three kingdoms of the second life. From the first etchings on the walls of catacombs, and the primitive symbols of faith depicted on martyr-urns, actual advancement had not ceased: but a still more auspicious hour now dawned when forms of beauty appeared which rivaled the productions of Greece and Rome, excelling the ancients by the sublimity of those holy sentiments transfused from heaven into the heart and intellect of its cultivators.
Giovanni, of the noble family of Cimabue, was born in the year 1240, and on account of the great improvement which he wrought in his art, is looked upon, perhaps too exclusively, as the founder of modern painting. He was the disciple of a Greek mosaic painter at Florence, and worthily reproduced the excellence he was born to perpetuate.