A history of Italian painting

by Frank Jewett Mather

Fig. 20. Giotto. Resuscitation of Drusiana by St. John.—Peruzzi Chapel, Santa Croce.

Upon the Feast of Herod with Salome modestly dancing John Ruskin[^[11]] has expended just eulogies in the petulant yet important little book “Mornings in Florence.” What is notable in the scene is its general decorum and the pathetic indecision of the weak King.

But the most accomplished design as such is the miracle of the Resuscitation of Drusiana by St. John the Evangelist, Figure [20]. Even the inscenation before a fine Romanesque city is adequately, if very simply, realized. The gesture of the apostle is of majestic power, the contrast of the massive, upright, columnar forms of the elders, with the sharply bent forms of Drusiana, her mourners and bier bearers, is admirably invented, and the drastic portraiture of a cripple at the left adds a tang of reality while in no wise detracting from the dignity of the scene. We have a work in the grand style, massively conceived, warmly felt, wrought into an elaborate and satisfying symmetry. The Ascension of St. John has an even graver and more ample rhythm. The Golden Age of Raphael and Titian will have little to add to this except the minor graces.

In the adjoining chapel of the Bardi family, Giotto, a little later, I believe, painted six stories of St. Francis, and four figures of the great Franciscan saints, St. Louis of France, St. Louis of Toulouse, St. Clare, and St. Elizabeth of Hungary. Over the entrance arch he set an animated picture of St. Francis receiving the stigmata, the wounds of the Saviour. Nearly thirty years earlier he had done this subject for the Church at Assisi, and in an altar-piece which has passed from Pisa to the Louvre. By comparing the rigid, angular figures of the earlier composition and their ill-adjusted accessories, with this easy and beautifully balanced arrangement, you may see how far Giotto had gone in the direction of grace, and you will not fail also to note how much more tragic the earlier and less calculated work is.

For the first time, in the Bardi chapel, Giotto conceives the decoration of the side walls as a whole. From the pointed lunettes above, through the three compositions on each wall, there is an architectural axis, sometimes arbitrarily imposed, about which the figures are symmetrically distributed. Often the scene is a screen with projecting wings as in the St. Francis before the Sultan of Morocco, or a similar fore-court, as in the Mourning for St. Francis. It will be well to compare the story of St. Francis renouncing his father, Figure [21], with the same subject at Assisi. You will recall that St. Francis, when rebuked by his father for a rash and impulsive act of charity, stripped off his clothes, then threw them at his father’s feet, and took refuge under the robe of the Bishop of Assisi. In the earlier version the architectural background splits the composition in two, adding to its intensity perhaps, but displeasing to the eye. Here in the late version a fine building seen in perspective both unifies the two groups and serves as apex for the decorative axis of the entire side wall.

Fig. 21. Giotto. St. Francis renounces his Father. Compare Fig. 9.—Bardi Chapel, Santa Croce.

More remarkable still is the contrast between St. Francis Braving the Fire Ordeal before the Soldan, Figure [22], as depicted at Assisi and Florence. We have to do not merely with an immense advance in decorative composition, the accessories at Assisi being trivial and fantastic; not merely with progress towards a gracious symmetry and more massive and impressive form, but also with a complete change of moral point of view. At Assisi the Soldan is an ogre exacting a cruel test. The Moslem priests are a cowardly pack of magicians ignobly slinking away, St. Francis a grim fanatic. At Florence the Soldan is a noble and humane gentleman, amazed at an unreasonable ordeal forced upon his wise men. The Moslem doctors are splendid scholars grudgingly shrinking from an unfair test, St. Francis an alert little enthusiast half gloating over the confusion he has thrown into the enemy camp. With a by no means orthodox feeling, old Giotto, humanistic Giotto, almost seems to take, or at least to see, the pagans’ side of it. He who had written a manly poem against the excesses and hypocrisies of the Franciscan ideal of poverty, is now capable of criticizing the more extravagant propagandism of the saint himself.

It is a criticism that admits all tenderness and sympathy, as may be seen in the famous fresco representing the Mourning over the body of St. Francis while his soul is translated to heaven, Figure [23]. Again John Ruskin is your best interpreter to this picture, which after all only needs to be seen. It combines all the qualities for which Giotto had striven—warmth, vivacity, ingenuity, unexpectedness in the narrative details; massiveness and dignity of the individual forms; and a decorative symmetry at once monumental, formal, and delightfully varied.