The Thirteenth, Greatest of Centuries

by James J. Walsh

The most important phase of Italian art during the Thirteenth Century is that which developed at Florence. It is with this that the world is most familiar. It began with Cimabue, who commenced painter, in the quaint old English phrase, not long before the middle of the century and whose great work occupies the second half of it. There are not wanting some interesting traditions of certain other Florentine painters before his time as Marchisello, of the early part of the century, Lapo who painted, in 1261, the facade of the Cathedral at Pistoia, and Fino di Tibaldi who painted a vast picture on the walls of the Municipal Palace about the middle of the century, but they are so much in the shadow of the later masters' work as to be scarcely known. Everywhere Nature began to reassert herself. The workers in Mosaic even, who were occupied in the famous baptistry at Florence about the middle of the century, though they followed the Byzantine rules of their art, introduced certain innovations which brought the composition and the subjects closer to nature. These are enough to show that there was a school of painting and decoration at Florence quite sufficient to account for Cimabue's development, without the necessity of appealing to the influence over him of wandering Greek artists as has sometimes been done.

Though he was not the absolute inventor of all the new art modes as he is sometimes supposed to be, Cimabue was undoubtedly a great original genius. Like so many others who have been acclaimed as the very first in a particular line of thought or effort, his was only the culminating intelligence which grasped all that had been done before, assimilated it and made it his own. As a distinct exception to the usual history of such great initiators, this father of Italian painting was rich, born of a noble family, but of a character that was eager for work and with ambition to succeed in his chosen art as the mainspring of life. At his death, as the result of his influence, artists had acquired a much better social position than had been theirs before, and one that it was comparatively easy for his successors to maintain. His famous Madonna which was subsequently borne in triumph from his studio to the Church of [{141}] Santa Maria Novella, placed the seal of popular approval on the new art, and the enthusiasm it evoked raised the artist for all time from the plane of a mere worker in colors to that of a member of a liberal profession. Even before this triumph his great picture had been deemed worthy of a visit by Charles of Anjou, the French King, who was on a visit to Florence and according to tradition ever afterwards the portion of the city in which it had been painted and through which it was carried in procession, bore by reason of these happy events the name Borgo Allegri—Ward of Joy.

This picture is still in its place in the Rucellai chapel and is of course the subject of devoted attention on the part of visitors. Lafenestre says of it, that this monument of Florentine art quite justifies the enthusiasm of contemporaries if we compare it with the expressionless Madonnas that preceded it. There is an air of beneficent dignity on the features quite unlike the rigidity of preceding art, and there is besides an attractive suppleness about the attitude of the body which is far better proportioned than those of its predecessors. Above all there is a certain roseate freshness about the colors of the flesh which are pleasant substitutes for the pale and greenish tints of the Byzantines. It did not require more than this to exalt the imaginations of the people delivered from their old-time conventional painting. It was only a ray of the dawn after a dark night, but it announced a glorious sunrise of art and the confident anticipations of the wondrous day to come, aroused the depths of feeling in the peoples' hearts. Life and nature went back into art once more; no wonder their re-apparition was saluted with so much delight.

Two other Madonnas painted by him, one at Florence in the Academy, the other in Paris in the Louvre, besides his great Mosaic in the apse of the Cathedral at Pisa, serve to show with what prudence Cimabue introduced naturalistic qualities into art, while always respecting the tradition of the older art and preserving the solemn graces and the majestic style of monumental painting. The old frescoes of the upper church at Assisi which represent episodes in the life of St. Francis have also been attributed to Cimabue, but evidently were done by a number of artists probably under his direction. It is easy to [{142}] see from them what an important role the Florentine artist played in directing the gropings of his assistant artists.

After Cimabue the most important name at Florentine in the Thirteenth Century is that of his friend, Gaddo Gaddi, whose years of life correspond almost exactly with those of his great contemporary. His famous Coronation of the Virgin at Santa Maria de Fiore in Florence shows that he was greatly influenced by the new ideas that had come into art. Greater than either of these well-known predecessors however, was Giotto the friend of Dante, whose work is still considered worthy of study by artists because of certain qualities in which it never has been surpassed nor quite outgrown. From Giotto, however, we shall turn aside for a moment to say something of the development of art in other cities of Italy, for it must not be thought that Florence was the only one to take up the new art methods which developed so marvelously during the Thirteenth Century.

Even before the phenomenal rise of modern art in Florence, at Pisa, at Lucca and especially at Siena, the new wind of the spirit was felt blowing and some fine inspirations were realized in spite of hampering difficulties of all kinds. The Madonna of Guido in the Church of St. Dominic at Siena is the proof of his emancipation. Besides him Ugolino, Segna and Duccio make up the Siena school and enable this other Tuscan city to dispute even with Florence the priority of the new influence in art. At Lucca Bonaventure Berlinghieri flourished and there is a famous St. Francis by him only recently found, which proves his right to a place among the great founders of modern art. Giunta of Pisa was one of those called to Assisi to paint some of the frescoes in the upper church. He is noted as having striven to make his figures more exact and his colors more natural. He did much to help his generation away from the conventional expressions of the preceding time and he must for this reason be counted among the great original geniuses in the history of art.

The greatest name in the art of the Thirteenth Century is of course that of Giotto. What Dante did for poetry and Villani for history, their compatriot and friend did for painting. Ambrogio de Bondone familiarly called Ambrogiotto (and with the abbreviating habit that the Italians have always had for the names of all those of whom they thought much shortened to [{143}] Giotto, as indeed Dante's name had been shortened from Durante) was born just at the beginning of the last quarter of the Thirteenth Century. According to a well-known legend he was guarding the sheep of his father one day and passing his time sketching a lamb upon a smooth stone with a soft pebble when Cimabue happened to be passing. The painter struck by the signs of genius in the work took the boy with him to Florence, where he made rapid progress in art and soon surpassed even his master. The wonderful precocity of his genius may be best realized from the fact that at the age of twenty he was given the commission of finishing the decorations of the upper Church at Assisi, and in fulfilling it broke so completely with the Byzantine formalism of the preceding millennium, that he must be considered the liberator of art and its deliverer from the chains of conventionalism into the freedom of nature.

It is no wonder that critics and literary men have been so unstinted in his praise. Here is an example:

"In the Decamerone it is said of him 'that he was so great a genius that there was nothing in nature he had not so reproduced that it was not only like the thing, but seemed to be the thing itself.' Eulogies of this tenor on works of art are, it is quite true, common to all periods alike, to the most accomplished of classical antiquity as well as to the most primitive of the Middle Age; and they must only be accepted relatively, according to the notion entertained by each period of what constitutes truth and naturalness. And from the point of view of his age, Giotto's advance towards nature, considered relatively to his predecessors, was in truth enormous. What he sought was not merely the external truth of sense, but also the inward truth of the spirit. Instead of solemn images of devotion, he painted pictures in which the spectator beheld the likeness of human beings in the exercise of activity and intelligence. His merit lies, as has been well said, in 'an entirely new conception of character and facts.'" [Footnote 14]

[Footnote 14: History of Ancient, Early Christian and Medieval Painting from the German of the late Dr. Alfred Woltmann, Professor at the Imperial University of Strasburg, and Karl Woertmann, Professor at the Royal Academy of Arts, Dusselford. Edited by Sidney Colvin, M. A., Dodd, Mead & Co., N. Y., 1894.]