Mornings in Florence Part 4

You are, therefore--instructed reader--called upon to admire a piece of art which no painter ever produced the equal of except Raphael; but it is unhappily deficient, according to Crowe, in the "mere rendering of form"; and, according to Signor Cavalcasella, "no opinion can be given as to its colour."

Warned thus of the extensive places where the ice is dangerous, and forbidden to look here either for form or colour, you are to admire "the variety of character and expression in the heads." I do not myself know how these are to be given without form or colour; but there appears to me, in my innocence, to be only one head in the whole picture, drawn up and down in different positions.

The "unity and harmony" of the whole--which make this an exceptional work of its kind--mean, I suppose, its general look of having been painted out of a scavenger's cart; and so we are reduced to the last article of our creed according to Crowe,--

"In the composition of this scene Giotto produced a masterpiece."

Well, possibly. The question is, What you mean by 'composition.' Which, putting modern criticism now out of our way, I will ask the reader to think, in front of this wreck of Giotto, with some care.

Was it, in the first place, to Giotto, think you, the "composition of a scene," or the conception of a fact? You probably, if a fashionable person, have seen the apotheosis of Margaret in Faust? You know what care is taken, nightly, in the composition of that scene,--how the draperies are arranged for it; the lights turned off, and on; the fiddlestrings taxed for their utmost tenderness; the ba.s.soons exhorted to a grievous solemnity.

You don't believe, however, that any real soul of a Margaret ever appeared to any mortal in that manner?

_Here_ is an apotheosis also. Composed!--yes; figures high on the right and left, low in the middle, etc., etc., etc.

But the important questions seem to me, Was there ever a St.

Francis?--_did_ he ever receive stigmata?--_did_his soul go up to heaven--did any monk see it rising--and did Giotto mean to tell us so?

If you will be good enough to settle these few small points in your mind first, the "composition" will take a wholly different aspect to you, according to your answer.

Nor does it seem doubtful to me what your answer, after investigation made, must be.

There a.s.suredly was a St. Francis, whose life and works you had better study than either to-day's Galignani, or whatever, this year, may supply the place of the Tichborne case, in public interest.

His reception of the stigmata is, perhaps, a marvellous instance of the power of imagination over physical conditions; perhaps an equally marvellous instance of the swift change of metaphor into tradition; but a.s.suredly, and beyond dispute, one of the most influential, significant, and instructive traditions possessed by the Church of Christ. And, that, if ever soul rose to heaven from the dead body, his soul did so rise, is equally sure.

And, finally, Giotto believed that all he was called on to represent, concerning St. Francis, really had taken place, just as surely as you, if you are a Christian, believe that Christ died and rose again; and he represents it with all fidelity and pa.s.sion: but, as I just now said, he is a man of supreme common sense;--has as much humour and clearness of sight as Chaucer, and as much dislike of falsehood in clergy, or in professedly pious people: and in his gravest moments he will still see and say truly that what is fat, is fat--and what is lean, lean--and what is hollow, empty.

His great point, however, in this fresco, is the a.s.sertion of the reality of the stigmata against all question. There is not only one St.

Thomas to be convinced; there are five;--one to each wound. Of these, four are intent only on satisfying their curiosity, and are peering or probing; one only kisses the hand he has lifted. The rest of the picture never was much more than a grey drawing of a n.o.ble burial service; of all concerned in which, one monk, only, is worthy to see the soul taken up to heaven; and he is evidently just the monk whom n.o.body in the convent thought anything of. (His face is all repainted; but one can gather this much, or little, out of it, yet.)

Of the composition, or "unity and harmony of the whole," as a burial service, we may better judge after we have looked at the brighter picture of St. Francis's Birth--birth spiritual, that is to say, to his native heaven; the uppermost, namely, of the three subjects on this side of the chapel. It is entirely characteristic of Giotto; much of it by his hand--all of it beautiful. All important matters to be known of Giotto you may know from this fresco.

'But we can't see it, even with our opera-gla.s.ses, but all foreshortened and spoiled. What is the use of lecturing us on this?'

That is precisely the first point which is essentially Giottesque in it; its being so out of the way! It is this which makes it a perfect specimen of the master. I will tell you next something about a work of his which you can see perfectly, just behind you on the opposite side of the wall; but that you have half to break your neck to look at this one, is the very first thing I want you to feel.

It is a characteristic--(as far as I know, quite a universal one)--of the greatest masters, that they never expect you to look at them; seem always rather surprised if you want to; and not overpleased. Tell them you are going to hang their picture at the upper end of the table at the next great City dinner, and that Mr. So and So will make a speech about it; you produce no impression upon them whatever, or an unfavourable one. The chances are ten to one they send you the most rubbishy thing they can find in their lumber-room. But send for one of them in a hurry, and tell him the rats have gnawed a nasty hole behind the parlor door, and you want it plastered and painted over;--and he does you a masterpiece which the world will peep behind your door to look at for ever.

I have no time to tell you why this is so; nor do I know why, altogether; but so it is.

Giotto, then, is sent for, to paint this high chapel: I am not sure if he chose his own subjects from the life of St. Francis: I think so,--but of course can't reason on the guess securely. At all events, he would have much of his own way in the matter.

Now you must observe that painting a Gothic chapel rightly is just the same thing as painting a Greek vase rightly. The chapel is merely the vase turned upside-down, and outside-in. The principles of decoration are exactly the same. Your decoration is to be proportioned to the size of your vase; to be together delightful when you look at the cup, or chapel, as a whole; to be various and entertaining when you turn the cup round; (you turn _yourself_ round in the chapel;) and to bend its heads and necks of figures about, as it best can, over the hollows, and ins and outs, so that anyhow, whether too long or too short-possible or impossible--they may be living, and full of grace. You will also please take it on my word today--in another morning walk you shall have proof of it--that Giotto was a pure Etruscan-Greek of the thirteenth century: converted indeed to worship St. Francis instead of Heracles; but as far as vase-painting goes, precisely the Etruscan he was before. This is nothing else than a large, beautiful, coloured Etruscan vase you have got, inverted over your heads like a diving-bell.' [Footnote: I observe that recent criticism is engaged in proving all Etruscan vases to be of late manufacture, in imitation of archaic Greek. And I therefore must briefly antic.i.p.ate a statement which I shall have to enforce in following letters. Etruscan art remains in its own Italian valleys, of the Arno and upper Tiber, in one unbroken series of work, from the seventh century before Christ, to this hour, when the country whitewasher still scratches his plaster in Etruscan patterns. All Florentine work of the finest kind--Luca della Robbia's, Ghiberti's, Donatello's, Filippo Lippi's, Botticelli's, Fra Angelico's--is absolutely pure Etruscan, merely changing its subjects, and representing the Virgin instead of Athena, and Christ instead of Jupiter. Every line of the Florentine chisel in the fifteenth century is based on national principles of art which existed in the seventh century before Christ; and Angelico, in his convent of St. Dominic, at the foot of the hill of Fesole, is as true an Etruscan as the builder who laid the rude stones of the wall along its crest--of which modern civilization has used the only arch that remained for cheap building stone. Luckily, I sketched it in 1845. but alas, too carelessly,--never conceiving of the brutalities of modern Italy as possible.]

Accordingly, after the quatrefoil ornamentation of the top of the bell, you get two s.p.a.ces at the sides under arches, very difficult to cramp one's picture into, if it is to be a picture only; but entirely provocative of our old Etruscan instinct of ornament. And, spurred by the difficulty, and pleased by the national character of it, we put our best work into these arches, utterly neglectful of the public below,--who will see the white and red and blue s.p.a.ces, at any rate, which is all they will want to see, thinks Giotto, if he ever looks down from his scaffold.

Take the highest compartment, then, on the left, looking towards the window. It was wholly impossible to get the arch filled with figures, unless they stood on each other's heads; so Giotto ekes it out with a piece of fine architecture. Raphael, in the Sposalizio, does the same, for pleasure.

Then he puts two dainty little white figures, bending, on each flank, to stop up his corners. But he puts the taller inside on the right, and outside on the left. And he puts his Greek chorus of observant and moralizing persons on each side of his main action.

Then he puts one Choragus--or leader of chorus, supporting the main action--on each side. Then he puts the main action in the middle--which is a quarrel about that white bone of contention in the centre. Choragus on the right, who sees that the bishop is going to have the best of it, backs him serenely. Choragus on the left, who sees that his impetuous friend is going to get the worst of it, is pulling him back, and trying to keep him quiet. The subject of the picture, which, after you are quite sure it is good as a decoration, but not till then, you may be allowed to understand, is the following. One of St. Francis's three great virtues being Obedience, he begins his spiritual life by quarreling with his father. He, I suppose in modern terms I should say, commercially invests some of his father's goods in charity. His father objects to that investment; on which St. Francis runs away, taking what he can find about the house along with him. His father follows to claim his property, but finds it is all gone, already; and that St. Francis has made friends with the Bishop of a.s.sisi. His father flies into an indecent pa.s.sion, and declares he will disinherit him; on which St. Francis then and there takes all his clothes off, throws them frantically in his father's face, and says he has nothing more to do with clothes or father. The good Bishop, in tears of admiration, embraces St. Francis, and covers him with his own mantle.

I have read the picture to you as, if Mr. Spurgeon knew anything about art, Mr. Spurgeon would read it,--that is to say, from the plain, common sense, Protestant side. If you are content with that view of it, you may leave the chapel, and, as far as any study of history is concerned, Florence also; for you can never know anything either about Giotto, or her.

Yet do not be afraid of my re-reading it to you from the mystic, nonsensical, and Papistical side. I am going to read it to you--if after many and many a year of thought, I am able--as Giotto meant it; Giotto being, as far as we know, then the man of strongest brain and hand in Florence; the best friend of the best religious poet of the world; and widely differing, as his friend did also, in his views of the world, from either Mr. Spurgeon, or Pius IX.

The first duty of a child is to obey its father and mother; as the first duty of a citizen to obey the laws of his state. And this duty is so strict that I believe the only limits to it are those fixed by Isaac and Iphigenia. On the other hand, the father and mother have also a fixed duty to the child--not to provoke it to wrath. I have never heard this text explained to fathers and mothers from the pulpit, which is curious.

For it appears to me that G.o.d will expect the parents to understand their duty to their children, better even than children can be expected to know their duty to their parents.

But farther. A _child's_ duty is to obey its parents. It is never said anywhere in the Bible, and never was yet said in any good or wise book, that a man's, or woman's, is. _When,_ precisely, a child becomes a man or a woman, it can no more be said, than when it should first stand on its legs. But a time a.s.suredly comes when it should. In great states, children are always trying to remain children, and the parents wanting to make men and women of them. In vile states, the children are always wanting to be men and women, and the parents to keep them children.

It may be--and happy the house in which it is so--that the father's at least equal intellect, and older experience, may remain to the end of his life a law to his children, not of force, but of perfect guidance, with perfect love. Rarely it is so; not often possible. It is as natural for the old to be prejudiced as for the young to be presumptuous; and, in the change of centuries, each generation has something to judge of for itself.

But this scene, on which Giotto has dwelt with so great force, represents, not the child's a.s.sertion of his independence, but his adoption of another Father.

You must not confuse the desire of this boy of a.s.sisi to obey G.o.d rather than man, with the desire of your young c.o.c.kney Hopeful to have a latch-key, and a separate allowance.

No point of duty has been more miserably warped and perverted by false priests, in all churches, than this duty of the young to choose whom they will serve. But the duty itself does not the less exist; and if there be any truth in Christianity at all, there will come, for all true disciples, a time when they have to take that saying to heart, "He that loveth father or mother more than me, is not worthy of me."

'_Loveth_'--observe. There is no talk of disobeying fathers or mothers whom you do not love, or of running away from a home where you would rather not stay. But to leave the home which is your peace, and to be at enmity with those who are most dear to you,--this, if there be meaning in Christ's words, one day or other will be demanded of His true followers.

And there is meaning in Christ's words. Whatever misuse may have been made of them,--whatever false prophets--and Heaven knows there have been many--have called the young children to them, not to bless, but to curse, the a.s.sured fact remains, that if you will obey G.o.d, there will come a moment when the voice of man will be raised, with all its holiest natural authority, against you. The friend and the wise adviser--the brother and the sister--the father and the master--the entire voice of your prudent and keen-sighted acquaintance--the entire weight of the scornful stupidity of the vulgar world--for _once_, they will be against you, all at one. You have to obey G.o.d rather than man. The human race, with all its wisdom and love, all its indignation and folly, on one side,--G.o.d alone on the other. You have to choose.

That is the meaning of St. Francis's renouncing his inheritance; and it is the beginning of Giotto's gospel of Works. Unless this hardest of deeds be done first,--this inheritance of mammon and the world cast away,--all other deeds are useless. You cannot serve, cannot obey, G.o.d and mammon. No charities, no obediences, no self-denials, are of any use, while you are still at heart in conformity with the world. You go to church, because the world goes. You keep Sunday, because your neighbours keep it. But you dress ridiculously, because your neighbours ask it; and you dare not do a rough piece of work, because your neighbours despise it. You must renounce your neighbour, in his riches and pride, and remember him in his distress. That is St. Francis's 'disobedience.'

And now you can understand the relation of subjects throughout the chapel, and Giotto's choice of them.

The roof has the symbols of the three virtues of labour--Poverty, Chast.i.ty, Obedience.

A. Highest on the left side, looking to the window. The life of St.

Francis begins in his renunciation of the world.

B. Highest on the right side. His new life is approved and ordained by the authority of the church.

C. Central on the left side. He preaches to his own disciples.

D. Central on the right side. He preaches to the heathen.

E. Lowest on the left side. His burial.

F. Lowest on the right side. His power after death.

Besides these six subjects, there are, on the sides of the window, the four great Franciscan saints, St. Louis of France, St. Louis of Toulouse, St. Clare, and St. Elizabeth of Hungary.

So that you have in the whole series this much given you to think of: first, the law of St. Francis's conscience; then, his own adoption of it; then, the ratification of it by the Christian Church; then, his preaching it in life; then, his preaching it in death; and then, the fruits of it in his disciples.

I have only been able myself to examine, or in any right sense to see, of this code of subjects, the first, second, fourth, and the St. Louis and Elizabeth. I will ask _you_ only to look at two more of them, namely, St. Francis before the Soldan, midmost on your right, and St.

Louis.