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The Mother of God between two angels, Madonna Della Clemenza, c. 700.

Icon with encaustic, 164 cm.

Santa Maria in Trastevere, Rome.

The early Christians confounded in their horror of heathen idolatry all imitative art and artists; they regarded with decided hostility all images and those who created them as bound to the service of Satan and heathenism. Hence, all visible representations of sacred personages and actions were therefore confined to mystic emblems. Thus, crosses signified redemption; fish, baptism; ships represented the church; serpents, sin or the spirit of evil. When, in the fourth century, the struggle between paganism and Christianity ended in the triumph and dominance of the latter and artistic activity was revived, it was, if not in a new form, in a new spirit through which the old forms were to be gradually moulded and modified. The Christians found the shell of ancient art remaining; traditional handicraft still existed. Certain models of figure and drapery handed down from antiquity, though degenerated and distorted, remained in use, and were applied to illustrate, by direct or symbolic representations the tenets of a purer faith. From the beginning, the figures selected to typify redemption were those of Christ and the Virgin, first separately, and then conjointly as the ‘Mother and Infant’. The earliest monuments of Christian art are to be found, nearly effaced, on the walls and ceilings of the catacombs at Rome, to which the early persecuted martyrs of the faith had fled for refuge. The first recorded representation of Christ is in the character of the ‘Good Shepherd’, and the attributes of Orpheus and Apollo were borrowed to express the character of he who “redeemed souls from hell,” and “gathered his people like sheep.” In the cemetery of St. Calixtus in Rome, the most ancient dipiction was discovered: a head of Christ. The figure is colossal; the face a long oval; the countenance mild, grave, melancholy; the long hair, parted on the brow and falling in two masses on either shoulder; the beard not thick, but short and divided. Here then, obviously imitated from some traditional description (probably the letter of Lentulus to the Roman Senate, assumed to be a fabrication of the third century), we have the first emergence of the type, the generic character since adhered to in the representations of Christ.

A controversy arose afterwards in the early Christian Church which had a determinately significant influence on art as it subsequently developed. One party, with St. Cyril at its head, maintained that the form of Christ, having been described by the prophet as without any outward comeliness, ought to be represented as utterly hideous and repulsive in painting. Fortunately, as the future success of the faith would prove, the most eloquent and influential among the fathers of the Church, St. Jerome, St. Augustin, St. Ambrose, and St. Bernard, took up the opposing side of the arguement. The pope, Adrian I, also threw his infallibility into the scale, and from the eigth century we find it decided, and later confirmed by a papal bull, that Christ should be represented with all the attributes of divine beauty which art in its then unrefined state could lend him.

Since that time the accepted and traditional type for the representation of Christ has been strictly attended to – a tall, slender figure with a long oval face; a broad, serene, elevated brow; a mild, melancholy, and majestic countenance; the hair (“of the colour of wine or wine lees” – which may mean either a dark rich brown or a golden yellow – have both been adopted) parted in the front, and flowing down on each side; and a parted beard. The resemblance to his mother – his only earthly parent – was strongly insisted upon by the early ecclesiastical writers and attended to by the earliest painters, which has given something peculiarly refined and even feminine to the most ancient artistic representations of Christ.

The Miracle of the Child Retrieved from the Bottom of the Sea, end of the 6th century.

Fresco. Lower Church of San Clemente, Rome.

Crucifixion, mid 8th century.

Fresco, 140 × 155 cm.

Teodoto Chapel, Santa Maria Antiqua, Rome.

Master of Saint Francis, Crucifixion, c. 1260–1272.

Tempera on wood.

National Gallery, London.

The oldest representations of the Virgin Mary now remaining are the sculptures on ancient Christian sarcophagi of about the third and fourth centuries, and a mosaic in the chapel of San Venanzio at Liome, referred to by antiquarians, emanating from the seventh century. Here she is represented as a colossal figure, draped majestically, standing with outspread arms (the ancient posture of prayer) and her eyes raised to heaven; then, after the seventh century succeeding her image in her maternal character: seated on a throne with the infant Christ in her arms. We must bear in mind, once and for all, that from the earliest ages of Christianity, the virgin mother of Christ has been selected as the allegorical embodiment of religion in the abstract sense; to this, her symbolic character must be lended those representations of later times, in which she appears trampling on the dragon, folding her votaries within the skirts of her ample robe, interceding for sinners, and crowned between heaven and earth by the Father and the Son.

In the same manner, traditional heads of St. Peter and St. Paul, roughly sketched, later became the groundwork of the highest dignity and beauty, still retaining that peculiarity of form and character which time and custom had consecrated in the eyes of the devout.

Besides the representations of Christ and the Virgin, some of the characters and incidents of the Old Testament were selected as subjects of art, generally with reference to corresponding characters and incidents in the Gospel. Thus, St. Augustin, in the latter half of the fourth century, tells us that “Abraham offering up his son Isaac” was then a common subject, typical, of course, of the sacrifice of the Son of God; “Moses striking the rock,” the Gospel or the water of life; the vine or grapes expressed the sacrament of the Eucharist; Jonah swallowed by the whale and then disgorged signified death and resurrection; Daniel in the lions’ den signified redemption. This system of corresponding subjects, of type and anti-type, was later, as we shall see, taken much further.

In the seventh century, painting, as it existed in Europe, may be divided into two great schools or styles – the Western, or Roman, of which the central point was Rome, and which was distinguished, amid great harshness of execution, by a certain dignity of expression and solemnity of feeling; and the Eastern, or Byzantine school, of which was headquartered in Constantinople, and which was distinguished by greater mechanical skill by adherence to the old classical forms, by the use of gilding, and by the mean, vapid, spiritless conception of motive and character.

Master of the Crucifixion, Crucifixion and Eight Episodes of the Passion of the Christ, end of the 12th century to the beginning of the 13th.

Tempera on wood, 250 × 200 cm.

Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.

Bonaventura Berlinghieri, Scenes from the Life of St. Francis, 1235.

Tempera on wood, 160 × 123 cm.

Church of San Francesco, Pescia.

From the fifth to the ninth century, the most important and interesting remains of pictorial art are the mosaics in the churches and the miniature paintings with which the Bible and Gospel manuscripts were decorated.

But during the tenth and eleventh centuries, Italy fell into a state of complete barbarism and confusion, which almost extinguished the practice of art in any shape; of this period only a few works remain. In the Byzantine Empire, painting still survived; it became, indeed, more and more conventional, but the technical methods were kept up. And so it happened when, in 1204, Constantinople was taken by the Crusaders and the intercourse between the east and west of Europe was resumed, that several Byzantine painters passed into Italy and Germany where they were employed to decorate churches, and taught the practice of their art, their manner of pencilling, mixing and using colours, and gilding ornaments to students who chose to learn them. They brought over the Byzantine types of form and colour, the long lean limbs of the saints, the darkvisaged Madonnas, and the blood-streaming crucifixes; these patterns were followed more or less imitatively by the native Italian painters who studied under them.

Specimens of this early art remain, and in later times have been diligently sought and collected into museums as curiosities, illustrating the history and progress of art. As such, they are interesting in the highest degree, but it must be confessed that otherwise they are not conventionally attractive. There are some very valuable examples in the Royal Collection of Britain. There is also one in the National Icon Collection of the British Museum, a little Cretan picture of the famous Apothecary Saints, Cosmo and Damian, painted by a certain, Emanuel Tzanes, in the seventeenth century. In the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence, and in the Louvre, a few Greek pictures are preserved as curiosities. The subject is generally the Madonna and Child enthroned, sometimes alone, sometimes with angels or saints ranged on each side. The characteristics in all cases are the same: the figures are stiff with long and meagre extremities, the features are hard and expressionless, and the eyes are long and narrow.

The head of the Virgin is generally declined to the left: the infant Christ is generally clothed and sometimes crowned; two fingers of his right hand are extended in an act of benediction; the left hand holding a globe, a scroll, or a book. With regard to the execution, the ornaments of the throne and borders of the draperies, and frequently the background, are elaborately gilded. The local colours are generally vivid and there is little or no relief; the handling is streaky and the flesh-tints are blackish or greenish. At this time, and for two hundred years afterwards (before the invention of oil painting), pictures were painted either in fresco, an art never totally lost, or on panels of seasoned wood, the colours mixed with water and thickened with egg white or the juice of the young shoots of the fig tree. This last method was styled by the Italians a colla or a tempera; by the French, en détrempe; and in English, in distemper. It is in these manners that all movable pictures were executed prior to 1440.

As it is not the purpose of this book to trace the gradual progress of early art, but rather to give some account of the early artists, and as we know nothing of those who lived in the first half of the thirteenth century except a name and date inscribed on a picture, there is no use dwelling upon them, but only revert to the fact that before the birth of Cimabue (1200–1240) there existed schools of painting in Siena and Pisa, not only under Greek but also Italian instruction. The former city produced Guido, whose Madonna and Child, with life-sized figures, signed and dated 1221, and preserved in the Palazzo Pubblica of Siena. It is engraved in Rosini’s Storia della Pittura, on the same page with a Madonna by Cimabue, to which it appears superior in drawing, attitude, expression, and drapery. Pisa produced Giunta da Pisa around the same time, of whom there remain works with the date 1236, one of these is a Crucifixion, engraved in Ottley’s Italian School of Design, and on a smaller scale in Rosini’s Storia della Pittura, in which the expression of grief in the hovering angels, who are wringing their hands and weeping, is very emotive and striking. Undoubtedly, though, the greatest man of that time, who gave an ingenutive impulse to modern art, was sculptor, Nicola Pisano, whose works date from about 1220 to 1270. Further, it appears that even in Florence a native painter, a certain Maestro Bartolomeo, lived and was employed in 1236. Thus, Cimabue’s often-quoted title as ‘father of modern painting’ cannot be justified, even in his own city of Florence. The facts on which his traditional celebrity has been founded will be elucidated in ensuing sections, as the opening scene must surely begin with none other than Guido.

Scenes from the History of Sylvester and Constantine, 1246.

Fresco. Church of the Santissimi

Quatro Coronati, Rome.

Scenes from the History of Sylvester and Constantine (detail), 1246.

Fresco. Church of the Santissimi

Quatro Coronati, Rome.