To name first those which are either certain or command the most general acceptance, placing them in something like an approximate and probable order of date. In the Uffizi at Florence are two companion pieces of the “Trial of Moses” and the “Judgment of Solomon,” the latter the finer and better preserved of the two, which pass, no doubt justly, as typical works of Giorgione’s youth, and exhibit, though not yet ripely, his special qualities of colour-richness and landscape romance, the peculiar facial types of his predilection, with the pure form of forehead, fine oval of cheek, and somewhat close-set eyes and eyebrows, and the intensity of that still and brooding sentiment with which, rather than with dramatic life and movement, he instinctively invests his figures. Probably the earliest of the portraits by common consent called his is the beautiful one of a young man at Berlin. His earliest devotional picture would seem to be the highly finished “Christ bearing his Cross” (the head and shoulders only, with a peculiarly serene and high-bred cast of features) formerly at Vicenza and now in the collection of Mrs Gardner at Boston. Other versions of this picture exist, and it has been claimed that one in private possession at Vienna is the true original: erroneously in the judgment of the present writer. Another “Christ bearing the Cross,” with a Jew dragging at the rope round his neck, in the church of San Rocco at Venice, is a ruined but genuine work, quoted by Vasari and Ridolfi, and copied with the name of Giorgione appended, by Van Dyck in that master’s Chatsworth sketch-book. (Vasari gives it to Giorgione in his first and to Titian in his second edition.) The composition of a lost early picture of the birth of Paris is preserved in an engraving of the “Teniers Gallery” series, and an old copy of part of the same picture is at Budapest. In the Giovanelli Palace at Venice is that fascinating and enigmatical mythology or allegory, known to the Anonimo Morelliano, who saw it in 1530 in the house of Gabriel Vendramin, simply as “the small landscape with the storm, the gipsy woman and the soldier”; the picture is conjecturally interpreted by modern authorities as illustrating a passage in Statius which describes the meeting of Adrastus with Hypsipyle when she was serving as nurse with the king of Nemea. Still belonging to the earlier part of the painter’s brief career is a beautiful, virginally pensive Judith at St Petersburg, which passed under various alien names, as Raphael, Moretto, &c., until its kindred with the unquestioned work of Giorgione was in late years firmly established. The great Castelfranco altarpiece, still, in spite of many restorations, one of the most classically pure and radiantly impressive works of Renaissance painting, may be taken as closing the earlier phase of the young master’s work (1504). It shows the Virgin loftily enthroned on a plain, sparely draped stone structure with St Francis and a warrior saint (St Liberale) standing in attitudes of great simplicity on either side of the foot of the throne, a high parapet behind them, and a beautiful landscape of the master’s usual type seen above it. Nearly akin to this masterpiece, not in shape or composition but by the type of the Virgin and the very Bellinesque St Francis, is the altarpiece of the Madonna with St Francis and St Roch at Madrid. Of the master’s fully ripened time is the fine and again enigmatical picture formerly in the house of Taddeo Contarini at Venice, described by contemporary witnesses as the “Three Philosophers,” and now, on slender enough grounds, supposed to represent Evander showing Aeneas the site of Troy as narrated in the eighth Aeneid. The portrait of a knight of Malta in the Uffizi at Florence has more power and authority, if less sentiment, than the earlier example at Berlin, and may be taken to be of the master’s middle time. Most entirely central and typical of all Giorgione’s extant works is the Sleeping Venus at Dresden, first recognized by Morelli, and now universally accepted, as being the same as the picture seen by the Anonimo and later by Ridolfi in the Casa Marcello at Venice. An exquisitely pure and severe rhythm of line and contour chastens the sensuous richness of the presentment: the sweep of white drapery on which the goddess lies, and of glowing landscape that fills the space behind her, most harmoniously frame her divinity. It is recorded that the master left this piece unfinished and that the landscape, with a Cupid which subsequent restoration has removed, were completed after his death by Titian. The picture is the prototype of Titian’s own Venus at the Uffizi and of many more by other painters of the school; but none of them attained the quality of the first exemplar. Of such small scenes of mixed classical mythology and landscape as early writers attribute in considerable number to Giorgione, there have survived at least two which bear strong evidences of his handiwork, though the action is in both of unwonted liveliness, namely the Apollo and Daphne of the Seminario at Venice and the Orpheus and Eurydice of Bergamo. The portrait of Antonio Grocardo at Budapest represents his fullest and most penetrating power in that branch of art. In his last years the purity and relative slenderness of form which mark his earlier female nudes, including the Dresden Venus, gave way to ideals of ampler mould, more nearly approaching those of Titian and his successors in Venetian art; as is proved by those last remaining fragments of the frescoes on the Grand Canal front of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi which were seen and engraved by Zanetti in 1760, but have now totally disappeared. Such change of ideal is apparent enough in the famous “Concert” or “Pastoral Symphony” of the Louvre, probably the latest, and certainly one of the most characteristic and harmoniously splendid, of Giorgione’s creations that has come down to us, and has caused some critics too hastily to doubt its authenticity.
We pass now to pictures for which some affirm and others deny the right to bear Giorgione’s name. As youthful in style as the two early pictures in the Uffizi, and closely allied to them in feeling, though less so in colour, is an unexplained subject in the National Gallery, sometimes called for want of a better title the “Golden Age”; this is officially and by many critics given only to the “school of” Giorgione, but may not unreasonably be claimed for his own work (No. 1173). There is also in England a group of three paintings which are certainly by one hand, and that a hand very closely related to Giorgione if not actually his own, namely the small oblong “Adoration of the Magi” in the National Gallery (No. 1160), the “Adoration of the Shepherds” belonging to Lord Allendale (with its somewhat inferior but still attractive replica at Vienna), and the small “Holy Family” in the collection of Mr R. H. Benson. The type of the Madonna in all these three pieces is different from that customary with the master, but there seems no reason why he should not at some particular moment have changed his model. The sentiment and gestures of the figures, the cast of draperies, the technical handling, and especially, in Lord Allendale’s picture, the romantic richness of the landscape, all incline us to accept the group as original, notwithstanding the deviation of type already mentioned and certain weaknesses of drawing and proportion which we should have hardly looked for. Better known to European students in general are the two fine pictures commonly given to the master at the Pitti gallery in Florence, namely the “Three Ages” and the “Concert.” Both are very Giorgionesque, the “Three Ages” leaning rather towards the early manner of Lorenzo Lotto, to whom by some critics it is actually given. The “Concert” is held on technical grounds by some of the best judges rather to bear the character of Titian at the moment when the inspiration of Giorgione was strongest on him, at least so far as concerns the extremely beautiful and expressive central figure of the monk playing on the clavichord with reverted head, a very incarnation of musical rapture and yearning—the other figures are too much injured to judge.
There are at least two famous single portraits as to which critics will probably never agree whether they are among the later works of Giorgione or among the earliest of Titian under his influence: these are the jovial and splendid half-length of Catherine Cornaro (or a stout lady much resembling her) with a bas-relief, in the collection of Signor Crespi at Milan, and the so-called “Ariosto” from Lord Darnley’s collection acquired for the National Gallery in 1904. Ancient and half-effaced inscriptions, of which there is no cause to doubt the genuineness, ascribe them both to Titian; both, to the mind of the present writer at least, are more nearly akin to such undoubted early Titians as the “Man with the Book” at Hampton Court and the “Man with the Glove” at the Louvre than to any authenticated work of Giorgione. At the same time it should be remembered that Giorgione is known to have actually enjoyed the patronage of Catherine Cornaro and to have painted her portrait. The Giorgionesque influence and feeling, to a degree almost of sentimental exaggeration, encounter us again in another beautiful Venetian portrait at the National Gallery which has sometimes been claimed for him, that of a man in crimson velvet with white pleated shirt and a background of bays, long attributed to the elder Palma (No. 636). The same qualities are present with more virility in a very striking portrait of a young man at Temple Newsam, which stands indeed nearer than any other extant example to the Brocardo portrait at Budapest. The full-face portrait of a woman in the Borghese gallery at Rome has the marks of the master’s design and inspiration, but in its present sadly damaged condition can hardly be claimed for his handiwork. The head of a boy with a pipe at Hampton Court, a little over life size, has been enthusiastically claimed as Giorgione’s workmanship, but is surely too slack and soft in handling to be anything more than an early copy of a lost work, analogous to, though better than, the similar copy at Vienna of a young man with an arrow, a subject he is known to have painted. The early records prove indeed that not a few such copies of Giorgione’s more admired works were produced in his own time or shortly afterwards. One of the most interesting and unmistakable such copies still extant is the picture formerly in the Manfrin collection at Venice, afterwards in that of Mr Barker in London, and now at Dresden, which is commonly called “The Horoscope,” and represents a woman seated near a classic ruin with a young child at her feet, an armed youth standing looking down at them, and a turbaned sage seated near with compasses, disk and book. Of important subject pictures belonging to the debatable borderland between Giorgione and his imitators are the large and interesting unfinished “Judgment of Solomon” at Kingston Lacy, which must certainly be the same that Ridolfi saw and attributed to him in the Casa Grimani at Venice, but has weaknesses of design and drawing sufficiently baffling to criticism; and the “Woman taken in Adultery” in the public gallery at Glasgow, a picture truly Giorgionesque in richness of colour, but betraying in its awkward composition, the relative coarseness of its types and the insincere, mechanical animation of its movements, the hand of some lesser master of the school, almost certainly (by comparison with his existing engravings and woodcuts) that of Domenico Campagnola. It seems unnecessary to refer, in the present notice, to any of the numerous other and inferior works which have been claimed for Giorgione by a criticism unable to distinguish between a living voice and its echoes.
Bibliography.—Morelli, Notizie, &c. (ed. Frizzoni, 1884): Vasari (ed. Milanesi), vol. iv.; Ridolfi, Le Maraviglie dell’ arte, vol. i.; Zanetti, Varie Pitture (1760); Crowe-Cavalcaselle, History of Painting in North Italy; Morelli, Kunstkritische Studien; Gronau, Zorzon da Castelfranco, la sua origine, &c. (1894); Herbert Cook, Giorgione (in “Great Masters” series, 1900); Ugo Monneret de Villard, Giorgione da Castelfranco (1905). The two last-named works are critically far too inclusive, but useful as going over the whole ground of discussion, with full references to earlier authorities, &c.
(S. C.)
GIOTTINO (1324-1357), an early Florentine painter. Vasari is the principal authority in regard to this artist; but it is not by any means easy to bring the details of his narrative into harmony with such facts as can now be verified. It would appear that there was a painter of the name of Tommaso (or Maso) di Stefano termed Giottino; and the Giottino of Vasari is said to have been born in 1324, and to have died early, of consumption, in 1357,—dates which must be regarded as open to considerable doubt. Stefano, the father of Tommaso, was himself a celebrated painter in the early revival of art; his naturalism was indeed so highly appreciated by contemporaries as to earn him the appellation of “Scimia della Natura” (ape of nature). He, it seems, instructed his son, who, however, applied himself with greater predilection to studying the works of the great Giotto, formed his style on these, and hence was called Giottino. It is even said that Giottino was really the son (others say the great-grandson) of Giotto. To this statement little or no importance can be attached. To Maso di Stefano, or Giottino, Vasari and Ghiberti attribute the frescoes in the chapel of S. Silvestro (or of the Bardi family) in the Florentine church of S. Croce; these represent the miracles of Pope S. Silvestro as narrated in the “Golden Legend,” one conspicuous subject being the sealing of the lips of a malignant dragon. These works are animated and firm in drawing, with naturalism carried further than by Giotto. From the evidence of style, some modern connoisseurs assign to the same hand the paintings in the funeral vault of the Strozzi family, below the Cappella degli Spagnuoli in the church of S. Maria Novella, representing the crucifixion and other subjects. Vasari ascribes also to his Giottino the frescoes of the life of St Nicholas in the lower church of Assisi. This series, however, is not really in that part of the church which Vasari designates, but is in the chapel of the Sacrament; and the works in that chapel are understood to be by Giotto di Stefano, who worked in the second half of the 14th century—very excellent productions of their period. They are much damaged, and the style is hardly similar to that of the Sylvester frescoes. It might hence be inferred that two different men produced the works which are unitedly fathered upon the half-legendary “Giottino,” the consumptive youth, solitary and melancholic, but passionately devoted to his art. A large number of other works have been attributed to the same hand; we need only mention an “Apparition of the Virgin to St Bernard,” in the Florentine Academy; a lost painting, very popular in its day, commemorating the expulsion, which took place in 1343, of the duke of Athens from Florence; and a marble statue erected on the Florentine campanile. Vasari particularly praises Giottino for well-blended chiaroscuro.
GIOTTO [Giotto di Bondone[1]] (1267?-1337), Italian painter, was born at Vespignano in the Mugello, a few miles north of Florence, according to one account in 1276, and according to another, which from the few known circumstances of his life seems more likely to be correct, in 1266 or 1267. His father was a landowner at Colle in the commune of Vespignano, described in a contemporary document as vir praeclarus, but by biographers both early and late as a poor peasant; probably therefore a peasant proprietor of no large possessions but of reputable stock and descent. It is impossible to tell whether there is any truth in the legend of Giotto’s boyhood which relates how he first showed his disposition for art, and attracted the attention of Cimabue, by being found drawing one of his father’s sheep with a sharp stone on the face of a smooth stone or slate. With his father’s consent, the story goes on, Cimabue carried off the boy to be his apprentice, and it was under Cimabue’s tuition that Giotto took his first steps in the art of which he was afterwards to be the great emancipator and renovator. The place where these early steps can still, according to tradition, be traced, is in the first and second, reckoning downwards, of the three courses of frescoes which adorn the walls of the nave in the Upper Church of St Francis at Assisi. These frescoes represent subjects of the Old and New Testament, and great labour, too probably futile, has been spent in trying to pick out those in which the youthful handiwork of Giotto can be discerned, as it is imagined, among that of Cimabue and his other pupils. But the truth is that the figure of Cimabue himself, in spite of Dante’s testimony to his having been the foremost painter of Italy until Giotto arose, has under the search-light of modern criticism melted into almost mythical vagueness. His accepted position as Giotto’s instructor and the pioneer of reform in his art has been attacked from several sides as a mere invention of Florentine writers for the glorification of their own city. One group of critics maintain that the real advance in Tuscan painting before Giotto was the work of the Sienese school and not of the Florentine. Another group contend that the best painting done in Italy down to the last decade of the 13th century was not done by Tuscan hands at all, but by Roman craftsmen trained in the inherited principles of Italo-Byzantine decoration in mosaic and fresco, and that from such Roman craftsmen alone could Giotto have learnt anything worth his learning. The debate thus opened is far from closed, and considering how scanty, ambiguous and often defaced are the materials existing for discussion, it is perhaps never likely to be closed. But there is no debate as to the general nature of the reform effected by the genius of Giotto himself. He was the great humanizer of painting; it is his glory to have been the first among his countrymen to breathe life into wall-pictures and altar-pieces, and to quicken the dead conventionalism of inherited practice with the fire of natural action and natural feeling. Upon yet another point there is no question; and that is that the reform thus effected by Giotto in painting had been anticipated in the sister art of sculpture by nearly a whole generation. About the middle of the 13th century Nicola Pisano had renewed that art, first by strict imitation of classical models, and later by infusing into his work a fresh spirit of nature and humanity, perhaps partly caught from the Gothic schools of France. His son Giovanni had carried the same re-vitalising of sculpture a great deal further; and hence to some critics it would seem that the real inspirer and precursor of Giotto was Giovanni Pisano the sculptor, and not any painter or wall-decorator, whether of Florence, Siena or Rome.
In this division of opinion it is safer to regard the revival of painting in Giotto’s hands simply as part of the general awakening of the time, and to remember that, as of all Italian communities Florence was the keenest in every form of activity both intellectual and practical, so it was natural that a son of Florence should be the chief agent in such an awakening. And in considering his career the question of his possible participation in the primitive frescoes of the upper courses at Assisi is best left out of account, the more so because of the deplorable condition in which they now exist. But with reference to the lowest course of paintings on the same walls, those illustrating the life of St Francis according to the narrative of St Bonaventura, no one has any doubt, at least in regard to nineteen or twenty of the twenty-eight subjects which compose the series, that Giotto himself was their designer and chief executant. In these, sadly as they too have suffered from time and wholesale repair, there can nevertheless be discerned the unmistakable spirit of the young Florentine master as we know him in his other works—his shrewd realistic and dramatic vigour, the deep sincerity and humanity of feeling which he knows how to express in every gesture of his figures without breaking up the harmony of their grouping or the grandeur of their linear design, qualities inherited from the earlier schools of impressive but lifeless hieratic decoration. The “Renunciation of the Saint by his Father,” the “Pope’s Dream of the Saint upholding the tottering Church,” the “Saint before the Sultan,” the “Miracle of the Spring of Water,” the “Death of the Nobleman of Celano,” the “Saint preaching before Pope Honorius”—these are some of the most noted and best preserved examples of the painter’s power in this series. Where doubt begins again is as to the relations of date and sequence which the series bears to other works by the master executed at Assisi and at Rome in the same early period of his career, that is, probably between 1295 and 1300. Giotto’s remaining undisputed works at Assisi are the four celebrated allegorical compositions in honour of St Francis in the vaulting of the Lower Church,—the “Marriage of St Francis to Poverty,” the “Allegory of Chastity,” the “Allegory of Obedience” and the “Vision of St Francis in Glory.” These works are scarcely at all retouched, and relatively little dimmed by time; they are of a singular beauty, at once severe and tender, both in colour and design; the compositions, especially the first three, fitted with admirable art into the cramped spaces of the vaulting, the subjects, no doubt in the main dictated to the artist by his Franciscan employers, treated in no cold or mechanical spirit but with a full measure of vital humanity and original feeling. Had the career and influence of St Francis had no other of their vast and far-reaching effects in the world than that of inspiring these noble works of art, they would still have been entitled to no small gratitude from mankind. Other works at Assisi which most modern critics, but not all, attribute to Giotto himself are three miracles of St Francis and portions of a group of frescoes illustrating the history of Mary Magdalene, both in the Lower Church; and again, in one of the transepts of the same Lower Church, a series of ten frescoes of the Life of the Virgin and Christ, concluding with the Crucifixion. It is to be remarked as to this transept series that several of the frescoes present not only the same subjects, but with a certain degree of variation the same compositions, as are found in the master’s great series executed in the Arena chapel at Padua in the fullness of his powers about 1306; and that the versions in the Assisi transept show a relatively greater degree of technical accomplishment than the Paduan versions, with a more attractive charm and more abundance of accessory ornament, but a proportionately less degree of that simple grandeur in composition and direct strength of human motive which are the special notes of Giotto’s style. Therefore a minority of critics refuse to accept the modern attribution of this transept series to Giotto himself, and see in it later work by an accomplished pupil softening and refining upon his master’s original creations at Padua. Others, insisting that these unquestionably beautiful works must be by the hand of Giotto and none but Giotto, maintain that in comparison with the Paduan examples they illustrate a gradual progress, which can be traced in other of his extant works, from the relatively ornate and soft to the austerely grand and simple. This argument is enforced by comparison with early work of the master’s at Rome as to the date of which we have positive evidence. In 1298 Giotto completed for Cardinal Stefaneschi for the price of 2200 gold ducats a mosaic of Christ saving St Peter from the waves (the celebrated “Navicella”); this is still to be seen, but in a completely restored and transformed state, in the vestibule of St Peter’s. For the same patron he executed, probably just before the “Navicella,” an elaborate ciborium or altar-piece for the high altar of St Peter’s, for which he received 800 ducats. It represents on the principal face a colossal Christ enthroned with adoring angels beside him and a kneeling donor at his feet, and the martyrdoms of St Peter and St Paul on separate panels to right and left; on the reverse is St Peter attended by St George and other saints, receiving from the donor a model of his gift, with stately full-length figures of two apostles to right and two to left, besides various accessory scenes and figures in the predellas and the margins. The separated parts of this altar-piece are still to be seen, in a quite genuine though somewhat tarnished condition, in the sacristy of St Peter’s. A third work by the master at Rome is a repainted fragment at the Lateran of a fresco of Pope Boniface VIII. proclaiming the jubilee of 1300. The “Navicella” and the Lateran fragment are too much ruined to argue from; but the ciborium panels, it is contended, combine with the aspects of majesty and strength a quality of ornate charm and suavity such as is remarked in the transept frescoes of Assisi. The sequence proposed for these several works is accordingly, first the St Peter’s ciborium, next the allegories in the vaulting of the Lower Church, next the three frescoes of St Francis’ miracles in the north transept, next the St Francis series in the Upper Church; and last, perhaps after an interval and with the help of pupils, the scenes from the life of Mary Magdalene in her chapel in the Lower Church. This involves a complete reversal of the prevailing view, which regards the unequal and sometimes clumsy compositions of this St Francis series as the earliest independent work of the master. It must be admitted that there is something paradoxical in the idea of a progress from the manner of the Lower Church transept series of the life of Christ to the much ruder manner of the Upper Church series of St Francis.