The Arts in the Middle Ages and at the Period of the Renaissance

by P. L. Jacob

Fresco has long been considered the most ancient style of painting. Vasari, who wrote in the middle of the sixteenth century, says in apt terms that “the ancients generally practised painting in fresco, and the first painters of the modern schools have only followed the antique methods;” and, in our own day, Millin, in his “Dictionnaire des Beaux-Arts,” asserts that the great paintings in the “Pœcile” of Athens and the “Lesche” of Delphi, by Panænus and Polygnotus, spoken of by Pausanias, were executed by this process; the same author also ranks among frescoes the numerous paintings left by the Egyptians in their temples and catacombs. “It was,” he remarks, “what the Romans called in udo pariete pingere (to paint on a damp wall); they say in cretula pingere (to paint on chalk) to designate water-colour painting on a dry ground.”

Some persons have considered the paintings found at Herculaneum and Pompeii to be frescoes; nevertheless Winckelmann, who is an authority in these matters, said, a hundred years ago, in speaking of those works, “It is to be remarked that the greater part of these pictures were not painted on damp lime, but upon a dry ground, which is rendered very evident by several of the figures having scaled off in such a way as to show distinctly the ground upon which they rest.”

The whole mistake has arisen from taking the expression “in udo pariete,” found in Pliny, in too literal a sense; the error, which might at all events have been dissipated by an attentive examination of the examples themselves, would not have lasted long if the passage from Pliny had been compared with a statement of Vitruvius, which informs us that they applied to fresh walls uniform tints of black, blue, yellow, or red, which were destined to form the grounds of paintings, or even allowed them to remain plain, like our present coloured walls. The employment of this process may also be easily recognised in the paintings of Pompeii, where this uniform colouring has sometimes penetrated nearly an inch into the stucco of the wall. On this ground, when it was perfectly dry, ornamental subjects were painted either in distemper or encaustic.

Thus, therefore, it is shown that the process of painting in fresco was unknown to the ancients, and was invented by artists of succeeding times; but it would be difficult to assign any precise date to this invention; for however far we go back, we do not find any authors who fix the epoch at which the new method was for the first time followed. We are, therefore, compelled to notice the age of some particular example which shows that the discovery had then taken place, without being able to determine the exact date of its commencement.

Painting, which with the Greeks attained its greatest height in the reign of Alexander, fell, says M. Breton, “with the power of Greece. In losing its liberty, the country of the Fine Arts lost, too, the perception of the beautiful.” At Rome, painting never reached the same degree of perfection as it did in Greece; for a long time it was only practised by men of the lowest rank and by slaves. A few patricians, such as Amulius, Fabius Pictor (painter), and Cornelius Pinus, were, at the best, able to bring about only some slight revival. After the twelve Cæsars, painting followed the movement of decadence which carried away with it all the arts; like them, it received its death-blow in the fourth century, on the day when Constantine, quitting Rome in order to establish the seat of empire at Byzantium, took with him into his new capital not only the best artists, but also a prodigious number of their productions, and of those of the artists who preceded them. Several other causes may also be mentioned as having led to the decline of art, or to the destruction of examples which would now bear witness to its power in remote ages. In the first place, there was the birth of Christian Art, which rose on the ruins of Paganism; then, the invasion of barbarians which took place in the fifth century; lastly, in the eighth and ninth centuries, the fury of the Iconoclasts, or Image-breakers, a sect at the head of which figured several emperors of the East, from Leo the Isaurian, who reigned in 717, down to Michael the Stammerer and Theophilus, who respectively ascended the imperial throne in 820 and 829.

Even among the ignorant masses, to whom we owe the loss of so many chefs-d’œuvre, were some individuals who formed honourable exceptions, not only by opposing the devastations, but also by manifesting a laudable conservative instinct. Cassiodorus tells us that Theodoric, king of the Goths, re-established the office of centurio nitentium rerum (guardian of beautiful objects), instituted by the emperor Constantius; and we know that the Lombard kings who succeeded this prince and reigned in Italy for 218 years, although less zealous in the culture of the arts, did not fail to honour and protect them. In Paul the Deacon[33] we read that, in the sixth century, queen Teudelinde, wife of Autharis and afterwards of Agilulphus, caused the valorous deeds of the first Lombard kings to be painted on the basilica that she had consecrated at Monza under the name of St. John. Other paintings of the same epoch may still be seen at Pavia. The Church of St. Nazaire at Verona possesses in its crypt paintings spoken of by Maffei, which have been engraved by Ciampini and Frisi: these must date back to the sixth and seventh centuries. Lastly, they have recently found in the subterranean chapel of the basilica of St. Clement, in Rome, some admirable mural paintings, which archæologists refer to the same epoch.

The Eastern artists, driven away by the persecutions of the Iconoclasts, sought an asylum in Italy, where the Latin Church, obedient to the prescriptions of the Council of Nice, seemed determined to multiply sacred images as much as possible. The arrival of the Grecian artists in the West was also singularly promoted by the commercial relations which from that time were established between all points of the Mediterranean shore and the maritime or mercantile towns of Italy—Pisa, Genoa, and Venice. Thus was brought about the movement which, although taking place on Italian soil, drew from an entirely Eastern source the inspiration of the revival of the Fine Arts; thus was continued the so-called Byzantine school, destined to be the foundation of all modern art.

In 817 some Greek artists, by order of Pope Pascal I., executed under the portico of the Church of St. Cecilia in Rome a series of frescoes, the subjects of which were taken from the life of the saint. To the same school we are indebted for the sitting figures of Christ and His mother ([Fig. 239]), in the old Church of Santa-Maria Trans-Tiberia, in Rome; the large Madonna painted on the walls of Santa-Maria della Scala, Milan, which, at the time when this church was destroyed and replaced by the theatre of La Scala, was taken away and carried to the Church of Santa-Fidelia, where it still remains; a series of portraits of the Popes after St. Leo, a collection of which a large portion perished in the fire of St. Paul-extra-Muros, Rome ([Fig. 240]); and lastly, the paintings in the vaults of the Cathedral of Aquila.

Fig. 239.—Christ and His Mother. Fresco-Painting of the Ninth Century, in the Apse of Santa-Maria Trans-Tiberia, Rome.