GIOTTO.
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTORY.
The biographies in this series[1] are intended to help in the preservation of the memories of those great artists, who, leaving to the world the legacies of their genius, have not all died, but live to this hour in the far-reaching influence their works exert. That such men lived, worked, and perished, is almost the sum of knowledge that most of us can boast of with regard to them; we here try to add the simple story of their lives, and perhaps a few touches of description as to the friends they loved, the country they lived in, and the times in which they worked; so that, perhaps, they may become in some measure to us, not only wielders of the chisel and the brush, but men like ourselves, with moments of frailty as well as exaltation, with lives more or less difficult through fading ambitions and frequent failure, but nevertheless bound to us by the tie of a common humanity, and claiming our sympathy and love, not only for the beauty they have left us, but because they also carried the burden, and fought the fight that we are fighting to-day. If it be true, as George Eliot tells us, that the aspect of affairs for the race, is largely altered by the influence of "those who have lived faithfully hidden lives, and rest in unvisited tombs," it is none the less true, that there is some danger in regarding those whose achievements are of historic magnitude, as if they belonged to a separate order of humanity, and were removed alike from its every-day joys and sorrows; and we shall gain a knowledge by no means to be despised, if we once bring fairly home to our consciousness the fact that the seeds of greatness flourish in no other soil than that which we all possess; that the divine light of genius glorifies natures that are subject to the like joys, sorrows, and passions as our own, nay, that even, "like the fierce light that beats upon a throne," it often reveals faults of which the weakest of us might well be ashamed, as well as virtues of which we are all capable. It is not by elevating the great to a passionless region of undisturbed supremacy of life and action, that we show them our truest reverence, or learn from them our most worthy lesson, but by seeing them as they were in sober truth. If we would knit into firmer unison the varying struggles, failures, and triumphs of our great brotherhood, we must learn to look upon genius, not as some cold, unapproachable excellence that finds its work in alien spheres of imagination and action, but rather as a keener insight into the truths of thought and feeling, with its relations to the everyday aspects of life, no less than to its most exalted phases.
It will not be wasted time to the busy dwellers in the England of the nineteenth century, to be led back in spirit to those old Italian days when as yet civilisation dozed upon the stream of time, when the Arno and the Tiber ran their course unspanned by other bridges than those grey stone ones that remain to this day, when under the shadows of the Umbrian mountains, the rushes of Thrasymene wavered not with the rush of the locomotive, but the sighing of the breezes, and on the hills of Assisi the brethren of St. Francis chanted their earliest anthems, and took their first solemn vows of poverty and obedience. It will not be wasted time, if a thrill of kindly sympathy can be raised within us for that old life without whose struggles our fuller knowledge could never have existed, when the world was plainly divided into soldiers and scholars, rulers and ruled, men of action and men of thought, when the good was encrusted with no uncertainties, and the evil mitigated by no doubts, and all the lives of men were poured along a deeper and narrower channel than now. Though we should not regret, we should still remember kindly those times and all that they wrought for us, and the lessons that they teach, though our lives be cast in a far different mould.
It is not possible now for a new regenerator of art to cause a new departure for art by plain reference to natural fact, as did the subject of this book six hundred years ago; but how long has it been impossible? For little more than twenty years! Strange as it may seem to many of our readers, a large portion of the very best art of the present day is based upon principles which were derived from the works of Giotto and his immediate successors, and such men as Millais, Holman Hunt, Rossetti, and Burne Jones, would never have painted as they have done,[2] had it not been for the Umbrian shepherd boy, whose story we are about to tell. The quality which they found in Giotto's work, of simple unswerving truth to the facts of nature and life, this it is which lies at the root of all their work, this it is which they sought to find in vain in the pictures of later artists, however superior such might be, and were, in beauty of form and refinement of colouring. Forced and eccentric as the work of the modern pre-Raphaelites at first seemed, it was indubitably based upon a sound principle—the principle of painting what they saw, and consequently what they believed in, rather than what they might have seen. They took up the theory that nature was essentially beautiful and, carrying it a step further than was usual, drew the conclusion that if they were absolutely faithful to nature, their work could not be ugly.[3]
It is hardly too much to say that this principle has gone far to effect as great a change in modern art as the practice of Giotto effected in that of six hundred years ago. Even those artists who have been most antagonistic to the pre-Raphaelite movement, as it is called, have had their practice modified by it; and though they have continued to uphold the necessity for following rules of art, conventionally graceful arrangement of line, and contrasts of light and shade as the chief elements of pictorial beauty, have still been forced by their antagonists into bringing their works more into accordance with natural fact.
Upon this point, however, this is not the place to dwell; it is sufficient to bear in mind that the influence of Giotto, of which we have spoken, is one which is even now modifying our art, and that therefore it will be no small help to the right understanding of present pictures and picture theories, to understand clearly what reform it was that Giotto introduced into Italian painting, and how it comes about that after so long an interval of time his work has come to form a sort of rallying point for young English artists of our own day.
There is still another reason for dwelling upon the work of this old pre-Raphaelite painter; which is, that there is one considerable section of the English art-world who unite in declaring the essential and necessary superiority of the Venetian and Florentine painting, say of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and in speaking in despairing terms of the hopeless ugliness of modern civilisation. I often wonder whether those worthy elders, had they lived in the times of Giotto, would not have referred in terms of despairing eulogy to the old Roman mosaics of the fifth and sixth centuries, and contrasted their beauty with the innovating tendency of the shepherd painter, who actually inserted portraits of living people into his sacred pictures, and vulgarised the most holy subjects by the insertion of personages who looked actually glad, or surprised, or sorry, just as they might have done in actual life!
But it surely is not the case that art alone, of all the great influences of the world, reached its apogee in the Middle Ages, and that nothing henceforth remains for it but stagnation or decline. Can we believe that progress will go on in all else, and that art alone is doomed to stand still for ever, like a sort of Lot's wife, looking backward to Venice and Florence, as she to Sodom? Such cannot be the belief of those who hold that progress is not the result of an accidental conjunction of fortunate circumstances, but rather that of an universal law of nature, which ordains that we move for ever forward, though the steps of our advance are rarely perceptible. It is possible that all the older forms of art must die—as they seem to be dying now, of inanition—ere the fuller art be born, but nevertheless the fuller art must come in its season, and whatever be its distinguishing characteristic, this at least is certain, that it will be more in unison with the facts of nature and life, as we now know them, than a reflection of the faded beauties of ancient story. So that we are justified in looking with special interest upon the works of the man who first asserted the principle of the broad relation of art to life, and painted legends of the Madonna, or whatever were his subjects, not in the ancient symbolical manner, but as incidents that happened in the work-a-day world, and were witnessed by spectators, such as might have really existed, some of whom were curious, some scornful, and some indifferent.
Whatever changes art may undergo in the future, our debt will be none the less to those who have made it such as we know it now, to those early workers who struggled against difficulties and solved them for us, and whose imperfections formed the groundwork of our fuller knowledge. And chief of these, as the first who introduced a rational and verifiable manner of painting, is Giotto Bondone, the pupil of Cimabue, who not only cast on one side the arbitrary forms of representation handed down from the Byzantine artists, but, as we have said, introduced into his pictures the element of natural life, and carrying his reform into the very heart of his subject, adopted for his characters not only appropriate action and natural positions, but made the whole picture tell a story of human life, instead of making it a composition of more or less graceful lines and variegated colours.