A history of Italian painting

by Frank Jewett Mather

So much for the shop methods. Now for him who makes shops possible—the patron. A wealthy Florentine as naturally wanted to invest in a frescoed chapel as a wealthy American does in a fleet of motor cars. Considering the changed value of money, one indulgence was about as costly as the other. But the Florentine never quite regarded paintings as luxuries. They were necessary to him. He loved them. They enhanced his prestige in this world and improved his chances in the next. Then to beautify a church was really to magnify the liberty and prosperity of Florence, which largely derived from the Holy See. Recall that every Florentine was born a Catholic, baptized in the fair Church of St. John with the name of a saint. This saint, he believed, could aid him morally and materially, was in every sense his celestial patron. It paid to do the saint honor, and that could best be done through the painter’s art. The poorest man might have a small portrait of his patron, a rich man might endow a chapel and cause all his patron’s miracles to be pictured on the wall. Think also that every altar—a dozen or more in every large church—was a shrine[^[1]], containing the bread and wine that by the never-ceasing miracle of the Mass became the Saviour’s body and blood; and was also a reliquary or tomb, containing in whole or part the body of some saint. Every altar then, and every chapel inclosing one, cried out for a twofold interpretation of its meaning. Everything about the Eucharist had to be explained (involving pretty nearly all of Biblical history), and the particular relic required similar illumination. Since many of the faithful could not read, and the Catholic Church has ever been merciful as regards sermonizing, these explanations of the altar as miracle shrine of Our Lord and as tomb of a particular saint were best made pictorially, and generally were so made.

Such motives for picture-making Florence of course shared with the entire Christian world. It remains to explain why she wanted more painting and better than any other mediæval city. She wanted more painting chiefly because of her exceptional civic pride and prosperity, she wanted better painting because she had moved ahead of the world towards finer, more passionate, and conscious experiences of life which the older painting was powerless to express. About the year 1200, a century before the time we are considering, there flourished two great religious leaders who gave to Christianity a new dignity and appeal. St. Dominic, with his disciple, St. Thomas Aquinas, endeavored to make Christianity more reasonable, St. Francis of Assisi endeavored to make it more heartfelt and compassionate. They founded two monastic orders with divergent yet harmonious aims. The Dominicans called men to a life of study and self-examination, enlisting the human reason to explain and justify the universe under the Christian scheme; the Franciscans called men to poverty, humility, and chastity, and service to the unfortunate. Between the two—one supplying the light of the reason and the other the light of the heart—they overcame heresies which had menaced both Christianity and civilization and roused the Church out of its dogmatic slumber. It was no longer enough for the Church to threaten. Men yielded to her now only on condition that their heads be convinced or their hearts touched. In Florence, where a rationalizing shrewdness and a real warm-heartedness singularly blended, the double appeal was irresistible. By and large the whole city either schematized with the Dominicans or slummed with the Franciscans. Here was urgent new matter requiring an art that could move and persuade.

Together with this religious revival and the political and commercial progress we have noted, came a literary revival. Before the end of the 13th century such poets as Guido Guinizelli, Guido Cavalcanti, and Dante Alighieri had so reshaped the rude vulgar tongue that it became worthy of its Latin succession. The refinements of chivalric love came to Florence in melodious verse, and what the poets called the “sweet new style,” il dolce stil nuovo, in diction presaged a similar sweet new style of painting. Alongside of the poets, Brunetto Latini in the Tesoro shows glimmerings of scientific interest, and Giovanni Villani lends substance and dignity to the work of the chronicler. Already the sculptors Nicola and Giovanni of neighboring Pisa had grasped the beauties respectively of classic sculpture and the noble intensity of that of the Gothic North. All this immensely increased that sum of fine thinking, feeling, and seeing which underlies all great art.

To express these new emotions the old painting was inadequate. Italy through the so-called Dark Ages produced art abundantly. Wherever power and order asserted themselves amid the welter of war and oppression, stately buildings rose and these were decorated. Thus at Rome, where the popes gradually added temporal to spiritual power, splendid basilicas grew over the tombs of the martyrs. At Ravenna, through the 6th and 7th centuries the seat of the Byzantine and Gothic sovereignties, magnificent churches and baptistries were covered with pictorial mosaics. In Sicily, at Messina, Cefalù and Palermo, the sway of the Norman kings in the eleventh and twelfth centuries expressed itself in churches and civic buildings of the utmost splendor, which were adorned with mosaics by Greek masters. When the fugitives from the valleys of the Po, Adige, and Piave, and Brenta fled from Attila to the Venetian fens, there again was a beginning of great building. Wherever there was a powerful primate as at Milan, Como, Parma, Pisa, or a wide ruling abbot as at Subiaco, Monte Cassino, Capua, you will find art.

But hardly, except perhaps in architecture, Italian art. We have sporadic provincial expressions dominated from afar by the prestige of the Eastern Roman Empire. At Constantinople there was a permanent court, a ceremonious civilization, an artistic blending of the traditions of old Greece and of the mysterious Levant. The merchants of the world sought from Byzantium, jewelry, enamels, embroideries, brocades, carved ivories, and pictured manuscripts. She was to the early Middle Ages what Paris is to ours—the æsthetic fashion maker of the world,—and her skilled artists went far afield as so many missionaries of the Byzantine style. We find them making the mosaics of Ravenna in the 6th and 7th centuries, of St. Mark’s at Venice from the 9th century, of many Roman churches from an even earlier date, of Palermo in the 12th, and of the Baptistry at Florence in the 13th. This Byzantine manner, as practiced by the travelling Greek artists and by their innumerable Italian imitators, is the real starting point and jump-off place for Italian painting. Hence in first studying the Byzantine style we do but imitate the Italian painters who immediately preceded Giotto.

Fig. 1. Byzantine Narrative Style about 1300. Detail from Mosaic Book Covers in the Opera del Duomo.

Fig. 2. Mosaic in the Cathedral, Pisa. St. John, left, is by Cimabue, 1302; the Christ is in good Byzantine tradition; the Virgin, right, is some twenty years later.

Byzantine pictures have come down to us on the largest and on the smallest scale—in the great mosaics and wall paintings, and as well on small panels and in the illustrated books used in the ritual of the church. Both are important. The mural decorations are what the early Italian painter had constantly before his eye; the miniatured psalters, Gospels, lectionaries, chorals and prayer books, afforded the patterns from which he drew with little alteration the standard compositions of the Annunciation to Mary, the Nativity of Christ, His Adoration by the Shepherds and Kings, His Baptism, the Raising of Lazarus, the Last Supper, Crucifixion, Descent into Hell, Resurrection, and Ascension. But Byzantine design is most imposing in its monumental phase. The most careless traveller still feels awe before those solemn figures of Christ supreme ruler (Pantokrator) and his Mother queen of heaven which are seen throned against a background of azure or gold and attended by solemn figures of apostles and martyrs, Figure [2]. The forms are flat,—silhouettes enriched by interior tracery, the arrangement in the space formal, symmetrical, highly decorative. The smaller narrative compositions,[^[2]] Figure [1], are clearly conceived but have small emotional appeal. For this reason the Italians of the Golden Age spoke of the Byzantine style as rude. This is an error. Rude in the hands of half-trained local imitators, the style as formulated in the 9th century at Constantinople was highly sophisticated and decoratively of great refinement. It was based on an admirable system of color spotting and a fine understanding of silhouette. The contours were cast in easy conventional curves. These were enriched within by hatchings and splintery angles of gold which contrasted effectively with the fluent outlines. Everything was done by precept and copybook. In four centuries before the year 1300, the style showed little change, indeed is still alive in the mountains of Macedonia and, until the Revolution, in Russia. The Byzantine artist seldom looked at a fellow mortal with artistic intent. He looked at some earlier picture or considered his own color preferences. Conventional and anæmic as the narrative style was, it did all that was required of it. Nothing better serves the purpose of an authoritative Church than the awe-inspiring Christs of the Lombard and Sicilian and Roman apses, and so long as the Church felt no duty beyond that of plain statement of her claims, the unfelt narratives from the Scriptures served every religious need.