Читать книгу A Text-Book of the History of Painting - The Original Classic Edition - Dyke John - Страница 2

tolo di Fredi (1330-1410), and Taddeo di Bartolo (1362-1422), were other painters of the school. The late men rather carried detail to excess, and the school grew conventional instead of advancing.

TRANSITION PAINTERS: Several painters, Starnina (1354-1413), Gentile da Fabriano (1360?-1440?), Fra Angelico (1387-1455), have been put down in art history as the makers of the transition from Gothic to Renaissance painting. They hardly deserve the title. There was no transition. The development went on, and these painters, coming late in the fourteenth century and living into the fifteenth, simply showed the changing style, the advance in the study of nature and the technic of art. Starnina's work gave strong evidence of the study of form, but it was no such work as Masaccio's. There is always a little of the past in[55] the present, and these painters showed traces of Byzantinism in details of the face and figure, in coloring, and in gold embossing.

Gentile had all that nicety of finish and richness of detail and color characteristic of the Siennese. Being closer to the Renaissance than his predecessors he was more of a nature student. He was the first man to show the effect of sunlight in landscape, the first one to put a gold sun in the sky. He never, however, outgrew Gothic methods and really belongs in the fourteenth century. This is true of Fra Angelico. Though he lived far into the Early Renaissance he did not change his style and manner of work in conformity

with the work of others about him. He was the last inheritor of the Giottesque traditions. Religious sentiment was the strong feature of his art. He was behind Giotto and Lorenzetti in power and in imagination, and behind Orcagna as a painter. He knew little of light, shade, perspective, and color, and in characterization was feeble, except in some late work. One face or type answered him for all classes of people--a sweet, fair face, full of divine tenderness. His art had enough nature in it to express his meanings, but little more. He was pre-eminently a devout painter, and really the last of the great religionists in painting.

FIG. 25.--FRA ANGELICO. ANGEL (DETAIL). UFFIZI.

The other regions of Italy had not at this time developed schools of painting of sufficient consequence to mention.[56]

PRINCIPAL WORKS: Florentines--Cimabue, Madonnas S. M. Novella and Acad. Florence, frescos Upper Church of Assisi (?); Giotto, frescos Upper and Lower churches Assisi, best work Arena chapel Padua, Bardi and Peruzzi chapels S. Croce, injured frescos Bargello Florence; Taddeo Gaddi, frescos entrance wall Baroncelli chapel S. Croce, Spanish chapel S. M. Novella (designed by Gaddi (?)); Agnolo Gaddi frescos in choir S. Croce, S. Jacopo tra Fossi Florence, panel pictures Florence Acad.; Giovanni da Milano, Bewail-ing of Christ Florence Acad., Virgin enthroned Prato Gal., altar-piece Uffizi Gal., frescos S. Croce Florence; Antonio Veneziano, frescos in ceiling of Spanish chapel, S. M. Novella, Campo Santo Pisa; Orcagna, altar-piece Last Judgment and Paradise Strozzi

chapel S. M. Novella, S. Zenobio Duomo, Saints Medici chapel S. Croce, Descent of Holy Spirit Badia Florence, altar-piece Nat. Gal. Lon.; Spinello Aretino, Life of St. Benedict S. Miniato al Monte near Florence, Annunciation Convent degl' Innocenti Arezzo, frescos Campo Santo Pisa, Coronation Florence Acad., Barbarossa frescos Palazzo Publico Sienna; Andrea da Firenze, Church Militant, Calvary, Crucifixion Spanish chapel, Upper series of Life of S. Raniera Campo Santo Pisa.

Siennese--Guido da Sienna, Madonna S. Domenico Sienna; Duccio, panels Duomo and Acad. Sienna, Madonna Nat. Gal. Lon.; Simone di Martino, frescos Palazzo Pubblico, Sienna, altar-piece and panels Seminario Vescovile, Pisa Gal., altar-piece and Madonna Opera del Duomo Orvieto; Lippo Memmi, frescos Palazzo del Podesta S. Gemignano, Annunciation Uffizi Florence; Bartolo di Fre-di, altar-pieces Acad. Sienna, S. Francesco Montalcino; Taddeo di Bartolo, Palazzo Pubblico Sienna, Duomo, S. Gemignano, S. Francesco Pisa; Ambrogio Lorenzetti, frescos Palazzo Pubblico Sienna, Triumph of Death (with Pietro Lorenzetti) Campo Santo Pisa, St. Francis frescos Lower Church Assisi, S. Francesco and S. Agostino Sienna, Annunciation Sienna Acad., Presentation Florence Acad.; Pietro Lorenzetti, Virgin S. Ansano, altar-pieces Duomo Sienna, Parish Church of Arezzo (worked with his brother Ambrogio).

TRANSITION PAINTERS: Starnina, frescos Duomo Prato (completed by pupil); Gentile da Fabriano, Adoration Florence Acad., Coronation Brera Milan, Madonna Duomo Orvieto; Fra Angelico, Coronation and many small panels Uffizi, many pieces Life of Christ Florence Acad., other pieces S. Marco Florence, Last Judgment Duomo, Orvieto.

[57]

CHAPTER VI. ITALIAN PAINTING.

EARLY RENAISSANCE. 1400-1500.

Books Recommended: As before, Burckhardt, Crowe and Cavalcaselle, Eastlake, Lafenestre, Lanzi, Habich, Lacroix, Mantz, Morelli, Burton, Rumohr, Stillman, Vasari; also Crowe and Cavalcaselle, History of Painting in North Italy; Berenson, Florentine Painters of Renaissance; Berenson, Venetian Painters of Renaissance; Berenson, Central Italian Painters of Renaissance; Study and Criticism of Italian Art; Boschini, La Carta del Navegar; Calvi, Memorie della Vita ed opere di Francesco Raibolini; Cibo, Niccolo Alunno e la

21

scuola Umbra; Citadella, Notizie relative a Ferrara; Cruttwell, Verrocchio; Cruttwell, Pollaiuolo; Morelli, Anonimo, Notizie; Mez-zanotte, Commentario della Vita di Pietro Vanucci; Mundler, Essai d'une Analyse critique de la Notice des tableaux Italiens au Lou-vre; Muntz, Les Precurseurs de la Renaissance; Muntz, La Renaissance en Italie et en France; Patch, Life of Masaccio; Hill, Pisanello, Publications of the Arundel Society; Richter, Italian Art in National Gallery, London; Ridolfi, Le Meraviglie dell' Arte; Rosini, Storia della Pittura Italiana; Schnaase, Geschichte der bildenden Kunste; Symonds, Renaissance in Italy--the Fine Arts; Vischer, Lucas Signorelli und die Italienische Renaissance; Waagen, Art Treasures; Waagen, Andrea Mantegna und Luca Signorelli (in Raumer's Taschenbuch, (1850)); Zanetti, Della Pittura Veneziana.

THE ITALIAN MIND: There is no way of explaining the Italian fondness for form and color other than by considering the necessities of the people and the artistic character of the Italian mind. Art in all its phases was not only an adornment but a necessity of Christian civilization. The Church taught people by sculpture, mosaic, miniature, and fresco. It was an object-teaching, a grasping

of ideas by[58] forms seen in the mind, not a presenting of abstract ideas as in literature. Printing was not known. There were few manuscripts, and the majority of people could not read. Ideas came to them for centuries through form and color, until at last the Italian mind took on a plastic and pictorial character. It saw things in symbolic figures, and when the Renaissance came and art took the lead as one of its strongest expressions, painting was but the color-thought and form-language of the people.

FIG. 26.--FRA FILIPPO. MADONNA. UFFIZI. Please click here for a modern color image

And these people, by reason of their peculiar education, were an exacting people, knowing what was good and demanding it from the artists. Every Italian was, in a way, an art critic, because every church in Italy was an art school. The artists may have led the peo-ple, but the people spurred on the artists, and so the Italian mind went on developing and unfolding until at last it produced the great art of the Renaissance.

THE AWAKENING: The Italian civilization of the fourteenth century was made up of many impulses and inclinations, none of them very strongly defined. There was a feeling about in the dark, a groping toward the light, but the lead[59]ers stumbled often on the road. There was good reason for it. The knowledge of the ancient world lay buried under the ruins of Rome. The Italians had to learn it all over again, almost without a precedent, almost without a preceptor. With the fifteenth century the horizon began to brighten. The Early Renaissance was begun. It was not a revolt, a reaction, or a starting out on a new path. It was a development

of the Gothic period; and the three inclinations of the Gothic period--religion, the desire for classic knowledge, and the study of

nature--were carried into the art of the time with greater realization.

The inference must not be made that because nature and the antique came to be studied in Early Renaissance times that therefore religion was neglected. It was not. It still held strong, and though with the Renaissance there came about a strange mingling of crime and corruption, aestheticism and immorality, yet the Church was never abandoned for an hour. When enlightenment came, people began to doubt the spiritual power of the Papacy. They did not cringe to it so servilely as before. Religion was not violently embraced as in the Middle Ages, but there was no revolt. The Church held the power and was still the patron of art. The painter's subjects extended over nature, the antique, the fable, allegory, history, portraiture; but the religious subject was not neglected. Fully three-quarters of all the fifteenth-century painting was done for the Church, at her command, and for her purposes.

But art was not so wholly pietistic as in the Gothic age. The study of nature and the antique materialized painting somewhat. The outside world drew the painter's eyes, and the beauty of the religious subject and its sentiment were somewhat slurred for the beauty of natural appearances. There was some loss of religious power, but religion had much to lose. In the fifteenth century it was still dominant.[60]

FIG. 27.--BOTTICELLI. CORONATION OF MADONNA. UFFIZI. Please click here for a modern color image

KNOWLEDGE OF THE ANTIQUE AND NATURE: The revival of antique learning came about in real earnest during this period. The scholars set themselves the task of restoring the polite learning of ancient Greece, studying coins and marbles, collecting manuscripts, founding libraries and schools of philosophy. The wealthy nobles, Palla Strozzi, the Albizzi, the Medici, and the Dukes of Urbino, encouraged it. In 1440 the Greek was taught in five cities. Immediately afterward, with Constantinople falling into the hands of the Turks, came an influx of Greek scholars into Italy. Then followed the invention of printing and the age of discovery on land and sea. Not the antique alone but the natural were being pried into by the spirit of inquiry. Botany, geology, astronomy, chem-istry, medicine, anatomy, law, lit[61]erature--nothing seemed to escape the keen eye of the time. Knowledge was being accumulated from every source, and the arts were all reflecting it.

The influence of the newly discovered classic marbles upon painting was not so great as is usually supposed. The painters studied

22

them, but did not imitate them. Occasionally in such men as Botticelli and Mantegna we see a following of sculpturesque example-- a taking of details and even of whole figures--but the general effect of the antique marbles was to impress the painters with the idea that nature was at the bottom of it all. They turned to the earth not only to study form and feature, but to learn perspective, light, shadow, color--in short, the technical features of art. True, religion was the chief subject, but nature and the antique were used to give it setting. All the fifteenth-century painting shows nature study, force, character, sincerity; but it does not show elegance, grace,

or the full complement of color. The Early Renaissance was the promise of great things; the High Renaissance was the fulfilment.

FLORENTINE SCHOOL: The Florentines were draughtsmen more than colorists. The chief medium was fresco on the walls of buildings, and architectural necessities often dictated the form of compositions. Distemper in easel pictures was likewise used, and oil-painting, though known, was not extensively employed until the last quarter of the century. In technical knowledge and intellectual grasp Florence was at this time the leader and drew to her many artists from neighboring schools. Masaccio (1401?-1428?) was the first great nature student of the Early Renaissance, though his master, Masolino (1383-1447), had given proof positive of severe nature study in bits of modelling, in drapery, and in portrait heads. Masaccio, however, seems the first to have gone into it

thoroughly and to have grasped nature as a whole. His mastery of form, his plastic composition, his free, broad folds of drapery, and

his[62] knowledge of light and perspective, all placed him in the front rank of fifteenth-century painters. Though an exact student

he was not a literalist. He had a large artistic sense, a breadth of view, and a comprehension of nature as a mass that Michael Angelo and Raphael did not disdain to follow. He was not a pietist, and there was no great religious feeling in his work. Dignified truthful appearance was his creed, and in this he was possibly influenced by Donatello the sculptor.

FIG. 28.--GHIRLANDAJO. THE VISITATION. LOUVRE. Please click here for a modern color image

He came early in the century and died early, but his contemporaries did not continue the advance from where he carried it. There

was wavering all along the line. Some from lack of genius could not equal him, others took[63] up nature with indecision, and others clung fondly to the gold-embossed ornaments and gilded halos of the past. Paolo Uccello (1397?-1475), Andrea Castagno (1390-

1457), Benozzo Gozzoli (1420?-1497?), Baldovinetti (1427-1499), Antonio del Pollajuolo (1426-1498), Cosimo Rosselli (1439-1507), can hardly be looked upon as improvements upon the young leader. The first real successor of Masaccio was his contemporary, and possibly his pupil, the monk Fra Filippo Lippi (1406-1469). He was a master of color and light-and-shade for his time, though in composition and command of line he did not reach up to Masaccio. He was among the first of the painters to take the individual faces of those about him as models for his sacred characters, and clothe them in contemporary costume. Piety is not very pronounced in any of his works, though he is not without imagination and feeling, and there is in his women a charm of sweetness. His tendency was to materialize the sacred characters.

With Filippino (1457?-1504), Botticelli (1446-1510), and Ghirlandajo (1449-1494) we find a degree of imagination, culture, and independence not surpassed by any of the Early Florentines. Filippino modelled his art upon that of his father, Fra Filippo, and was influenced by Botticelli. He was the weakest of the trio, without being by any means a weak man. On the contrary, he was an artist

of fine ability, much charm and tenderness, and considerable style, but not a great deal of original force, though occasionally doing forceful things. Purity in his type and graceful sentiment in pose and feature seem more characteristic of his work. Botticelli, even, was not so remarkable for his strength as for his culture, and an individual way of looking at things. He was a pupil of Fra Filippo, a man imbued with the religious feeling of Dante and Savonarola, a learned student of the antique and one of the first to take subjects from it, a severe nature student, and a painter of much[64] technical skill. Religion, classicism, and nature all met in his work, but the mingling was not perfect. Religious feeling and melancholy warped it. His willowy figures, delicate and refined in drawing, are more passionate than powerful, more individual than comprehensive, but they are nevertheless very attractive in their tenderness and grace.

Without being so original or so attractive an artist as Botticelli, his contemporary, Ghirlandajo, was a stronger one. His strength came more from assimilation than from invention. He combined in his work all the art learning of his time. He drew well, handled drapery simply and beautifully, was a good composer, and, for Florence, a good colorist. In addition, his temperament was robust, his style dignified, even grand, and his execution wonderfully free. He was the most important of the fifteenth-century technicians, without having any peculiar distinction or originality, and in spite of being rather prosaic at times.

FIG. 29.--FRANCESCA. DUKE OF URBINO. UFFIZI. Please click here for a modern color image

Verrocchio (1435-1488) was more of a sculptor than a painter, but in his studio were three celebrated pupils--Perugino, Leonardo da Vinci, and Lorenzo di Credi--who were half-way between the Early and the High Renaissance. Only one of them, Leonardo, can be classed among the[65] High Renaissance men. Perugino belongs to the Umbrian school, and Lorenzo di Credi (1450-1537),

though Florentine, never outgrew the fifteenth century. He was a pure painter, with much feeling, but weak at times. His drawing was good, but his painting lacked force, and he was too pallid in flesh color. There is much detail, study, and considerable grace about his

23

work, but little of strength. Piero di Cosimo (1462-1521) was fond of mythological and classical studies, was somewhat fantastic in composition, pleasant in color, and rather distinguished in landscape backgrounds. His work strikes one as eccentric, and eccentricity was the strong characteristic of the man.

UMBRIAN AND PERUGIAN SCHOOLS: At the beginning of the fifteenth century the old Siennese school founded by Duccio and the Lorenzetti was in a state of decline. It had been remarkable for intense sentiment, and just what effect this sentiment of the old Siennese school had upon the painters of the neighboring Umbrian school of the early fifteenth century is a matter of specula-tion with historians. It must have had some, though the early painters, like Ottaviano Nelli, do not show it. That which afterward be-came known as the Umbrian sentiment probably first appeared in the work of Niccolo da Foligno (1430?-1502), who was probably a pupil of Benozzo Gozzoli, who was, in turn, a pupil of Fra Angelico. That would indicate Florentine influence, but there were many influences at work in this upper-valley country. Sentiment had been prevalent enough all through Central Italian painting during the Gothic age--more so at Sienna than elsewhere. With the Renaissance Florence rather forsook sentiment for precision of forms

and equilibrium of groups; but the Umbrian towns being more provincial, held fast to their sentiment, their detail, and their gold ornamentation. Their influence upon Florence was slight, but the influence of Florence upon them was considerable. The larger city drew the provincials its way to[66] learn the new methods. The result was a group of Umbro-Florentine painters, combining some up-country sentiment with Florentine technic. Gentile da Fabriano, Niccolo da Foligno, Bonfiglio (1425?-1496?), and Fiorenzo di Lorenzo (1444?-1520) were of this mixed character.

FIG. 30.--SIGNORELLI. THE CURSE (DETAIL). ORVIETO.

The most positive in methods among the early men was Piero della Francesca (1420?-1492). Umbrian born, but Florentine trained, he became more scientific than sentimental, and excelled as a craftsman. He knew drawing, perspective, atmosphere, light-and-shade in a way that rather foreshadowed Leonardo da Vinci. From working in the Umbrian country his influence upon his fellow-Umbrians was large. It showed directly in Signorelli (1441?-1523), whose master he was, and whose style he[67] probably formed. Signorelli

was Umbrian born, like Piero, but there was not much of the Umbrian sentiment about him. He was a draughtsman and threw his strength in line, producing athletic, square-shouldered figures in violent action, with complicated foreshortenings quite astonishing. The most daring man of his time, he was a master in anatomy, composition, motion. There was nothing select about his type, and nothing charming about his painting. His color was hot and coarse, his lights lurid, his shadows brick red. He was, however, a master-draughtsman, and a man of large conceptions and great strength. Melozzo da Forli (1438-1494), of whom little is known, was another pupil of Piero, and Giovanni Santi (1435?-1494), the father of Raphael, was probably influenced by both of these last named.