CHAPTER IV--PAINTING
Distribution of Artistic Gifts in Italy—Florence and Venice —Classification by Schools—Stages in the Evolution of Painting—Cimabue —The Rucellai Madonna—Giotto—His widespread Activity—The Scope of his Art—Vitality—Composition—Colour—Naturalism—Healthiness—Frescoes at Assisi and Padua—Legend of S. Francis—The Giotteschi—Pictures of the Last Judgment—Orcagna in the Strozzi Chapel—Ambrogio Lorenzetti at Pisa—Dogmatic Theology—Cappella degli Spagnuoli—Traini's "Triumph, of S. Thomas Aquinas"—Political Doctrine expressed in Fresco—Sala della Pace at Siena—Religious Art in Siena and Perugia—The Relation of the Giottesque Painters to the Renaissance.
It is the duty of the historian of painting to trace the beginnings of art in each of the Italian communities, to differentiate their local styles, and to explain their mutual connections. For the present generation this work is being done with all-sufficient thoroughness and accuracy.[[118]] The historian of culture, on the other hand, for whom the arts form one important branch of intellectual activity, may dispense with these detailed inquiries, and may endeavour to seize the more general outlines of the subject. He need not weigh in balances the claims of rival cities to priority, nor hamper his review of national progress by discussing the special merits of the several schools. Still there are certain broad facts about the distribution of artistic gifts in Italy which it is necessary to bear in mind. However much we may desire to treat of painting as a phase of national and not of merely local life, the fundamental difficulty of Italian history, its complexity and variety, owing to the subdivisions of the nation into divers states, must here as elsewhere be acknowledged. To deny that each of the Italian centres had its own strong personality in art—that painting, as practised in Genoa or Naples, differed from the painting of Ferrara or Urbino—would be to contradict a law that has been over and over again insisted upon already in these volumes.
The broad outlines of the subject can be briefly stated. Surveying the map of Italy, we find that we may eliminate from our consideration the north-western and the southern provinces. Not from Piedmont nor from Liguria, not from Rome nor from the extensive kingdom of Naples, does Italian painting take its origin, or at any period derive important contributions.[[119]] Lombardy, with the exception of Venice, is comparatively barren of originative elements.[[120]] To Tuscany, to Umbria, and to Venice, roughly speaking, are due the really creative forces of Italian painting; and these three districts were marked by strong peculiarities. In art, as in politics, Florence and Venice exhibit distinct types of character.[[121]] The Florentines developed fresco, and devoted their genius to the expression of thought by scientific design. The Venetians perfected oil-painting, and set forth the glory of the world as it appeals to the imagination and the senses. The art of Florence may seem to some judges to savour over-much of intellectual dryness; the art of Venice, in the apprehension of another class of critics, offers something over-much of material richness. More allied to the Tuscan than to the Venetian spirit, the Umbrian masters produced a style of genuine originality. The cities of the Central Apennines owed their specific quality of religious fervour to the influences emanating from Assisi, the head-quarters of the cultus of S. Francis. This pietism, nowhere else so paramount, except for a short period in Siena, constitutes the individuality of Umbria.
With regard to the rest of Italy, the old custom of speaking about schools and places, instead of signalising great masters, has led to misconception, by making it appear that local circumstances were more important than the facts justify. We do not find elsewhere what we find in Tuscany, in Umbria, and in Venice—a definite quality, native to the district, shared through many generations by all its painters, and culminating in a few men of commanding genius. When, for instance, we speak of the School of Milan, what we mean is the continuation through Lionardo da Vinci and his pupils of the Florentine tradition, as modified by him and introduced into the Lombard capital. That a special style was developed by Luini, Ferrari, and other artists of the Milanese duchy, so that their manner differs essentially from that of Parma and Cremona, does not invalidate the importance of this fact about its origin. The name of Roman School, again, has been given to Raphael and Michael Angelo together with their pupils. The truth is that Rome, for one brief period, during the pontificates of Julius and Leo, was the focus of Italian intellect. Allured by the patronage of the Papal Curia, not only artists, but scholars and men of letters, flocked from all the cities of Italy to Rome, where they found a nobler sphere for the exercise of their faculties than elsewhere. But Rome, while she lent her imperial quality of grandeur to the genius of her aliens, was in no sense originative. Rome produced no first-rate master from her own children, if we except Giulio Romano. The title of originality is due rather to Padua, the birthplace of Mantegna, or to Parma, the city of Correggio, whose works display independence of either Florentine or Venetian traditions. Yet these great masters were isolated, neither expressing in any definite form the character of their districts, nor founding a succession of local artists. Their influence was incontestably great, but widely diffused. Bologna and Ferrara, Brescia and Bergamo, Cremona and Verona, have excellent painters; and it is not difficult to show that in each of these cities art assumed specific characters. Yet the interest of the schools in these towns is due mainly to the varied influences brought to bear upon them from Venice, Umbria, and Milan. In other words they are affiliated, each according to its geographical position, to the chief originative centres.
What I have advanced in the foregoing paragraphs is not meant for a polemic against the time-honoured division of Italian painters into local schools, but for a justification of my own proposed method of treatment. Having undertaken to deal with painting as the paramount art-product of the Renaissance, it will be my object to point out the leading characteristics of æsthetic culture in Italy, rather than to dwell upon its specific differences. The Venetian painters I intend to reserve for a separate chapter, devoting this and the two next to the general history of the art as developed in Tuscany and propagated by Tuscan influences.[[122]] In pursuing this plan I shall endeavour to show how the successive stages in the evolution of Italian painting corresponded to similar stages in the history of the Renaissance. Beginning as the handmaid of the Church, and stimulated by the enthusiasm of the two great popular monastic orders, painting was at first devoted to embodying the thoughts of mediæval Christianity. In proportion as the painters fortified themselves by study of the natural world, their art became more secular. Mysticism gave way to realism. It was felt that much beside religious sentiment was worthy of expression. At the same time, about the year 1440, this process of secularisation was hastened by the influences of the classical revival, renewing an interest in the past life of humanity, and stirring a zeal for science. The painters, on the one hand, now aimed at accurate delineation of actual things: good perspective, correct drawing, sound portraiture, occupied their attention, to the exclusion of more purely spiritual motives. On the other hand they conceived an admiration for the fragments of the newly discovered antiques, and felt the plastic beauty of Hellenic legends. It is futile to attempt, as M. Rio has done, to prove that this abandonment of the religious sphere of earlier art was for painting a plain decline from good to bad, or to make the more or less of spiritual feeling in a painter's style the test of his degree of excellence; nor can we by any sophistries be brought to believe that the Popes of the fifteenth century were pastoral protectors of solely Christian arts. The truth is, that in the Church, in politics, and in society, the fifteenth century witnessed a sensible decrease of religious fervour, and a very considerable corruption of morality. Painting felt this change; and the secularisation, which was inevitable, passed onward into paganism. Yet the art itself cannot be said to have suffered, when on the threshold of the sixteenth century stand the greatest painters whom the world has known—neither Catholics nor Heathens, but, in their strength of full accomplished art and science, human. After Italy, in the course of that century, had been finally enslaved, then, and not till then, painting suffered from the general depression of the national genius. The great luminaries were extinguished one by one, till none were left but Michael Angelo in Rome, and Tintoret in Venice. The subsequent history of Italian painting is occupied with its revival under the influences of the counter-Reformation, when a new religious sentiment, emasculated and ecstatic, was expressed in company with crude naturalism and cruel sensualism by Bolognese and Neapolitan painters.
I need scarcely repeat the tale of Cimabue's picture, visited by Charles of Anjou, and borne in triumph through the streets with trumpeters, beneath a shower of garlands, to S. Maria Novella.[[123]] Yet this was the birthday festival of nothing less than what the world now values as Italian painting. In this public act of joy the people of Florence recognised and paid enthusiastic honour to the art arisen among them from the dead. If we rightly consider the matter, it is not a little wonderful that a whole community should thus have hailed the presence in their midst of a new spirit of power and beauty. It proves the widespread sensibility of the Florentines to things of beauty, and shows the sympathy which, emanating from the people, was destined to inspire and brace the artist for his work.[[124]]
In a dark transept of S. Maria Novella, raised by steps above the level of the church, still hangs this famous "Madonna" of the Rucellai—not far, perhaps, from the spot where Boccaccio's youths and maidens met that Tuesday morning in the year of the great plague; nor far, again, from where the solitary woman, beautiful beyond belief, conversed with Machiavelli on the morning of the first of May in 1527.[[125]] We who can call to mind the scenes that picture has looked down upon—we who have studied the rise and decadence of painting throughout Italy from this beginning even to the last work of the latest Bolognese—may do well to visit it with reverence, and to ponder on the race of mighty masters whose lineage here takes its origin.
Cimabue did not free his style from what are called Byzantine or Romanesque mannerisms. To unpractised eyes his saints and angels, with their stiff draperies and angular attitudes, though they exhibit stateliness and majesty, belong to the same tribe as the grim mosaics and gaunt frescoes of his predecessors. It is only after careful comparison that we discover, in this picture of the Rucellai for example, a distinctly fresh endeavour to express emotion and to depict life. The outstretched arms of the infant Christ have been copied from nature, not merely borrowed from tradition. The six kneeling angels display variety of attitude suited to several shades of devout affection and adoring service. The head of the Madonna, heavy as it is and conventional in type, still strives to represent maternal affection mingled with an almost melancholy reverence. Prolonging our study, we are led to ask whether the painter might not have painted more freely had he chosen—whether, in fact, he was not bound down to the antique mode of presentation consecrated by devout tradition. This question occurs with even greater force before the wall-paintings ascribed to Cimabue in the church of S. Francis at Assisi.