Читать книгу Early Italian Painting - Joseph Archer Crowe - Страница 6

Giotto di Bondone, Maestà (Ognissanti Madonna), 1305–1310.

Tempera on wood, 325 × 204 cm.

Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.

Giovanni of Florence, of the noble family of the Cimabue, aka Gualtieri, was born in 1240. At an early age, his parents sent him to study grammar in the school of the convent of Santa Maria Novella, where (as is also related of other innate painters), instead of conning his task, he distracted his teachers by drawing men, horses, and buildings on his schoolbooks; before printing was invented, this spoiling of schoolbooks must have been a rather costly fancy, and no doubt alarmed the professors of Greek and Latin. His parents, wisely yielding to the natural desire of his mind, allowed him to study painting under some Greek artists who had come to Florence to decorate the church of the convent in which he was a scholar. It seems doubtful whether Cimabue did indeed study under the specific painters alluded to by Vasari, but that his masters and models were the Byzantine painters of the time seems to be of no doubt whatsoever. The earliest of his works mentioned by Vasari still exists – a St. Cecilia, painted for the altar of that saint, but now preserved in the church of San Stefano. He was later employed by the monks of Vallombrosa, for whom he painted a Madonna with Angels on a gold background, now preserved in the Galleria dell’Academia in Florence. He also painted a Crucifixion for the church of Santa Croce, still on display, and several pictures for the churches of Pisa to the great contentment of the Pisans. By these and other works, his fame being spread far and near, he was called in the year 1265, when he was only 25-years-old, to finish the frescoes in the church of St. Francis in Assisi, which had been begun by Greek painters and continued by Giunta Pisano.

The decoration of this celebrated church is memorable in the history of painting. It is known that many of the best artists of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were employed there, but only fragments of the earliest pictures exist and the authenticity of those ascribed to Cimabue has been disputed by many. Lanzi, however, and Dr. Kugler agree in attributing him with the paintings on the roof of the nave, representing, in medallions, the figures of Christ, the Madonna, St. John the Baptist, St. Francis, and four magnificent winged and sceptred angels. “In the lower corners of the triangles are represented naked Genii bearing tasteful vases on their heads; out of these grow rich foliage and flowers, on which hang other Genii, who pluck the fruit or lurk in the cups of the flowers.”[1] If these are really by the hand of Cimabue, it must be concluded that here lies a great step in advance of the formal monotony of his Greek models. He executed many other pictures in this famous church, “con diligenza infinita” from the Old and New Testaments, in which, judging from the remaining fragments, he showed a decided improvement in drawing, in propriety of attitude, and in the expression of life. But still, the figures have only just so much animation and significance as are absolutely necessary to render the story or action intelligible. There is no variety, no expressive imitation of nature.

Cimabue, Saint Francis (detail).

Museo della Porziuncola, Church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, Assisi.

Cimabue, Saint Francis, detail from The Virgin and Child with Angels and Saint Francis, c. 1280–1283.

Fresco. Right transept, Lower Basilica of San Francesco, Assisi.

In his figures of the Virgin he did not improve much on the Byzantine models. The faces are not beautiful, the features are elongated, the extremities weak, the general effect flat. But to his heads of prophets, patriarchs, and apostles, whether introduced into his great pictures of the Madonna or in other sacred subjects, he gave a certain grandeur of expression and largeness of form, or, as Lanzi expresses it, “un non so che di forte e sublime”, in which he has not been greatly surpassed by succeeding painters. This energy of expression – his chief and distinguishing excellence which gave him the superiority over Guido of Siena and others who painted only Madonnas – was in harmony with his personal character. He is described to us as exceedingly haughty and disdainful, of a fiery temperament, proud of his high lineage, his skill in his art, and his various acquirements, for he was well studied in all the literature of his age. If a critic found fault with one of his works when in progress, or if he were himself dissatisfied with it, he would destroy it at once, whatever pains it might have cost him. From these traits of character, and the bent of his genius, which leaned to the grand and terrible rather than the gentle and graceful, he has been styled as the Michelangelo of his time. Vasari recorded of him that he painted a head of St. Francis “after nature”, a thing, he says, still unknown at the time. It could not have been a portrait from life, because St. Francis died in 1225. The earliest head ‘after nature’ which remains was the portrait of Frate Elia, a monk of Assisi, painted by Giunta Pisano around 1235. Perhaps Vasari meant that the San Francesco was the first representation of a sacred personage for which nature had been used as a model.

According to Vasari, all the arts apparently decayed at the same time. Sculpture was restored by Nicola Pisano, architecture by Duccio, mosaics and painting by Florentines taught by Greeks. However, the revival might not only be due to Greeks. There are no records confirming the statement that the Florentine State ever sent for Grecian painters. Similarly, Vasari is wrong in supposing that Cimabue was the descendant of a noble Florentine family. The register of receipts and expenses of the convent of Santa Chiara of Pisa, contains a contract, from which it appears that Giovanni, or Cenni, bore the nickname of Cimabue, and was the son of a certain Pepi and lived in Florence in the parish of St. Ambrose.

Wherever Cimabue was taught, he learnt something more than his immediate precursors. Though he did not raise the standard of art to a very high level, he certainly infused new life into old and worn concepts. He threw a new energy and individuality into the empty forms of the older guildsmen, and he injected some poetry, feeling, and colour upon what could have appeared as a degenerate school of painting. The wonder is not that he clung to the models that first shaped his designs, but the fact that he was able to achieve the advance which gave him repute through utilizing the background and techniques available to him. There are no intrinsically Greek elements in his art, which he simply evolved out of the rough Italian materials which have been examined in the works of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It is impossible to objectively countenance the belief that better skill in painting could have been found amongst the Greeks than amongst the Italians of the age of Cimabue.

It is sufficient that we shall be able to agree with Vasari in thinking that Cimabue was the first Italian who gave an impulse to progress in the arts of drawing and painting at a time when both were in a state of atrophy. It may be that he was not only sensible of the necessity for a change, but proud of having helped to bring it on. We read in the Purgatorio how conscious he was of holding the field which Giotto later wrested from him. In light of the commentary regarding his destruction of even slightly criticised works, the apparent admiration of his contemporaries was such that the occurrence of such an action is hard to imagine. Either way, it is definitely in contrast with the popular local anecdote of the region, according to which the Madonna Rucellai (a work erroneously ascribed to him for centuries), when finished, was so admired that when taken to its place of exhibition in Santa Maria Novella, it was carried in procession preceded by a band of trumpeteers, only after the mightiest lords and patricians of Florence had been invited to see it in the painter’s rooms. It can now be found in the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence.[2]

Cimabue, Saint John the Evangelist, c. 1301–1302.

Mosaic. Apse, Cathedral of Pisa, Pisa.

Cimabue, Crucifix, c. 1272. 336 × 267 cm.

Church of San Domenico, Arezzo.

It is equally difficult to assign a date to the beginning of Cimabue’s independent practice as a painter and to say when the Madonna of Santa Maria Novella was first placed on the altar, where it continues to stand. “We must be content to accept the fact that, for the time in which it was executed, the Madonna Rucellai is a masterpiece.”

In this great and important picture, the Virgin is represented in a red tunic and blue mantle, her feet rest on an open-worked stool and she sits on a chair hung with a white drapery flowered in gold and blue, supported by six angels kneeling in threes above each other. A delicately engraved nimbus surrounds her head and that of the infant Christ on her lap, who is dressed in a white tunic and purple mantle shot with gold. A dark-coloured frame surrounds the picture and its gables, which are delicately traced with an ornament and interrupted at intervals by thirty medallions on gold backgrounds, each of which contains the half-figure of a saint. The face of the Madonna is marked by a tender and melancholy expression, the infant is well-shaped and not wanting in animation; the group displays a rare amount of maternal affection. The attitudes of the angels, the movement of the heads, and the elegance with which the hair is wound around the cinctures, falling in locks on the neck, are all pleasing to the eye. The energetic mien of some prophets is striking. There is a certain loss of balance, caused by the weight of the Virgin’s head as compared with the slightness of her frame. The features are designed in a way typical to the thirteenth century, softened, as regards the expression of the eye, by closed lids and an exaggeration of elliptical form in the iris. The nose starts from a bony protuberance, and is depressed at the end; the mouth and chin are, as usual, small and prim. In Christ, the same coarse nose is united to a half-open mouth and large, staring eyes, with features which may be considered too masculine and square. The hands of both Virgin and Child are remarkable for the length of the tapered fingers, their wide separation near the palm and the stiffness of their articulations; the feet are quite conventional in shape. In the grouping of the angels, the absence of all true notions of composition is striking. Their frames are slight for the heads, though their movements are more natural and pleasing than those of earlier artists. In the setting of drapery, Cimabue shows no sensible progress, but he softens the hardness of the fine engraved outlines, and he gives the flesh-tints a clear and carefully fused colour, imparting the surfaces with some of the rotundity which they had lost. With him vanish the old contrasts of half tones and shades. He abandons line shadowing for a careful stippling which follows and develops form. He relieves the general verde underlayer with ruddy shadows and warm lights. A flush tinges without staining the cheeks and lips. Unity and harmony are provided by a system of final glazes, which, having now in part disappeared, exaggerate the paleness of the flesh. The draperies are painted in lively and transparent colours; reds, gently harmonising with the flesh, along with brilliant blues and rosy pinks. In ornamentation, there is more taste and a better subordination than older works.

Cimabue, Saint Francis.

Museo della Porziuncola, Church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, Assisi.

From the date of this altarpiece, the Florentine school began to expand. Without it the superiority of Cimabue over his predecessors would remain unexplained, the principal link of artistic history in Florence would be lost and Giotto’s greatness would be difficult to understand. There are companion pictures to that of Santa Maria Novella – one at the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence, another in the Louvre. For various reasons neither of them gives a totally unequivocal idea of the master.