A history of Italian painting

by Frank Jewett Mather

Fig. 29. Andrea Orcagna. Upper part of Fresco of Last Judgment.—Strozzi Chapel, Santa Maria Novella.

Giorgio Vasari regarded Gherardo Starnina (active before 1400) as an important link between Giotto and the Renaissance, and if Professor Suida is right in ascribing the frescoes of the legend of St. Nicholas in the Castellani Chapel, Santa Croce, to Starnina, Vasari was quite right. About this mysterious pupil of Antonio Veneziano who worked in Spain, we really know almost nothing. But the St. Nicholas frescoes have a grimness and gravity which points back to Giotto and withal a careful fusion of light and shade which anticipates Masolino and Masaccio. Meanwhile Giotto’s own great compositions in still undiminished splendor and impressiveness stood ready to give lessons to the eye and mind that could read them aright. Before such later panoramists as Niccolò di Pietro Gerini, Mariotto di Nardo, and Spinello Aretino were gone, that eye was already busy, in the person of a rugged little boy of San Giovanni in Valdarno. He may have already been called Masaccio for his untidiness. He was to rebuild on Giotto and create the grand style of the Renaissance.

A mere catalogue of those painters who pursued the panoramic method with ability can hardly be expected. One and all they followed the Sienese narrative style. Prominent would be certain incomers from other cities, Giovanni da Milano, Antonio Veneziano, and Spinello Aretino. These are typical decorators of the last quarter of the 14th century.

Fig. 31. Andrea Bonaiuti, The Navicella, fresco, closely imitated from Giotto’s Mosaic at St. Peter’s, Rome.—Spanish Chapel.

We do better to fix our attention upon the most remarkable example of the Florentine panoramic style, the decoration of the Spanish Chapel, the chapter house attached to the Dominican Church of Santa Maria Novella.[^[14]] The work was begun by Andrea Bonaiuti in the year 1365, as we know from a recently discovered document. As decoration it is delightful, if rather superficially so. The artist treats his spaces as wholes, declining to cut them up into oblongs after the earlier fashion. He covers his great surfaces with ease and taste, has a knack at illustration, and a fine sense of color. The great Calvary over the triumphal arch imposes from its very vastness; the triangles of the cross vault, including a spirited transcript of Giotto’s Navicella, Figure [31], are composed with clarity and skill; the famous composition of the Dominican theologian, St. Thomas Aquinas, enthroned above the Liberal Arts and Sciences, and their representatives in history, combines an almost Byzantine formality and grandeur with prettiness and ingenuity in details. But the method is better shown in the decoration opposite, which represents the dual earthly powers, the Pope and the Emperor, enthroned equally, and supported by the representatives of the spiritual orders and secular estates, Figure [32]. The group which symbolizes the right government of society, according to mediæval ideas, is set before a church which quite faithfully shows what the Cathedral of Florence was then intended to be. High up in the arch is the goal of all earthly endeavor—Heaven with Christ enthroned amid the angels; an altar with a lamb before Him, symbolizing His sacrifice; His Mother kneeling as intercessor for mankind. The Gate of Heaven with St. Peter in attendance, is naïvely set above the church on a sort of aerial raft. Below is a novel realistic touch, the villa-studded sky line of hills which encloses Florence. The real guide to St. Peter’s presence is always a Dominican monk, usually St. Dominic himself is intended—the founder and militant evangelist of the order, as St. Thomas Aquinas was its systematic theologian. In the lower range of the picture, St. Dominic confutes the heretics, who tear their wicked books in despair. Above he vainly beseeches careless gentlefolk at dalliance in an orange grove; still higher, he leads the truly penitent to Heaven’s gate. At the foot the Domini Canes (a bad pun for Dominicans) are vigilant. The moral of the fresco is, happy the world which trusts its worldly and religious business to the Emperor and the Pope, and its personal religious problems to the Dominicans. It is a kind of glorified poster for the order.

In its sprightliness, variety, complication and facile charm, it is a fine example of the panoramic style. It lacks every quality of seriousness whether as a composition or in the drawing of the figures. But its fairy tale profuseness and ease have made it ever since it was painted, one of the most popular decorations in Italy. Its success shows the kind of taste with which the few disciplined artists of the fourteenth century had to contend. Such obstacles have ever been the fate of the artist who cares enough for his art to practice it austerely.

Fig. 32. Andrea Bonaiuti. Dominican Allegory of Church and State. Fresco.—Spanish Chapel.

Work of the facile and superficial character of the Spanish Chapel Florence produced in abundance for two generations after Giotto’s death. His faithful but dull disciple, Taddeo Gaddi, as we have seen, gloomily foresaw the downfall of the art of painting. But as in a great personality the recreations and even dissipations seldom permanently eclipse the greater purpose, so Florence was big enough to indulge for a time her weaker side. Had Taddeo Gaddi been more intelligent, or even more hopeful, he would have seen that new masters must arise, and that there would soon be pictures in Florence at which Giotto come back to earth would gaze with that humility with which he had once viewed the marble gods of Rome, with that understanding sympathy which he had borne to all his fellow mortals.