[42] Cosmo Rosselli, one of the Tuscan painters who preceded Michael Angelo in decorating the Chapel of Sixtus IV.
[43] This is the Madonna painted for Angelo Doni, now in the Tribuna of Florence, and probably the only existing oil-picture of Michael Angelo, though Lanzi rejects its title to that. Vasari mentions it with his usual extravagance of praise, but appears ignorant of the real meaning of the figures.
A
HISTORY OF ART
IN
THE SCHOOLS OF ITALY.
THE TUSCAN SCHOOL.
The analogy of style observable in the figures impressed on Tuscan coins of the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth century, and those found in the miniatures that decorate the manuscripts of the contemporary periods, proves that Tuscany had its artists long before the epoch which Vasari and his copyists fix for the importation of Greek art with Greek artists: whether those paintings be all pure Tuscan, or here and there interspersed with Greek ones, none will venture to decide, who knows the impossibility of drawing a limitary line sufficiently severe to distinguish the last spasms of an expiring art from the first stammerings of an infant one. Of the still surviving monuments of painting during those epochs, it may be sufficient to mention the famed Christ, painted on canvass and glued to a wooden cross, of a date anterior to 1003.
In subsequent times, the earliest and least unsuccessful essays in art, were made by the Pisano. Whilst a Greek sarcophagus at Pisa, storied with the incidents of Hippolytus and Phædra, furnished some elements of form to the sculptors Niccolo and Giovanni Pisano, painting made some progress with Giunta Pisano: his composition of Christ on the Cross at the Angeli of Assisi, though defective in design, possesses life and expression.[44]