[THE EARLY FLORENTINE SCHOOL]
"The early efforts of Cimabue and Giotto are the burning messages of prophecy, delivered by the stammering lips of infants"
(Ruskin: Modern Painters, vol. i. pt. i. sec. i. ch. ii. § 7).
Give these, I exhort you, their guerdon and glory
For daring so much, before they well did it.
The first of the new, in our race's story,
Beats the last of the old; 'tis no idle quiddit.
Browning: Old Pictures in Florence.
On entering the Gallery from Trafalgar Square, and ascending the main staircase, the visitor reaches the North Vestibule. What, he may be inclined to ask, is there worth looking at in the quaint and gaunt pictures around him here? The answer is a very simple one. This vestibule is the nursery of Italian art. Here is the first stammering of infant painting. Accustomed as we are at the present day to so much technical skill even in the commonest works of art, we may be inclined to think that the art of painting—the art of giving the resemblances of things by means of colour laid on to wood or canvas—is an easy one, of which men have everywhere and at all times possessed the mastery. But this of course is not the case. The skill of to-day is the acquired result of long centuries of gradual improvement; and the pictures in this vestibule bear the same relation to the pictures of our own time as the stone huts of our forefathers to the Gallery in which we stand. The poorness of the pictures here is the measure of the richness of others. To feel the full greatness of Raphael's Madonna (1171), one should first pause awhile before the earliest Italian picture here (564), the gaunt and forbidding Madonna by
Margaritone of Arezzo,
With the grave-clothes garb and swaddling barret
(Why purse up mouth and beak in a pet so,
You bald old saturnine poll-clawed parrot?) (R. Browning).
But even in the earliest efforts of infancy, there is a certain amount of inherited gift. First of all, therefore, one should look at a specimen of such art as Italians had before them when they first began to paint for themselves. With the fall of the Roman Empire and the invasion of the Goths, the centre of civilisation shifted to the capital of the Eastern Church, Byzantium (Constantinople). The characteristics of Byzantine art may be seen in a Greek picture (594). The history of early Italian art is the history of the effort to escape from the swaddling clothes of this rigid Byzantine School. The effort was of two kinds: first the painters had to see nature truly, instead of contenting themselves with fixed symbols—art had to become "natural," instead of "conventional." Secondly, having learned to see truly, they had to learn how to give a true resemblance of what they saw; how to exhibit things in relief, in perspective, and in illumination. In relief: that is, they had to learn to show one thing as standing out from another; in perspective: that is, to show things as they really look, instead of as we infer they are; in illumination: that is, to show things in the colours they assume under such and such lights. The first distinct advance was made by Cimabue and Giotto at Florence, but contemporaneous with them was the similar work of Duccio and his successors at Siena, whose pictures should be studied in this connection. Various stages in the advance will be pointed out under the pictures themselves; and the student of art will perhaps find the same kind of pleasure in tracing the painter's progress as grown-up people feel in watching the gradual development of children.