From the hand of the same saintly painter are the Adoring Angel (no No.), which until 1909 was in the Victor Gay collection, the Martyrdom of St. Cosmo and St. Damian (No. 1293), part of the predella of a dismembered altarpiece, and the large fresco painting of the Crucifixion (No. 1294) which hangs on the Escalier Daru. The latter was purchased, together with Domenico Ghirlandaio’s Bottle-nosed Man (No. 1322, [Plate III.]), in 1879 for £1960. The Beheading of St. John the Baptist (No. 1291) and the Resurrection (No. 1294a) are unauthentic.
In Benozzo Gozzoli (1420–1498) we have an assistant and follower of Fra Angelico. He worked at different towns in Italy, notably at Montefalco, Orvieto, Florence, San Gimignano, Rome, and Pisa, where he died. Although his earlier work reminds us of Fra Angelico, than whom he is much more dramatic and much less spiritual, in later life he depicts the costumes and life of his time in a more realistic and objective manner. His Triumph of St. Thomas Aquinas (No. 1319), which originally hung in the Cathedral at Pisa, deals with a subject often met with in the art of the period. The great Dominican teacher, whom the heathen philosophers, Aristotle on the left, and Plato on the right, recognise as their master in philosophy, is enthroned, his books of theological learning on his knees. At his feet, subdued, is Guillaume de St. Amour, the author of a book entitled De Periculis Novissimorum Temporum, in which he exposed the various abuses then prevalent among the mendicants. The dramatic action seen in the lower part of the panel embraces Pope Alexander iv. presiding over the religious council of Agnani, and the envoys of St. Louis (Louis ix. of France) who took steps to end the religious conflicts of 1256. A large altarpiece (No. 1320) representing the Madonna and Child Enthroned, St. Cosmo, St. Damian, St. Jerome, St. John the Baptist, St. Francis d’Assisi, and St. Lawrence in the central panel is also assigned to Benozzo. The frame also contains seven predella pictures, and at either end is the coat of arms of the Medici family.
The great French Museum, which is weaker than the National Gallery, the Berlin Gallery, and certain other national collections in Italian primitives, affords us no example of the art of Andrea del Castagno (fl. 1410–1457), whose compositions are characterised by harsh colour, hard lines, and crude forms. Nor do we find here any painting by that very rare artist, Domenico Veneziano (1400?–1461), who, it has been said, was the first Tuscan artist to work in an oil medium.
PAOLO UCCELLO
Prominent among the masters who were influenced by Donatello, the sculptor, and Lorenzo Ghiberti, the first metal-worker in elegant forms, is Paolo di Dono, generally known as Uccello. His profound study and ultimate discovery of the laws of linear perspective was enhanced by the inquiries into the laws of aerial perspective that Fra Angelico studied so deeply. Paolo Uccello (1397–1475) was a pupil and assistant of Lorenzo Ghiberti, who made the bronze doors for the East Side of the Baptistery at Florence. He gave himself up to the scientific study of perspective, the principles of which he was one of the first to apply to painting, thus rendering incalculable services to art. In his Battlepiece (No. 1273) is seen a mounted soldier in armour with his sword drawn; on the left are horsemen about to charge with couchant lances, while on the right cavalry-men are drawn up awaiting orders, their lances in rest. The correctness of the perspective and the justice of the foreshortenings and the movements of the foot-men in the intervals of the cavalry mark an epoch in art. This is the third and right-hand panel of the series of three battle-pictures which Uccello painted for the Casa Medici (now the Riccardi Palace) in Florence for Cosimo de’ Medici about the year 1457, and not, as the official Catalogue asserts, for the Bartolini family. The best preserved of these three large panel pictures illustrating the Rout of San Romano in 1432 is that in the National Gallery (No. 583), while the second or centre panel of the series is now in the Uffizi (No. 52). The Louvre panel is in a deplorable condition, caused by long neglect.
Uccello’s Portraits of Giotto, Paolo Uccello, Antonio Manetti, and Filippo Brunelleschi (No. 1272), whose names are in this order on the panel, is a work of considerable importance, as marking an early stage in the development of portraiture. This picture, which is referred to at some length by Vasari, constitutes a historical document. The Italian chronicler tells us that Uccello “was a person of eccentric character and peculiar habits, but he was a great lover of ability in those of his own art, and, to the end that their memory should remain to posterity, he drew with his own hand on an oblong picture the portraits of five distinguished men, which he kept in his house as a memorial of them. The first of these portraits was that of the painter Giotto, as one who had given light and new life to the art; the second was Filippo di Ser Brunellesco, for architecture; the third was Donatello, for sculpture; the fourth was himself, for perspective and animals; the fifth was his friend Giovanni (sic) Manetti, for mathematics. With this philosopher Paolo conferred very frequently, and held continual discourse with him concerning the problems of Euclid.” Manetti’s real Christian name, Antonio, is correctly inscribed on the panel, but is inaccurately given as Giovanni by Vasari and on the official label.
The St. John the Baptist as a Child (No. 1274), which hangs in the Long Gallery, is labelled as a picture of the Florentine school, and catalogued as being by Uccello. It is perhaps by Piero di Cosimo.
We enter on the first period of the coming Renaissance with Fra Filippo Lippi (1406–1469), who was trained in the best school of Florentine painting. He was a pupil of Lorenzo Monaco, came under the influence of Fra Angelico, and was affected by the magic spell of Masaccio, whom he must have seen at work in the Brancacci Chapel. In the latter half of the Quattrocento the cult of love and beauty was rapidly dethroning the more austere ideals of an earlier age. Filippo Lippi’s stormy and romantic career passes into a new phase with his residence at Prato in 1452. Four years later he was appointed Chaplain to the nuns of S. Margherita in that town. The year before his arrival in Prato, Lucrezia and Spinetta, the orphan daughters (aged eighteen and seventeen respectively) of Francesco Buti, had, apparently much against their will, been placed in the Convent, the abbess of which commissioned the Frate to paint a picture of the Madonna della Cintola. Lucrezia posed to the painter-chaplain for the figure of the Madonna in that picture. On May 1, 1456, on the occasion of the exhibition of the Holy Girdle of the Virgin, a precious relic still preserved at Prato, the painter bore off Lucrezia out of the safe keeping of the convent. A short summary of these well-known facts is suggested by the view which is put forward in the official Catalogue of the Louvre, to the effect that the Madonna della Cintola is to be identified with the Nativity (No. 1343) in this Gallery. The weight of evidence is against this theory; in fact, this large panel picture has little claim to be regarded as the work of Fra Filippo. One critic has given it as his opinion that the Nativity was begun by Fra Filippo and completed by Fra Diamante, who succeeded him as Chaplain at Prato. Others have attributed the picture to Pesellino, Baldovinetti, and Stefano da Zevio respectively. It seems to show the influence of Andrea del Castagno. The official Catalogue does not indicate the provenance of the picture, although it implies that it came from the Convent at Prato at the time when it was brought to Paris by Napoleon. There can be little doubt that the Madonna della Cintola is the painting thus named which still hangs in the place of honour in the Municipal Gallery at Prato.
The Louvre does, however, possess in the Madonna and Child with Angels and Two Abbots (No. 1344, [Plate II.]) one of the best of the Frate’s creations, although the colouring has suffered considerably. It is an early work, and was painted about 1437 for the Barbadori Chapel in Santo Spirito. It contains beauty of line, freshness of colour, and much variety in the composition. The cast of the draperies is ample and the motives are novel and bold, the Renaissance background throwing into prominent relief the soulful and ideal figure of the Madonna. The predella panels of this dismembered altarpiece, for which Fra Filippo received forty gold florins, are now in the Accademia at Florence. They depict (a) St. Frediano deviating the Course of the River Serchio; (b) The Virgin receiving the Announcement of her Coming Decease; and (c) St. Augustine in his Study. The Madonna and Child (No. 1345) is only a school picture.
