A history of Italian painting

by Frank Jewett Mather

Fig. 208. Presentation; Flight to Egypt; Miracle at Cana; Temptation. From an Italo-Byzantine Altar-front of about 1350.—Trieste.

When Venetian painting about the year 1350 made its first timid assertions of originality, the leading influence was that of the late Byzantine artists of the Slavonian coast and the Ionian Islands. We see their narrative painting assuming a very slightly Italian guise in the composite altar-front preserved in the museum of Trieste. Figure [208]. Its date cannot be very late in the fourteenth century, and the stereotyped religious compositions represent models vividly before the Venetian painter up to the Renaissance. Such Venetian masters as Paolo, active from 1332 to 1358, and Lorenzo, whose work falls a generation later, make slight and external improvements on the Byzantine manner.[^[70]] They reject its more rigid formulas—the gold web over drapery, the multiplied small folds, the painfully schematized muscles. They add on their own account radiant blond coloring, splendid brocades, more gorgeous fashions of gilding, and a new type of architectural arrangement. The elaborate altar-backs with perforated pilasters, and flamboyant arches and cresting; with full-length figures below and half-length of like scale above, become the standard form of Venetic ancona about 1350 and remains so for nearly a century and a half. We may see the form, with the upper central panel modernized, in Lorenzo’s Annunciation of 1357, in the Venetian Academy. The effect depends largely on the frame-maker. Such altar-pieces are made more thoughtfully by Caterino and Donato and indeed persist in all Northern Italy until after 1450. Figure [211]. We may study a similar type of ancona with narratives instead of single figures in the very accomplished and colorful work doubtfully ascribed to Nicolo Semitecolo, towards the beginning of the new century. Though the narratives follow pretty closely the old Byzantine requirements, the whole surface shows the flower-bed variety and harmony of color which is proper to Venice. Such work, as a blend of Byzantine and Gothic features, repeats what Siena had effected with far greater originality and finesse about seventy years earlier under Duccio and Simone Martini. Modena and Bologna and Padua through the latter half of the fourteenth century share this development, but again on a basis of rather marked inferiority to Siena.

The Venetian authorities were fully conscious of the backwardness of their own artists. When the Ducal Palace was finished in 1365, they called to fresco its great hall not any of the various local followers of Paolo and Lorenzo, but Guariento from neighboring Padua. He executed the great Coronation of the Virgin which was later damaged by fire and covered by Tintoretto’s Paradise. The temporary removal of Tintoretto’s canvas showed for a time the crumbling remains of Guariento’s fresco. It is in an elaborate Gothic-Byzantine style and abounds in incidental architectural ornament. Below the ceremony of the Coronation there is a screen of pierced marble niches occupied by graceful angels. It is a motive that will often recur in the new century. On the whole Guariento brings little new to Venice, but he does demonstrate the decorative possibilities of the local style. His influence was restricted because the Venetians soon ceased to work in fresco.

The impetus necessary to lift Venetian painting out of its routine condition was supplied in the fifteenth century by Gentile da Fabriano and Pisanello. Gentile, who worked in the Ducal Palace about 1410, commanded both the exquisiteness of the Sienese style and its narrative breadth. Unhappily his Venetian frescoes which are lauded in contemporary accounts have perished. His sweetness and ideality are attested by various Madonnas. We may infer his raciness and vivacity as a narrative painter from the predella of his master work, the Adoration of the Kings (1423). The little panel of the Presentation in the Temple is admirable for its architectural inscenation and for the actuality of its incidental figures. We have a man whose eye takes in the look of things. This is even more the case with Pisanello (1397–1455), who worked a little later in the same hall. He has severe notions of draughtsmanship, as befitted the greatest of all medallists. He brought from Verona, where his artistic ideas were formed, the ideal of elaborate and credible setting, especially as regards the relations of figures to architecture. In his ruined fresco of St. George of Verona, Figure [209], we may catch his quality. But the Veronese style is really better represented by such immediate predecessors as Avanzo and Altichiero. Jointly about 1385 they frescoed the great Oratorio of St. George at Padua. Especially remarkable are the legends of the titular saint, Figure [210]. Through repainting one may still discern the dignity and discretion of the arrangement, and in particular the just and tasteful elaboration of contemporary architectural features. Florentine and Sienese frescoes of the time are hardly as accomplished. The festal value of the architecture persists as a leading ideal of the school of Verona down to her greatest master, Paolo Veronese, and the ideal was taken up with conviction at Venice—became indeed the distinctive feature of her narrative school.

Fig. 210. Altichiero of Verona. St. George baptizes the Family of the Princess. Fresco.—Oratory of St. George, Padua.

Fig. 209. Pisanello. St. George meets the Princess. Fresco.—Sant’ Anastasia. Verona.

Jacopo Bellini,[^[71]] the first great painter whom Venice herself developed, was the pupil of Gentile da Fabriano and also profoundly influenced by the Veronese. Thus he combines in himself the two main strains of early Venetian painting—its desire for sweetness and its desire for vivacity and elaborate truthfulness in narrative. Alongside of Jacopo Bellini worked the faithful imitators of Paolo, Lorenzo, and Guariento. Such artists as Jacobello del Fiore and Michele Giambono, while often inherently attractive, are of small importance. Their contemporary, Antonio Vivarini, though in most ways less sensitively the artist, prepared the way for the conservative school of Murano. Antonio’s quality is somewhat obscured by his habit of working with a German partner, Giovanni. Yet the part of Antonio, as represented by his altar-piece in the Vatican, dated 1464, Figure [211], seems to have been merely to build cautiously on the work of Guariento and Lorenzo. His nephew, Alvise, and his younger brother, Bartolommeo, become influential figures towards the end of the century.

The hope of the future rested with that far more searching spirit, Jacopo Bellini. He gave to art not merely his own indefatigable curiosity but two sons of genius, Gentile and Giovanni. All the leading tendencies of the Early Renaissance in Venice originate with this remarkable family. We first meet Jacopo Bellini in 1424 as an assistant of Gentile da Fabriano and he worked on till 1470. The great decorative canvases which he made for the Ducal Palace, and for the Schools of St. Mark and St. John the Evangelist have perished, while the few pictures remaining from his brush are mostly of late date and inadequately express his ambitions. His Madonnas at the Uffizi, Venice, Paris, and Milan retain the exquisite sweetness of his master’s vein. Their modest grace may be felt in the little Madonna, Figure [212], at Venice. Of admirable gentleness and spirit is the ornate Annunciation painted in 1444, in Sant’ Alessandro at Brescia. Its predella panels, although probably of student execution, show how definitely his narrative compositions derive from Altichiero and the Veronese.