Notwithstanding all the enthusiasm that has been bestowed upon the paintings of Giotto, it must frankly be admitted that these are to be regarded as remarkable only when viewed in relation to the art of the time in which they were produced. To extol them as masterpieces according to the standards that were developed by the later Florentines would be to throw criticism to the winds. But the architectural efforts of Giotto may be praised with less reserve. The Campanile of Florence has aroused the enthusiasm of most critics who have viewed it; Ruskin[k] declares that “of living Christian works, none is so perfect as the tower of Giotto.”
The same writer speaks with equal enthusiasm of Giotto’s work in another field: “Of representations of human art under heavenly guidance,” he says, “the series of bas-reliefs which stud the base of this tower of Giotto must be held certainly the chief in Europe. Read but these inlaid jewels of Giotto once with patient following, and your hour’s study will give you strength for all your life.” This may be held by colder criticism to be an over-enthusiastic estimate, but few who have come under the spell of the Campanile will wish to modify the eloquent words in which Ruskin characterises that structure as a whole.[a]
Ruskin’s Estimate of Giotto’s Tower
“The characteristics of power and beauty,” he says, “occur more or less in different buildings, some in one and some in another. But all together, and all in their highest possible relative degrees, they exist, as far as I know, only in one building in the world, the Campanile of Giotto. In its first appeal to the stranger’s eye there is something unpleasing—a mingling, as it seems to him, of over-severity with over-minuteness. But let him give it time, as he should to all other consummate art. I well remember how, when a boy, I used to despise that Campanile, and think it meanly smooth and finished. But I have since lived beside it many a day, and looked out upon it from my windows by sunlight and moonlight, and I shall not soon forget how profound and gloomy appeared to me the savageness of the northern Gothic, when I afterwards stood, for the first time, beneath the front of Salisbury. The contrast is indeed strange if it could be quickly felt, between the rising of those gray walls out of their quiet swarded space, like dark and barren rocks out of a green lake, with their rude, mouldering, rough-grained shafts and triple lights, without tracery or other ornament than the martins’ nests in the height of them, and that bright, smooth, sunny surface of glowing jasper, those spiral shafts and fairy traceries, so white, so faint, so crystalline, that their slight shapes are hardly traced in darkness on the pallor of the eastern sky, that serene height of mountain alabaster, coloured like a morning cloud and chased like a sea-shell. And if this be, as I believe it, the model and mirror of perfect architecture, is there not something to be learned by looking back to the early life of him who raised it? I said that the power of human mind had its growth in the wilderness; much more must the love and the conception of that beauty, whose every line and hue we have seen to be, at the best, a faded image of God’s daily work, and an arrested ray of some star or creation, be given chiefly in the places which he has gladdened by planting there the fir-tree and the pine. Not within the walls of Florence, but among the far-away fields of her lilies, was the child trained who was to raise that headstone of beauty above her towers of watch and war. Remember all that he became; count the sacred thoughts with which he filled the heart of Italy; ask those who followed him what they learned at his feet; and when you have numbered his labours and received their testimony, if it seem to you that God had verily poured out upon this his servant no common nor restrained portion of his spirit, and that he was indeed a king among the children of men, remember also that the legend upon his crown was that of David’s: ‘I took thee from the sheep-cote and from following the sheep.’”[k]
FOOTNOTES
[13] Franco Sacchetti, in his Capitolo (Rime, publ. dal Poggiali, p. 56), enumerates about 1390 the names of over a hundred distinguished people in the ruling parties who had died within his memory. However many mediocrities there may have been among them, the list is still remarkable as evidence of the awakening of individuality.
[14] There was a comic poet named Plato.
