A history of Italian painting

by Frank Jewett Mather

Fig. 169. Gentile da Fabriano. The Nativity. Predella piece from Adoration of Magi.—Uffizi.

Passing to Florence, he left there the fullest expression of his gracious talent in the resplendent Adoration of the Kings, Figure [168], now in the Uffizi, which was painted for Palla Strozzi’s chapel in the Trinità. It was signed in May 1423, and perhaps because it was the season of flowers, Gentile painted in the rich pilasters growing sprays of morning glory, iris, anemone, and cornflower. Within its fantastic Gothic frame we witness a pageant such as Italy often saw on holy days—the procession of the Wise man moving through her streets. Around the Mother and her Child devotion reigns, but soon the scene passes off into the tumult of waiting men-at-arms, of chafing steeds, and snarling animals of the chase. The color is a radiance of scarlet, crimson, azure and gold, after the Gothic fashion. But the picture is more than Gothic in the tender and almost atmospheric shading of the rolling hills in the background. Skilfully blending Sienese idealism with narrative breadth and vivacity, the picture is the last and most magnificent memorial to a chivalry now merely an afterglow, but dying with all the iridescence of the sunset hour.

As is usually the case, the modern contribution of the picture is modestly made in the predella panels. The Nativity, Figure [169], with the light radiating tenderly from the Christ Child and golden stars glimmering above the hill-top pastures is perhaps the first nocturne in art, and still one of the loveliest. The Flight into Egypt, shows a joyous sunrise creeping over the glad hills. The means are conventional, the highlights are touched in with gold, but the mood and effect are there. Young Masaccio surely considered these little panels before he undertook his more naturalistic adventure in structural light and shade.

Fig. 170. Andrea da Bologna. Madonna of Humility.—Cleveland.

Soon Pope Martin V, returning from exile at Avignon and planning to restore the splendors of Christian Rome, called Gentile and set him to decorating the nave of St. John Lateran. Again fire has deprived us of the monumental works which constituted Gentile’s contemporary fame. We know that they won the praise of the greatest Flemish painter who visited Renaissance Italy, Rogier de la Pasture of Tournai. And two generations later crabbed Michelangelo declared almost sentimentally that Gentile was gentle both by name and by nature. For us it is important to note that Gentile forecast precisely the future triumphs of Raphael, carrying the glory of Umbrian painting widely through Italy before asserting it at Rome.

Of course such work as Gentile’s was highly exceptional in the Umbrian Marches. The average state of things is represented by the shy and humble Madonnas which Francescuccio Ghisi repeated indefinitely. This type of Madonna of Humility is nowhere more delightfully represented than in the lovely panel at the Cleveland Museum, Figure [170], for which I have elsewhere suggested the attribution of Andrea da Bologna.[^[62]] She is most unlike the majestic Madonnas of Florence and Siena. To assure us that this gentle Mother is after all Queen of Heaven and the Second Eve come for our salvation, the artist has given her a resplendent aureole with tiny miniatures of her champions, the apostles, and has stretched at her feet that First Eve in whom we all sinned. The picture will have been painted before 1380, and, with its Byzantine reminiscences, it well exemplifies the mediævalism that held its own in the Adriatic Marches long after Tuscany had set her face towards the Renaissance.

It would add little to our survey of Umbria to dwell on Ottaviano Nelli at Urbino, a gently vivacious story-teller; nor yet on those early painters at Camerino and San Severino who tinged the softer native style with the splendid severity of the early Venetian manner. I pass their works with regret, for they are often lovely in their frank dependence on greater spirits. In a general survey the middle years of the fifteenth century in Umbria show rather little to attract us until the rise of Pietro Perugino. He emerges in an artistic world dominated in the Tiber Valley by the Florentine, Gozzoli, and beyond the mountains by Carlo Crivelli and the Vivarini. Such predecessor of Perugino as Benedetto Bonfigli of Perugia need not detain us. He had learned a little, a very little, from the Florentine, Domenico Veneziano, paints Madonnas with a modest ideality; and narratives, the life of St. Ercolano in the Communal Palace of Perugia, with abundant and muddled detail, after the fashion of Gozzoli and Domenico di Bartolo. His bottega was a factory of those quaint and often terrible religious banners, Figure [171], which the devout Umbrians carried processionally to avert the recurrent plague. We need not dwell upon Perugino’s alleged master, Fiorenzo di Lorenzo, whose ugly and emphatic draughtsmanship derives from Verrocchio and the Pollaiuoli. We may best appreciate Perugino’s extraordinary originality by considering contemporaries who came up with equal advantages. Lorenzo di San Severino exemplifies the usual Umbrian blend of Gozzoli and Venetian influences. And in such a picture as the Enthroned Madonna, Figure [172], in the Holden Collection, at Cleveland, he attains an ideality of feeling and a beauty of workmanship of the most refreshing sort. This picture must have been painted about 1490. It may represent the high mark reached in the Marches towards the end of the century—may thus dispense us from considering such inherently charming painters as Girolamo da Camerino and his fellow townsman Giovanni Boccatis.

Fig. 171. Bontigli Plague Banner. The Virgin protecting her Devotees from plague Shafts hurled by Christ.—Chiesa del Gonfalone, Perugia.