Vision and Design

by Roger Fry

And now, having found our Cimabue in the master of the Crucifixion, what must our verdict be on his character as an artist? Frankly we must admit that he is not to be thought of in the same category with the master of the Esau fresco, much less with Duccio or Giotto.[25] There is, however, in his work that spark of vitality which the Italians rightly prized above Byzantine accomplishment. He gave to his historical compositions a rude dramatic vigour, and to his Madonnas and Angels a suggestion of sentimental charm which borders on affectation; he was, in fact, a sentimental realist whose relation to the Byzantine masters must have been something like that of Caravaggio to the academic school of the Caracci.

We come next to the master of the Deception of Isaac, and the closely allied, if not identical, painter who did the Four Doctors of the vault. We have already noticed the likeness of these works to the legend of S. Francis, which we may take provisionally to be Giotto’s; but, in spite of the similarity of technique, they are inspired by a very diverse sentiment. They are not dramatic and intense as Giotto’s; they show a more conscious aspiration after style; the artist will not allow the requirements of formal beauty to be disturbed by the desire for expressive and life-like gestures. Where, then, could an artist of this period acquire such a sense of pure classic beauty in painting? In sculpture it might be possible to find classic models throughout Italy as Niccolo did at Pisa, but Rome was the only place which could fulfil the requirements for a painter. There must at this time have been many more remains of classical painting among the ruins of the Palatine than are now to be seen, and it is a natural conclusion that the artist who painted the figure of Rachel was directly inspired by them. Nor is there anything difficult in the assumption that this unknown precursor of Giotto was a Roman artist, for the Roman school of painting was by far the most precocious of any in Italy. At Subiaco there are frescoes, some of which must date from the lifetime of S. Francis, which already, as in the portrait of S. Francis himself, show a certain freedom from Byzantine formalism. But it is in the works of the Cosmati, Jacopo Torriti, Rusutti, and Cavallini in the latter half of the thirteenth century that we see how vigorous and progressive an art was springing up in Rome.[26] Had not the removal of the Popes to Avignon in the fourteenth century left the city a prey to internal discord, we can hardly doubt that the Roman would have been one of the greatest and earliest developed schools of Italian painting. As it is, we find in the mosaics under the apse of Sta. Maria in Trastevere, executed about the year 1290, compositions in every way comparable to Giotto’s frescoes. These mosaics, too, have architectural accessories which are very similar to the architecture of the “Doctors of the Church” at Assisi. The architecture based on a study of classic forms is of the kind always associated with the Cosmati family. It will be seen that it is quite distinct from the architecture of Cimabue’s and Duccio’s Madonnas, but that it becomes the normal treatment in Giotto’s frescoes.

There is, then, a curiously close analogy between the origins of neo-Christian painting and neo-Christian sculpture in Italy; just as Giovanni Pisano’s work was preceded by the purely classic revival which culminated in Niccolo’s Baptistery pulpit, so in painting Giotto’s work emerges from a similar classic revival based on the study of Roman wall-paintings. The perfect similarity between Niccolo Pisano’s sentiment and that of the master of the Esau fresco may be realised by comparing the action of Rachel’s hand in the fresco with that of the Virgin in the Annunciation of the Baptistery pulpit. In both we have the same autarchic conception of character conveyed by the same measured ease of gesture, which contrasts vividly with the more expansive ideals of neo-Christian art, of which Giotto appears from the first as the most perfect representative.

In examining the series of frescoes describing the life of S. Francis we find varieties in the proportions of the figures and in the types of features which suggest the co-operation of more than one artist, but the spirit that inspires the compositions throughout is one. And this afflatus which suddenly quickens so much that was either tentative or narrowly accomplished into a new fulness of life, a new richness of expression, is, we may feel certain, due to the genius of Giotto.

If we look at one of these frescoes, such, for example, as the Presepio at Greccio, and at the same time endeavour to transport ourselves into the position of a contemporary spectator, what will strike us most immediately and make the most startling general impression is its actuality. Here at last, after so many centuries of copying the traditional forms handed down from a moribund Pagan art—centuries during which these abstractions had become entirely divorced from the life of the time—here at last was an artist who gave a scene as it must have happened, with every circumstance evidently and literally rendered. The scene of the institution of the Presepio takes place in a little chapel divided from the body of the church by a marble wall. The pulpit and crucifix are therefore seen from behind, the latter leaning forward into the church and showing from the chapel only the wooden battens and fastenings of the back. The singing-desk in the centre is drawn with every detail of screws and adjustments, while the costume of the bystanders is merely the ordinary fashionable dress of the day. The research for actuality could not be carried farther than this. When some years ago a French painter painted the scene of Christ at the house of the Pharisee with the figures in evening dress it aroused the most vehement protests, and produced for a time a shock of bewilderment and surprise. This is not to suggest any real analogy between the works of the two artists, but merely that the innovation made by Giotto must have been in every way as surprising to his contemporaries. Nor was Giotto’s, like M. Béraud’s, a succès de scandale; on the contrary, it was immediately recognised as satisfying a want which had been felt ever since the legend of S. Francis, the setting of which belonged to their own time and country, had been incorporated by the Italians in their mythology. The earliest artists had tried to treat the subject according to the formulas of Byzantine biblical scenes, but with such unsatisfactory results as may be seen in the altar-piece of the Bardi Chapel of Sta. Croce at Florence. In Giotto’s frescoes at Assisi it acquired for the first time a treatment in which the desire for actuality was fully recognised. But actuality alone would not have satisfied Giotto’s patrons; it was necessary that the events should be presented as scenes of everyday life, but it was also necessary that they should possess that quality of universal and eternal significance which distinguishes a myth from a mere historical event. It was even more necessary that they should be heroic than that they should be actual. And it was in his power to satisfy such apparently self-contradictory conditions that Giotto’s unique genius manifested itself. It was this that made him the greatest story-teller in line, the supreme epic-painter of the world. The reconciliation of these two aims, actuality and universality, is indeed the severest strain on the power of expression. To what a temperature must the imagination be raised before it can fuse in its crucible those refractory squalid trivialities unconsecrated by time and untinged by romance with which the artist must deal if he is to be at once “topical” and heroic, to be at one and the same time in “Ercles’ vein” and Mrs. Gamp’s. Even in literature it is a rare feat. Homer could accomplish it, and Dante, but most poets must find a way round. In Dante the power is constantly felt. He could not only introduce the politics and personalities of his own time, but he could use such similes as that of old tailors peering for their needles’ eyes, a half-burnt piece of paper, dogs nozzling for fleas, and still more unsavoury trivialities, without for a moment lowering the high key in which his comedy was pitched. The poet deals, however, with the vague and blurred mental images which words call up, but the painter must actually present the semblance of the thing in all its drab familiarity. And yet Giotto succeeded. He could make the local and particular stand for a universal idea.

But, without detracting in any way from what was due to Giotto’s superlative genius, it may be admitted that something was given by the propitious moment of his advent. For the optics of the imagination are variable: in an age like the present, men and events grow larger as they recede into the mist of the past; it is rarely that we think of a man as truly great till he has for long received the consecration of death. But there must be periods when men have a surer confidence in their own judgments—periods of such creative activity that men can dare to measure the reputations of their contemporaries, which are of their own creation, against the reputations of antiquity—and in such periods the magnifying, mythopoetical effect, which for us comes only with time, takes place at once, and swells their contemporaries to heroic proportions. It was thus that Dante saw those of his own time—could even see himself—in the proportions they must always bear. The fact that S. Francis was canonised two years after death, and within twenty years was commemorated by the grandest monument in Italy, is a striking proof of that superb self-confidence.

We will return to the frescoes: the evidence for their being in the main by Giotto himself rests not only on the general consensus of tradition, but upon the technical characteristics and, most of all, upon the imaginative conception of the subjects. None the less, in so big a work it is probable that assistants were employed to carry out Giotto’s designs, and this will account for many slight discrepancies of style. Certain frescoes, however—notably the last three of the series—show such marked differences that we must suppose that one of these assistants rose to the level of an original creative artist.

In the fresco of S. Francis kneeling before the Pope, we have already noticed Giotto’s close connection with the artists of the Roman school. Their influence is not confined to the figures and drapery; the architecture—in which it may be noted, by the way, that Giotto has already arrived instinctively at the main ideas of linear perspective—with its minute geometrical inlays, its brackets and mouldings, derived from classic forms, is entirely in the manner of the Cosmati. But the composition illustrates, none the less, the differences which separate him from the master of the Esau fresco. Giotto is at this stage of his career not only less accomplished, but he has nothing of that painter’s elegant classical grace. He has, instead, the greatest and rarest gift of dramatic expressiveness. For though the poses, especially of the bishop seated on the Pope’s left, lack grace, and the faces show but little research for positive beauty or regularity of feature, the actual scene, the dramatic situation, is given in an entirely new and surprising way. Of what overwhelming importance for the history of the world this situation was, perhaps Giotto himself could scarcely realise. For this probably represents, not the approbation of the order of minor brethren by Honorius III., which was a foregone conclusion, but the permission to preach given by Innocent III., a far more critical moment in the history of the movement. For Innocent III., in whom the Papacy reached the zenith of its power, had already begun the iniquitous Albigensian crusade, and was likely to be suspicious of any unofficial religious teaching. It cannot have been with unmixed pleasure that he saw before him this poverty-stricken group of Francis and his eleven followers, whose appearance declared in the plainest terms their belief in that primitive communistic Christianity which, in the case of Petrus Waldus, had been branded by excommunication. In fact, the man who now asked for the Papal blessing on his mission was in most respects a Waldensian. Francis (the name Francesco is itself significant) was probably by birth, certainly by predilection[27] and temperament, half a Frenchman; his mother came from Provence, and his father had business connections at Lyons; so that it is not impossible that Francis was influenced by what he knew, through them, of the Waldensian movement. In any case, his teaching was nearly identical with that of Petrus Waldus; both taught religious individualism and, by precept at all events, communism. It was, therefore, not unnatural that Innocent should not respond at once to S. Francis’ application. According to one legend, the Pope’s first advice to him was to consort with swine, as befitted one of his miserable appearance. But, whatever his spontaneous impulses may have been, he had the good sense to accept the one man through whom the Church could again become popular and democratic.

Of all that this acceptance involved, no one who lived before the Reformation could understand the full significance, but Giotto has here expressed something of the dramatic contrasts involved in this meeting of the greatest of saints and the most dominating of popes—something of the importance of the moment when the great heretic was recognised by the Church.

In the fresco of S. Francis before the Sultan we have a means of comparing Giotto at this period with the later Giotto of the Bardi Chapel, in Florence where the same scene is treated with more intimate psychological imagination; but here already the story is told with a vividness and simplicity which none but Giotto could command. The weak and sinuous curves of the discomfited sages, the ponderous and massive contour of the indignant Sultan, show that Giotto’s command of the direct symbolism of line is at least as great as Duccio’s in the Three Maries, while his sense of the roundness and solid relief of the form is, as Mr. Berenson[28] has ably pointed out, far greater. We find in the Sultan, indeed, the type for which Giotto showed a constant predilection—a well-formed, massive body, with high rounded shoulders and short neck, but with small and shapely hands. As is natural in the work of an artist who set himself so definitely to externalise the tension of a critical moment, his hands are always eloquent; it is impossible to find in his work a case where the gestures of the hands are not explicit indications of a particular emotion. The architecture in this fresco is a remarkable evidence of the classical tendencies which he inherited from the Cosmati school. The Sultan’s throne has, it is true, a quasi-Gothic gable, but the coffered soffit, and the whole of the canopy opposite to it, with its winged genii, pilasters, and garlands are derived from classic sources.