Fig. 6. Pietro Cavallini. Dormition of the Virgin. Mosaic.—S. M. in Trastevere, Rome.
Fig. 7. Pietro Cavallini. Apostles, fresco, from Last Judgment.—Santa Cecelia in Trastevere.
Colder spirits, as is often the case, more readily found the right way. And the discovery was made at Rome where the sculptured columns, arches, and sarcophagi, the pagan wall paintings and the earliest Christian mosaics combined to continue the lesson of classic humanism. A remarkable family of decorators, the Cosmati; with such contemporaries as Jacopo Torriti and Filippo Rusuti begin very cautiously to free themselves from Byzantine trammels. But it was a painter, Pietro Cavallini,[[5]] who more fully grasped that glory that had been Rome. In 1291 he designed for the church of Santa Maria in Trastevere a Madonna and four stories of the Christ Child in mosaic. Here we glimpse a new pictorial form, Figure [6]. Those Byzantine hooks and hatchings which were quite false to form give way to a reasonable structure in light and dark, the hair no longer wild and ropy, is disposed in sculpturesque locks, the draperies are no longer a cobweb pattern, but cast in broad and classic folds. All these improvements may be noted in more complete form in the frescoed Last Judgment which has recently been uncovered in the church of Santa Cecilia, Figure [7]. Here the heads of Christ and the Apostles are well built in carefully graduated light and shade, while the draperies suggest Hellenistic statuary. But the renovation is on the whole cold and academic. Cavallini has not much more to say than the Byzantines, but that little he says with far greater gravity and truthfulness. He was a lucid and industrious but not a fine or strong spirit. His work later at Naples—in the Church of the Donna Regina, about 1310—shows that when he will express strong emotions he becomes merely hectic. Yet he recovered for Italian painting more than a hint of the choice naturalism of old Rome, and that is his sufficient glory. There is greater power and knowledge than his in the work of such contemporaries as the unknown painters of the frescoed heads of prophets in Santa Maria Maggiore at Rome and of the stories of Isaac in the Upper Church at Assisi.[[6]] These show a resolute and intelligent effort to draw in masses of light and shade, and as well an ambition to recover the gravity of the early Christian mosaics. It is no wonder that some critics ascribe such dramatic and superbly constructed frescoes as The Betrayal of Esau to young Giotto, Figure [8], but the art is too mature for any young artist. We have rather to do with a great personality of Roman training who broke the way for Giotto. Cavalcaselle suggests, I think rightly, that the Florentine, Gaddo Gaddi, may have done some of this work. But we are safe only in calling this great painter “The Isaac Master.”
To recapitulate, there were three ways, all imperfect, open to a young and progressive painter who like Giotto di Bondone was forming a style about the year 1300. He might with the Sienese evade the issue of passion and naturalism, choosing for gracefulness, he might try over again the great adventure of his master Cimabue, endeavoring to bring emotion into the old unfit forms, or he might, like Pietro Cavallini, let emotion take care of itself and work academically towards better structure, drapery, light, and shade. His choice was absolutely momentous for modern painting, and I want you to feel that the issue was quite consciously and vividly before him, for he had spent much of his youth as a humble assistant in the basilica at Assisi, where frescoes in the vehement Tuscan manner of Cimabue and in the dignified Roman style of the Isaac Master were being painted side by side. His decision was to combine the merits of the two manners—to seek, like his master, sincerity and depth of emotion, but to embody it in the new and nobler forms of the Roman school. This decision virtually fixed the character of Christian art in Italy—it was to be warm and humanistic, but it was to revive much of that abstract nobility which old Rome had inherited from Greece. Thus Italian painting at the outset took a classic stamp which when true to itself it has never lost. In fundamental ideas of beauty, there is no real difference between Giotto, Masaccio, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Titian, Michelangelo.
Fig. 8. “The Isaac Master.” Esau before Isaac. Fresco.—Upper Church, Assisi.
Giotto di Bondone,[[7]] according to the best information we have on a disputed point, was born in 1266, at the village of Colle, in the lovely valley of the Mugello. His people were prosperous and his way smooth. I see no reason for doubting the charming legend told by Ghiberti that Cimabue found the lad Giotto by the roadside diligently scratching the outlines of a sheep on a slate, and that that was the beginning of their association. In any case, we may surmise that he was early with Cimabue as apprentice and eventually went with the Master to Assisi to grind colors, clean brushes, and paint under direction. To be at that moment in the Franciscan Basilica was to be at the greatest creative center of the world. It seems to me likely that Giotto may have had a considerable part in the actual painting of the Old and New Testament stories in the nave, and I believe we may find his earliest designs in certain frescoes of the upper rows. The Lamenting over Christ’s Body, for example, singularly combines the energy of Cimabue with the dignity of Cavallini, and there are significant echoes of the composition in Giotto’s later version of the same theme at Padua. Tradition also ascribes to Giotto, maybe correctly, the Resurrection and Pentecost on the entrance wall.[[8]]
After 1296, according to Vasari’s entirely credible account, young Giotto took over the direction of the work for the newly elected Franciscan General, Giovanni dal Muro. What share he had in the vivacious and justly loved stories of St. Francis,[[9]] in the lower range of the nave, is greatly disputed. Of the twenty-eight frescoes involved, it seems clear to me that the first and the last three are by an artist more nearly in the Sienese tradition, that Nos. II to XVIII inclusive are designed by Giotto in the style of the Old Testament stories above and painted by him with a certain amount of assistance, and that the rest are largely inspired by Giotto but executed in his absence and without his final control. What is more important is the variety and vivacity of these narratives. Young Giotto is free to improvise, as he was not in the standard Bible subjects, and the mood shifts readily. We have charity, with St. Francis giving his cloak to a beggar, in an idyllic landscape; family strife in St. Francis renouncing his father, Figure [9]; sorcery in the exorcism of the devils from Arezzo; an odd mixture of ogreishness and witchcraft, in St. Francis’s Fire Ordeal before the Soldan, Figure [11]; a great pious intentness, in the choristers at the Cradle Rite; intense physical appetite, in the Miracle of the Spring; an entrancing blend of reverence and humor, in the Sermon to the Birds, Figure [10]; stark tragedy in the Death of the Knight of Celano.
