Westward empire

by Elias Lyman Magoon

Giotto, the son of Bondone, was born near Florence in the year 1276. It is said that he was a shepherd boy, and was discovered drawing a sheep upon a slab of stone by Cimabue, who took him home and instructed him in painting. In him the graphic art was associated with the ecstasy of a contemplative mind, and became a powerful and animated language. He did not astound or flatter the senses by the strength of tints, or the violent contrast of lights and shadows; but like his great successor, Angelico, in the urbanity and variety of lines, in the profiling of countenances, and in the ingenuous movement of the figure, he portrayed that harmony which pervades all creation, and which reveals itself most divinely in the gentle companion of man.

Amid the rugged Apennines about Umbria there was reared a simple and solitary school of painting in the fifteenth century, which gloried in sublime inspirations, and cultivated external beauty only to show the splendor of its conceptions. Such were Fabriano, Credi, Perugino, Pinturricchio, and Raphael who came down to Florence to mature their capacities and ennoble their art, in competition with the great leaders of the Tuscan school, Giotto Memmi, Gaddi, Spinello, Pietro Cavallini, and the rest. These are the men who first burst the trammels of dryness, meagreness and servile imitation; who first introduced a free, bold, and flowing outline, coupled with examples of dignified character, energetic action, and concentrated expression; invented chiaroscuro and grouping, and at the point of culmination imparted to their works a majesty unrivaled in the history of pictorial art. That was a memorable epoch truly, and for the imitative arts one of superlative glory. For while the people were struggling between tyranny and liberty; while philosophy was engaged in its deliriums about judicial astrology, and the civil code was cruel and oppressive, painting gradually approached that sovereign excellence to which the genius of Leonardo and Raphael were destined to exalt it; till, with the rapidity that signalized its ascent, it began to sink into decay and ruin.

It would seem that oil-painting was practiced in Giotto's time; but it came not into general use until about 1410, when this superior medium of art was either invented or revived by the Flemish artist, John Van Eyck, of Brughes. The place of this invention is significant, and still more the fact that ever since the progress of art and the perfection of color in Europe has neared that vicinity.

Next to the revival of ancient learning, and the progress of science, the age of Leo X. was indebted to the perfection of painting for its glory. It sprang from an inspiration as special, bore a character equally definite, and yet is invested with an excellence as absolute as that of Greek sculpture. It was a spiritual plant of the most delicate texture, the life of which may be defined as to its limits with the greatest precision. Our countryman, unfortunately now lost to literature, science, and art, Horace Binney Wallace, presents the facts in the following summary form: "The first bud broke through the hard rind of conventionality about the year 1220, and the scene of its first growth may be fixed at Siena; and by the year 1320 the germination of the whole trunk was decisively advanced. Cimabue and Giotto had spread examples of Art over all Italy. In the next century, till 1470, all the branches and sprays that the frame was to exhibit were grown; the leafage was luxuriantly full, and the buds of the flowers were formed, Memmi, the Gaddis, the Orgagnas, the Lippis, Massaccio, and, more than all, as relates to spiritual development, Fra Beato had lived and wrought. About 1470, the peerless blossom of Perfection began to expand, and continued open for seventy years, the brightest period of its glow being between 1500 and 1535. Its life declined and expired almost immediately. After 1570 nothing of original or progressive vitality was produced in Italy. Fra Bartolomeo had died in 1517; Leonardo in 1519; Raphael in 1520; Coreggio in 1534; Michael Angelo, at a great age, in 1563; Giorgione had died in 1511; John Bellini in 1516; Titian survived till 1576, at the age of 99; and Veronese died in 1588. The complete exhaustion of the vital force of Art, in the production of the great painters who were all living in 1500, is a noticeable fact. With the exception of the after-growth of the Bolognese school—of whom Dominicheno, Guido, and Guercino, alone are worth notice—which flourished between 1600 and 1660, nothing in the manner of the previous days, but false and feeble imitations appeared."

Great artists went westward often to execute masterpieces for the most appreciative and powerful patrons in the age of Leo, as before in the times of Augustus and Pericles, but progress in refinement called them eastward never. When the arts were in their highest vigor in Italy, they were wooed to the banks of the Seine and the Thames, by that true lover, Francis I., of France, and by the monied might of England. The richest art treasures on earth have ever since accumulated in the retreats where choice collections then were first commenced, as we shall have occasion more fully to state when we come to sketch the age now transpiring. For ten centuries the vast and progressive populace of continental Europe had no other representative than the Church; it was then that Art achieved its greatness under the fostering care of Catholicism, when the Church belonged to the People, and they were comparatively free. But when Religion sank into bigotry, and Art, instead of addressing the popular heart, was compelled to minister to the narrow demands of private patrons, she passed beyond seas, and awaited fairer auspices in the midst of a freer race.

CHAPTER III.

SCIENCE.

Exactly at the era when the great European race was dismembered, the Latin tongue was disused. This had formerly been the universal tie between dissimilar tribes, and when it was sundered by such men as Dantè, who rose to stamp the seal of their genius upon the idiom of the common people, science soared sublimely amid the new growth of national languages, and became the supreme and most universally uniting bond. When Italy had gradually become nationalized as one Italy, Spain as one Spain, Germany as one Germany, France as one France, and Britain as one Great Britain; and when that still mightier process of civilization, the Reformation, had supervened, ecclesiastical union was destroyed, and then it was that enlarged invention came to the rescue and supplied the conservative influence which was most in demand. Increased ardor in the pursuit of knowledge led to wider and more frequent intercommunications, both mental and physical, while these in turn were encouraged and protected by the improved polity of aspiring states. A new voice even more cosmopolitic than cotemporaneous creeds broke upon the roused and exulting peoples saying, "One is your master, Thought, and all ye are brethren!" Sciences lead most directly, and with greatest efficiency to general views; and, above all, natural law, that science which treats of inherent and universal rights, arose and was cultivated with propitious zeal. The dawn was begun, and the noon was not far off when in central Europe a great proficient in universal history could say: "The barriers are broken, which severed states and nations in hostile egotism. One cosmopolitic bond unites at present all thinking minds, and all the light of this century may now freely fall upon a new Galileo or Erasmus."

From the sixth to the fourteenth century the science of government, as laid down by Justinian, was illustrated by the labors and comments of numerous celebrated jurisconsults. The Byzantine legislation yielded on two essential points to the influence of Christianity. The institution of marriage, which in the Code and Pandects was only directed by motives of policy, assumed, in 911, a legal religious character; and domestic slavery disappeared gradually, to be replaced by serfdom. A charter was even granted to the serfs by the emperor Emanuel Comnenus in 1143. Irnerius, at the beginning of the twelfth century, opened the first law-school in his native city, Bologna, and thenceforth that science absorbed republican intellects, and led to a clearer defining of civil rights. A passion for this study possessed even the gentler sex; as in the case of Novella Andrea da Bologna, who was competent to fill the professor's chair, during her father's absence, and delivered eloquent lectures on arid law. Sybil-like, she took care to screen her lovely face behind a curtain, "lest her beauty should turn those giddy young heads she was appointed to edify and enlighten." Modeled after this pattern, law-schools spread widely, and the study of the Lombard and Tuscan municipal constitutions eventually roused the European communities to break the bonds of feudalism. The principle of personal and political freedom so indelibly rooted in each individual consciousness respecting the equal rights of the whole human race, is by no means the discovery of recent times. At the darkest hour of the middle period of history this idea of "humanity" in no mean degree existed and began to act slowly but continuously in realizing a vast brotherhood in the midst of our race, a unit impelled by the purpose of attaining one particular object, namely, the free development of all the latent powers of man, and the full enjoyment of all his rights.

In this department, as in all the rest, Florence was the seat of supreme mental power during the age of Leo X.; she fostered the genius which spread widely in beauty and might. In the fifteenth century, an ancient and authentic copy of the Justinian constitutions was captured at Pisa, and given by Lorenzo de Medici to the custody of Politiano, the most distinguished mediæval professor of legal science. He corrected numerous manuscripts, supervised the publication of repeated editions, and prepared the way for all the great improvements which, in his profession, have since been made. Politiano and Lorenzo, as they together took daily exercise on horseback, were wont to converse on their morning studies, and this was characteristic of the intellectual life of that age and city. The vivifying light which began to pour on a hemisphere was especially concentrated on the Tuscan capital, and all the sciences simultaneously awoke from torpor under the invigorating beams. Like a sheltered garden in the opening of spring, Florence re-echoed with the earliest sounds of returning energy in every walk of scientific invention. The absurdities of astrology were exposed, and legitimate deduction was substituted in the place of conjecture and fraud. Antonio Squarcialupi excelled all his predecessors in music, and Francesco Berlinghieri greatly facilitated the study of geography. Lorenzo de Medici himself gave especial attention to the science of medicine, and caused the most eminent professors to prosecute their researches under the auspices of his name and bounty. Paolo Toscanelli erected his celebrated Gnomen near the Platonic academy; and Lorenzo da Volpaja constructed for his princely namesake a clock, or piece of mechanism, which not only marked the hours of the day, but the motions of the sun and of the planets, the eclipses, the signs of the zodiac, and the whole revolutions of the heavens.