Translated and slightly abridged from Borghesi and Banchi, Nuovi Documenti per la Storia dell’ Arte Senese, (Doc. 6, p. 10) Siena, 1898.

This contract well illustrates the elaborateness and strictness of such agreements. It may be compared with the picture itself (Fig. [46]). Apparently the artist persuaded the Bishop to give up the plan of twelve prophets and saints on two side pilasters, and made instead a greater number (15) of figures in the upper arcade and pinnacles.

Fig. 70. Andrea del Castagno. David, Slayer of Goliath. Parade Shield.—Widener Coll., Elkins Park, Pa.

Chapter III
MASACCIO AND THE NEW REALISM

Ghiberti, Brunellesco, and Donatello about 1400 begin to study Nature and the Antique—The new secular spirit—Discontent with the old pictorial style expressed in reaction by Lorenzo Monaco—in cautious reform by Fra Angelico—and Masolino—in revolutionary reform by Masaccio—The Cassoni painters as illustrators of contemporary manners—Masaccio and the new structure in light and shade—The Problem of the Brancacci Frescoes—Masaccio’s enduring influence—The early Florentine Realists—Paolo Uccello and Perspective—Andrea del Castagno and Anatomy—Domenico Veneziano and Oil Painting—Alesso Baldovinetti.

In the two earlier chapters we have considered what Giorgio Vasari calls the vigorous childhood of Italian painting. We are now to observe its splendid youth. The story appropriately begins with three young men and the year 1401 and with a baby, later nicknamed Masaccio, who was born that same year. The three young Florentines represent the new time-spirit. The lucky one, Lorenzo Ghiberti, has just won a competition for the new bronze doors of the Baptistery, and has in that one commission more than twenty years of happy work ahead. Ghiberti is sensitive and thoughtful beyond the wont of the older craftsmen artists. He writes of an antique statue: “It has sweetness of modelling which cannot be caught either in a strong or a dim light, only the hand and touch can find it.” Ghiberti is a critic and analyst as well as a creator. In his “Commentaries,” a product of his old age, he writes: “Thus I have always sought for first principles, as to how nature works in herself, and how I may approach her, how the eye knows the varieties of things, how our visual power works, how visual images come about, and in what manner the theory of sculpture and painting should be framed.” This is the mood of the Renaissance in its most serious aspect.

This student mood was fully shared by two young friends of Ghiberti. Donatello, the sculptor, and Brunellesco, later the designer of the dome of the Cathedral at Florence, had lost in the competition for the Baptistery doors. They accepted defeat magnanimously, joined forces and went to Rome, where their persistent way of poking among the ruins got them the name of the treasure seekers. Such indeed they were, but the treasure they sought was not gold, but the secrets of the ancient sculptors and architects. So Donatello refined and perfected the rugged realism he had from nature. As early as 1416 he was to carve the alert and noble St. George for Or San Michele. Brunellesco’s life dream was that lightest and loveliest of domes which is still the architectural crown of Florence, and almost incidentally he threw off designs that filled Florence with elegant colonnades and churches which renewed the dignity and joyousness of the best Roman building. A resolute spirit, Brunellesco once tramped the sixty miles from Florence to Cortona to see a newly excavated statue. Not incidentally, then, but by hardest study, Brunellesco worked out a correct practice of linear perspective. This needed resource for the painter was now available when any one had the sense to ask for it, and all the time young Masaccio was growing up in San Giovanni up the Arno.

Such is the immediate background for the forward move in painting which begins in 1422, or thereabouts, and runs through fifty years of eager experimentation. As in the first revival the sculptors and architects had shown the way to the painters, so it was again. But there is also a remoter social and commercial background for the Early Renaissance which we must consider briefly. The great plague of 1348 cuts Florentine history sharply in two. It marked an acceleration of gayety and worldliness, of sports and pageantry. The chronicler Matteo Villani[[28]] noted with amazement that the plague had caused not repentance but dissipation. He was shocked to see the old toga-like costume of the Florentines give place to the bobtailed jerkins and parti-colored hose borrowed from wicked France. Heritages were many and heirs few. You saw the gowns of gentle and noble ladies on backs of hussies or worse—the new wives. People ran to “the sin of gluttony, to feasts and taverns, delicate viands and games.” As for the poor folk, they no longer wished to work at their trades, they expected the costliest food, they married “ad libitum.” So began that loosening up of the old bourgeois morals which culminated in the carnivals of the end of the fifteenth century and in the libertine muse of Lorenzo the Magnificent. All this meant an inspiring spectacle for the artist to record, and plenty of lavish patronage, but also it meant a disintegrating tendency for art. Painting is great in Florence in the measure that it escapes the mere expansiveness of the times and seeks discipline. As if to assert the permanency of the spirit of discipline, the very year that set Matteo Villani in despair, 1348, gave him also a chapter on the founding of the Studio, a school of higher learning which eventually became the University of Florence. And the course of art for most of the fifteenth century was to be a constant interplay and rivalry between the Florence of the tavern and race-course and the Florence of the Studio, with a final victory for the latter.

Oddly enough, the new luxury and gayety and the new scholarship conspired to make the old painting inadequate. The panoramic style of the fourteenth century was too simple and unornate for the Frenchified Florentines; for the new generation of strenuous artists, it was too slight and unskilful. All the finer spirits at the beginning of the fifteenth century are malcontents. Their unrest expressed itself, according to temperament, in progress or reaction. The dominating artist of the moment was a reactionary, Don Lorenzo Monaco,[[29]] Camaldolese monk. Turning from the superficiality of the current Florentine style, he sought his corrective at Siena, his birthplace, in the decorative exquisiteness of Simone Martini and the narrative warmth and breadth of the Lorenzetti; and he imports these qualities into Florence in an art as aristocratic and retrospective as that of our own Pre-Raphaelites. In his hands Gothic painting takes a new and unwarranted lease of life. He is a brilliant colorist, a fastidious designer, an austere spirit. Even his great Sienese exemplars have hardly surpassed his masterpiece, the Coronation of the Virgin, in the Uffizi. It is dated 1413. In the richness of the Gothic frame, the profusion of small incidental figures, the festooning curves of the swaying saints and angels, and formal symmetry of arrangement, it well represents the most florid type of Gothic painting as developed at Siena. It is hard to realize that this lovely mediæval work was painted at the moment when Brunellesco and his friends were already turning sharply to nature and to the vision of Hellas. But Lorenzo was a cloistered man, and appropriately a votary of past perfections. His devout mood is best expressed in the gracious Annunciation, Figure [71], which has happily never left its original altar in the Church of the Trinità. Here Lorenzo follows the Lorenzettian canons of space. A girlish delicacy in the obedient Virgin is a new note, to be echoed more sweetly by Lorenzo’s best follower, Fra Angelico. Lorenzo died in 1425. Masaccio had already created the new style of painting, but for a couple of decades faithful disciples of Don Lorenzo carried on his style.