This will be treated of in subsequent portions of this essay, it is sufficient to say here that painters were not slow to follow the example thus set, nor the public to appreciate the change. It was so sudden and of such marked importance, the advantages gained were so great, that the new method of painting, completely vanquished the traditional one, even in the artist's own lifetime; and with the whole weight of tradition, and with the Church's dislike to innovation to contend with, it succeeded in permanently establishing itself in public favour.
From the time of Giotto's early manhood to the death of Titian, the history of painting is mainly the history of the principles which the former artist taught his pupils and exemplified in his works.
Even in landscape painting, which was hardly if at all practised in his time, the advance made by Giotto was remarkable, as he substituted for the ordinary conventional background, scenes in which nature was represented faithfully, though with many shortcomings of perspective and errors of proportion such as were inevitable in a first attempt. However, for two hundred years afterwards the advance in landscape was very slight,[4] and in some respects his designs of leaves and foliage, especially some of those in the sculptures on the Campanile at Florence, are still worthy of our admiration for their fidelity, no less than for their beauty.
And lastly, to conclude this introductory chapter, it may be worth while to attempt to answer the question of what analogy we can find between the work of Giotto and that of the present day, and what lessons we can derive from the former. Now that we have had our road cleared of the many difficulties that beset the old Italian artist, have we any left that he can teach us how to master, and if so, what are they?
The answer is a very simple one. In his time art was suffering its restriction to a certain class of subjects, the religious; and a certain way of representing those subjects, the conventional. This restriction had engendered a purely formal and unemotional art, and an almost total suppression in pictures of the elements of fancy and the realisation of natural fact. In the present day, as in the thirteenth century, art suffers from restrictions, the difference being, that instead of being imposed from without, they are imposed from within, or in other words, they are developments from her own practice. The effect of the great advance in art made in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries has been to make modern artists look at nature in a particular way, i.e., in the manner in which the painters of that day originated; and instead of aiming at beauty through truth to nature and life, they rather aim at it through an imitation of the works of Raphael and Titian. The perfection of technique reached by those masters and their contemporaries, has raised the admiration of all later painters to such a degree that they have exalted the methods of this Renaissance painting into a religion, and seek to find in the laws of chiaroscuro, composition, balance, and harmony of colour, which they can deduce from the pictures of that period, the source of the inspiration that renders those works immortal. Thus art is still in service, in service to itself; it has but burst one set of fetters that it might "gather the links of the broken chain to fasten them proudly round her." No longer bound by superstition and formalism; she is bound by bonds of her own making, and falls down, like Narcissus of old, in worship of her own fair face. Indeed the present error is really a deeper one than that which Giotto vanquished, for throughout all the degradation of art in the early centuries of the Christian era, there was one principle which had been clung fast to, and that was, that pictures should represent things worthy to be represented; it is true that the range was narrowed and its treatment governed by rule, but it may be doubted whether this was not preferable to our present indifference of what it is that is painted, or whether anything should be painted at all.
For it must be noticed that many modern writers on art seem to hold, and artists to exemplify, the principle, that one subject is as good as another; in fact, that the treatment is everything, the meaning of the work wholly subsidiary. Art no longer exists to depict worthily worthy things, but rather like an æsthetic Blondin balances itself solemnly on a tight-rope of its own construction, seeming to pride itself upon its removal from the vulgar crowd, and moves onward with abstracted gaze, heedless of the oft repeated cries of "Come down."
Yet now, as in the older centuries, men sorrow and hope, succeed and fail, and woman's beauty is as fair, and her heart as tender, as under the Italian sunshine six hundred years ago; there may be at the present hour in the cottages of England, as then mid the hills of Vespignano, peasants' children in whom the inspiration of art is struggling for utterance, needing but the chance that Cimabue gave to Giotto, to give to mankind new lessons of beauty and truth. In a word, now as then, the subjects of art and its power are the same as they have ever been, and men have not ceased to be the same because the fashion of their dress is changed, and they no longer display their emotions with the frank egotism of the Middle Ages. And, as has been said, the history of Giotto is the history of the man who first in painting gave expression to all the diverse emotions of men, who refused to believe that traditional arrangements of line, and profuseness of colouring, could be efficient substitutes for the vital facts of nature and life; who taught that painting is but one of the means by which man speaks to man, and that therefore the words it says are as important, perhaps more so, as the way in which they are said. So I repeat the history of this old pre-Raphaelite is doubly important to us at this day, not only as the founder of the great schools of Italian painting, but as the energetic reformer in whose works our artists may find an exhortation to cast away formulas for facts, and rely for the beauty and attractiveness of their pictures, more upon their correspondence with nature, than their subservience to artistic tradition.
CHAPTER II.
ART IN ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY.
If we would gain a true and adequate conception of the works and merit of any painter, it is necessary for us not only to examine his special productions, but to become in some measure acquainted with the state in which art was during his time. And not only is it necessary to take into account the actual amount of progress then manifested in one particular branch, such as painting, but to consider also the tendencies of the age, if we would separate the influence exercised by the artist's work, and define its true significance. Therefore readers will not think it irrelevant to the right telling and understanding of the life of Giotto, if they are first asked to consider for a short time the condition of art in the year 1276; and in order to thoroughly comprehend this condition, we must for a moment carry our thoughts back a thousand years further still, and think of those days when art and paganism flourished side by side in the Grecian republic.
It would be difficult at any time, impossible in the short space at our disposal, to explain the peculiar action and reaction of Greek art upon Greek religion; we must content ourselves with noting the fact that the two were absolutely inseparable—that the religion owed its influence over men's minds in no small degree to the power of art, is as indisputable as that art gained enormously in dignity and strength by being considered as the greatest exponent of religion, and by all its most important achievements being consecrated to that service. But if the Greek art was on the one hand indissolubly connected with the national religion, it was, on the other, no less connected with the national life. If the wisdom of Zeus, the pride of Juno, and the tenderness of Venus ornamented one side of the amphora, the struggles of the chase and the contests of the gymnasia adorned the other; nor did it seem to the people that there was anything extraordinary in thus mingling the doings of their neighbours, and the actions of their gods. Why! their gods, after all, were but neighbours of a higher order, and had even been known to succumb to the craft or bravery of men. The barrier between seen and unseen scarcely existed; but nature passed through almost imperceptible gradations, from the dryad of the woodland, to the ruler of Olympus. Had their religion, their art, and their life stood apart, as, unhappily, religion, art, and life stand apart now, the rise of Christianity could never have produced the withering effect upon all works of imagination which we know occurred; for it could not have taken away, at one blow, both the motives and the subjects of art, however it might have changed the mode of their representation; nor would Christianity have been opposed to it in like manner, had it not clearly perceived that it was one of the great instruments in the hands of the pagan priests. Unable to pervert to spiritual conceptions an art whose only conception of spiritual things was the perfection of bodily ones, ascetic Christianity had no choice but to discourage the practice of art altogether, and this is what actually happened. Gradually as the study of the nude figure was abandoned, the ignorance of the artists of the real outlines of the human form increased; and gradually, as the first broad Christian theory of fellowship and brotherhood, faded through the help of the priest into a stern, asceticism, enforced by Church tradition, all representations of vigour and manly beauty were considered to verge upon the profane, till at last we find in the work of the fifth to the tenth centuries, an almost total absence of all study of either nature or man; the former being totally disregarded, the latter represented under rude types, which were repeated from age to age without variety or improvement. Splendour of material and colouring were made to atone for poverty of conception and absence of thought, and the great art of those ages was one which the Greeks had only considered worthy to decorate the floors of their palaces. This art of mosaic, which about the fourth century[5] began to supersede painting in tempera and encaustic, was peculiarly fitted to be the servant of asceticism. In the course of its practice all the flowing lines of drapery became harsh and stiff, the limbs lost their suppleness and movement, the face its expression and life, and in fact the whole picture became less a representation of an occurrence, than a type to recall some subject to the mind. If we remember that many of the facts of the Christian religion were such as almost to defy absolute representation, we shall discover another reason for the adoption of this work. It is to be noted that, according to Pliny, mosaic began to be in vogue in Rome about 170 years before Christ. Kugler asserts that this art was an invention of the Alexandrian age, but in this he appears to be mistaken, and it is more probable that the Greeks received it from Persia and Assyria (through their Ægean colonies and the histories of Phœnician merchants), in which countries the art seems to have been of great antiquity,[6] The finest examples of these wall mosaics are to be found in Rome and Ravenna, and, at a later date, in the decoration of St. Mark's, at Venice, to which we shall hereafter have occasion to refer. Another kind of art of great importance at this time was Illumination, the earliest traces of which are found towards the close of the second century, when the present form of leaves sewn together at the back superseded the rollers which had been previously used. The first embellishments were simple enlargements and variety of colouring in the letters; from this, the advance to borders and illustrative designs was comparatively rapid.[7] The earliest examples of importance remaining at the present day, are the Dioscorides, in the library at Vienna, and the Virgil, in the Vatican, both of which are supposed to be of the fourth century.