Europe in the Middle Ages

by Ierne L. Plunket

This was the second aspect of the ‘New Learning’, the disappearance of the belief that Latin and Greek alone were literary, and the gradual linking up of mediaeval with modern scholarship by the discovery that the growth of national ideals and aspirations could best be expressed in a living national tongue. The forerunners of this movement lived long before the period that we usually call the Renaissance. Thus Dante, greatest of mediaeval minds, was inspired to employ his native Italian in his masterpiece, the Divina Commedia, that, had his genius been less original, might have been merely a classical imitation. Petrarch, the friend of Rienzi and lover of liberty, who lived at the papal court at Avignon, was half-ashamed of his Italian sonnets, yet it is by their charm still more than by his Latin letters that he lives to-day, as Boccaccio by the witty easy-flowing style of his tales.

These are the names of literary ‘immortals’, and perhaps it may seem strange to find, when we pass from them to the ‘New Learning’ itself, that the greater part of the works published by members of the ‘Platonic Academy’ and other intellectual circles are now as dead as the dialectics of the schoolmen. Yet it is still harder, if we turn their pages, to believe that such florid sentences and long-drawn arguments could ever have stirred men’s blood to a frenzy of enthusiasm or passion. The explanation lies in the fact that for all the charm of its newly-won freedom, the Renaissance, on its literary side, was not a time of creation but of criticism and inquiry. Its leaders were too busy clearing away outworn traditions, collecting material for fresh thought, and laying literary foundations, to build themselves with any breadth of vision. Where they paused exhausted, or failed, the ‘giants’ of the modern world were able to erect their masterpieces.

Lorenzo ‘the Magnificent’ himself we can remember for the genuine love of nature and poetry apparent in his sonnets, but his claim to remain immortal in the world’s history must rest, not on his literary achievements, but on his generous patronage and appreciation of scholars and artists, as well as on the political wisdom that made him the first statesman of his day.

Giotto

If the literature of the Renaissance was mainly experimental in character, painting was pre-eminently its finished glory—the representation of that sense of beauty in nature and in human life from which the Middle Ages had turned away, as from a snare set by the Devil to distract souls from Paradise. Here again, in painting, there is a twofold aspect: the artist mind seeking in the past as well as aspiring to the future for inspiration to guide his brush. It was in the life of St. Francis, ‘the little Brother of Assisi’, that Giotto, the great forerunner of the ‘new’ art, found that sense of humanity idealized that spurred him to break away from the old conventional Byzantine models, stiff, decorative, and inhuman, in order to attempt the realization of life as he saw it around him in the street and field.

Cimabue, a famous Florentine painter, had found Giotto as a shepherd lad, cutting pictures of the sheep grouped round him with a stone upon the rockside. He carried the boy away to be his apprentice, but the pupil soon excelled the master and not merely Florence but all Italy heard of his wondrous colours and designs. ‘He took nature for his guide,’ says Leonardo da Vinci; and many are the tales of this kindly peasant genius, small and ugly in appearance but full of the joy and humour of the world that he studied so shrewdly. The Angevin King Robert of Naples once asked him to suggest a symbol of his own turbulent Southern kingdom, whereupon the artist drew a donkey saddled, sniffing at another saddle lying on the ground. ‘Such are your subjects,’ he remarked, ‘that every day would seek a new master.’ No politician could have made a more fitting summary of mediaeval Naples.

Giotto’s chief fame to-day lies in his frescoes of the life of St. Francis on the walls of the double chapel at Assisi and in the Franciscan Church of Santa Croce in Florence. Most of them, damaged by the action of time and weather on the rough plaster, have been repaired to their disadvantage, though a few remain unharmed to show the painter’s clear, delicate colouring and boldness of outline. To the average sightseer to-day they seem perhaps just legendary pictures, more or less crude in design, but when Giotto painted we must remember that the crowds who watched his brush in breathless admiration read as they gazed the story of the most human of saints—a man who had but lately walked amongst the Umbrian hills, and whose words and deeds were to them more vivid than many a living utterance.

To understand what the genius of Giotto meant to his own day we must consider the stiff unreality of former art, just as we cannot realize the greatness of Columbus by thinking of a modern voyage from the Continent to America, but only by recalling the primitive navigation of his time. Giotto, like Columbus, had many imitators and followers, some of them famous names, but the pioneer work that he had done for art was commemorated at the Renaissance when, by the orders of Lorenzo de Medici, a Latin epitaph was placed on his tomb containing these words: ‘Lo! I am he by whom dead Art was restored to life ... by whom Art became one with Nature.’

It would be impossible to condense satisfactorily in a few short paragraphs the triumphant history of Renaissance painting, the rapid development of which Giotto and his ‘school’ had made practicable, or even to give a slight sketch of the artists on whom that history depends. Never before has so much genius been crowded into so few years; but before we leave this pre-eminent age in modern Art, there is one arresting figure who must be described, a man who more than any other embodies the spirit of the Renaissance at its best, Leonardo da Vinci, ‘foremost amongst the supreme masters of the world’.

Leonardo da Vinci