After visiting Padua, Siena, Perugia, Assisi, however, the pupil became a keen admirer of this early art, independently of any influence other than the inherent beauty, dignity, and purity of the feeling in the works themselves.[49] Moreover, the natural sympathy which Leighton felt for the art of Greece, discovered in this early Italian work records of her influence, and that, in a very striking manner, it was allied to that of the great ancients. In his Academy address of 1887 we find this alluded to in the following passage:—
"The production, both in sculpture and painting, of the middle period of the thirteenth century has a character of transition. In painting, the works, for instance, of Cimabue and of Duccio are still impregnated with the Byzantine spirit, and occasionally reveal startling reminiscences of classic dignity and power, to which justice is not, I think, sufficiently rendered. In sculpture, the handiwork of Nicolo Pisano is full of the amplitude, the rhythm, and virility of classic Art. I see in it, indeed, the tokens of a new life in Art, but little sign of a new artistic form—it is not a dawn; it is an after-glow, strange, belated, and solemn. In the Art of Giotto and the Giottosques, the transformation is fulfilled. It is an art lit up with the spirit of St. Francis, warm with Christian love, pure with Christian purity, simple with Christian humility; it is the fit language of a pious race endowed with an exquisite instinct of the expressiveness of form, as form, but untrained as yet in the knowledge of the concrete facts of the outer world; an art fresh with the dew and tenderness of youth, and yet showing, together with this virginal quality of young life, a simple forcefulness prophetic of the power of its riper day. Within the outline of these general characteristics individuality found sufficient scope."
Even when this transformation is fulfilled in the frescoes of Giotto, any intelligent study of his art at Padua and Assisi, while keeping in mind the manner in which Pheidias felt and treated the human form in his sculpture, would prove to the student how distinctly visible is the link between the ancient and this mediæval art; though the fact of the latter being fired with an ecstasy of spiritual emotion of which the Greek had no experience, may disguise the link where feeling in art is of more interest than form. There is the same detachment of one form from another, each being given its full expression and intention—which induces a feeling of simplicity and serenity in the greatest work. The form of the head is not smudged into the throat, nor the throat into the chest, nor the chest into the arms. Even in the smallest Greek coin or intaglio of the best period this separate individuality of form in each part of the human frame is accentuated, and with it a sense of size and breadth. The same fundamental principles also, adhered to by the great Greek workmen in their treatment of drapery, is to be traced in the work of Giotto.
"IDYLL." 1881[ToList]
PORTRAIT OF MISS MABEL MILLS (THE HON. MRS. GRENFELL). 1877[ToList]
But the great Greeks did not invent the beauty they immortalised, any more than did Leighton and Watts; the Pheidian school intuitively chose the noblest form it found in nature.[50] The notable gift with which nature endowed the artists of the Periclean epoch consisted of eyes to perceive, and taste to prefer, the form which, intrinsically and most convincingly, inspires admiration in those imbued with the finest sense of beauty—not a gift to invent something new and different from nature. In like manner the gift nature bestowed on Leighton and Watts was the same, a perception and a preference for noble form; and in this choice they had been educated by legacies from Pheidias and his school, but only so far as these legacies induced them to seek and perceive in nature herself the elements of such nobility. In painting the magnificent head and shoulders entitled "Atalanta,"[51] or the reclining figures in "Idyll,"[52] Leighton copied as directly from nature as when he painted the portrait of "Miss Mabel Mills,"[53] where a similar beauty of form in the throat existed as in Miss Jones, who sat for "Atalanta" and "Idyll." When Watts painted his superb "Lady with the Mirror," one of his really great achievements, it was the model before him whose beauty he was recording, though his own sense in recognising it had been further inspired by his study of Pheidias. We need not go out of England to find types which are as completely noble as are those in the most inspiring art ever created, but the sense as a rule is wanting in English artists to select and to prefer such nobility.