Renaissance in Italy Volume III Part 7

Distribution of Artistic Gifts in Italy--Florence and Venice --Cla.s.sification by Schools--Stages in the Evolution of Painting--Cimabue --The Rucellai Madonna--Giotto--His widespread Activity--The Scope of his Art--Vitality--Composition--Colour--Naturalism--Healthiness--Frescoes at a.s.sisi and Padua--Legend of S. Francis--The Giotteschi--Pictures of the Last Judgment--Orcagna in the Strozzi Chapel--Ambrogio Lorenzetti at Pisa--Dogmatic Theology--Cappella degli Spagnuoli--Traini's "Triumph, of S. Thomas Aquinas"--Political Doctrine expressed in Fresco--Sala della Pace at Siena--Religious Art in Siena and Perugia--The Relation of the Giottesque Painters to the Renaissance.

It is the duty of the historian of painting to trace the beginnings of art in each of the Italian communities, to differentiate their local styles, and to explain their mutual connections. For the present generation this work is being done with all-sufficient thoroughness and accuracy.[118] The historian of culture, on the other hand, for whom the arts form one important branch of intellectual activity, may dispense with these detailed inquiries, and may endeavour to seize the more general outlines of the subject. He need not weigh in balances the claims of rival cities to priority, nor hamper his review of national progress by discussing the special merits of the several schools. Still there are certain broad facts about the distribution of artistic gifts in Italy which it is necessary to bear in mind. However much we may desire to treat of painting as a phase of national and not of merely local life, the fundamental difficulty of Italian history, its complexity and variety, owing to the subdivisions of the nation into divers states, must here as elsewhere be acknowledged. To deny that each of the Italian centres had its own strong personality in art--that painting, as practised in Genoa or Naples, differed from the painting of Ferrara or Urbino--would be to contradict a law that has been over and over again insisted upon already in these volumes.

The broad outlines of the subject can be briefly stated. Surveying the map of Italy, we find that we may eliminate from our consideration the north-western and the southern provinces. Not from Piedmont nor from Liguria, not from Rome nor from the extensive kingdom of Naples, does Italian painting take its origin, or at any period derive important contributions.[119] Lombardy, with the exception of Venice, is comparatively barren of originative elements.[120] To Tuscany, to Umbria, and to Venice, roughly speaking, are due the really creative forces of Italian painting; and these three districts were marked by strong peculiarities. In art, as in politics, Florence and Venice exhibit distinct types of character.[121] The Florentines developed fresco, and devoted their genius to the expression of thought by scientific design.

The Venetians perfected oil-painting, and set forth the glory of the world as it appeals to the imagination and the senses. The art of Florence may seem to some judges to savour over-much of intellectual dryness; the art of Venice, in the apprehension of another cla.s.s of critics, offers something over-much of material richness. More allied to the Tuscan than to the Venetian spirit, the Umbrian masters produced a style of genuine originality. The cities of the Central Apennines owed their specific quality of religious fervour to the influences emanating from a.s.sisi, the head-quarters of the _cultus_ of S. Francis. This pietism, nowhere else so paramount, except for a short period in Siena, const.i.tutes the individuality of Umbria.

With regard to the rest of Italy, the old custom of speaking about schools and places, instead of signalising great masters, has led to misconception, by making it appear that local circ.u.mstances were more important than the facts justify. We do not find elsewhere what we find in Tuscany, in Umbria, and in Venice--a definite quality, native to the district, shared through many generations by all its painters, and culminating in a few men of commanding genius. When, for instance, we speak of the School of Milan, what we mean is the continuation through Lionardo da Vinci and his pupils of the Florentine tradition, as modified by him and introduced into the Lombard capital. That a special style was developed by Luini, Ferrari, and other artists of the Milanese duchy, so that their manner differs essentially from that of Parma and Cremona, does not invalidate the importance of this fact about its origin. The name of Roman School, again, has been given to Raphael and Michael Angelo together with their pupils. The truth is that Rome, for one brief period, during the pontificates of Julius and Leo, was the focus of Italian intellect.

Allured by the patronage of the Papal Curia, not only artists, but scholars and men of letters, flocked from all the cities of Italy to Rome, where they found a n.o.bler sphere for the exercise of their faculties than elsewhere. But Rome, while she lent her imperial quality of grandeur to the genius of her aliens, was in no sense originative. Rome produced no first-rate master from her own children, if we except Giulio Romano. The t.i.tle of originality is due rather to Padua, the birthplace of Mantegna, or to Parma, the city of Correggio, whose works display independence of either Florentine or Venetian traditions. Yet these great masters were isolated, neither expressing in any definite form the character of their districts, nor founding a succession of local artists. Their influence was incontestably great, but widely diffused. Bologna and Ferrara, Brescia and Bergamo, Cremona and Verona, have excellent painters; and it is not difficult to show that in each of these cities art a.s.sumed specific characters. Yet the interest of the schools in these towns is due mainly to the varied influences brought to bear upon them from Venice, Umbria, and Milan. In other words they are affiliated, each according to its geographical position, to the chief originative centres.

What I have advanced in the foregoing paragraphs is not meant for a polemic against the time-honoured division of Italian painters into local schools, but for a justification of my own proposed method of treatment.

Having undertaken to deal with painting as the paramount art-product of the Renaissance, it will be my object to point out the leading characteristics of aesthetic culture in Italy, rather than to dwell upon its specific differences. The Venetian painters I intend to reserve for a separate chapter, devoting this and the two next to the general history of the art as developed in Tuscany and propagated by Tuscan influences.[122]

In pursuing this plan I shall endeavour to show how the successive stages in the evolution of Italian painting corresponded to similar stages in the history of the Renaissance. Beginning as the handmaid of the Church, and stimulated by the enthusiasm of the two great popular monastic orders, painting was at first devoted to embodying the thoughts of mediaeval Christianity. In proportion as the painters fortified themselves by study of the natural world, their art became more secular. Mysticism gave way to realism. It was felt that much beside religious sentiment was worthy of expression. At the same time, about the year 1440, this process of secularisation was hastened by the influences of the cla.s.sical revival, renewing an interest in the past life of humanity, and stirring a zeal for science. The painters, on the one hand, now aimed at accurate delineation of actual things: good perspective, correct drawing, sound portraiture, occupied their attention, to the exclusion of more purely spiritual motives. On the other hand they conceived an admiration for the fragments of the newly discovered antiques, and felt the plastic beauty of h.e.l.lenic legends. It is futile to attempt, as M. Rio has done, to prove that this abandonment of the religious sphere of earlier art was for painting a plain decline from good to bad, or to make the more or less of spiritual feeling in a painter's style the test of his degree of excellence; nor can we by any sophistries be brought to believe that the Popes of the fifteenth century were pastoral protectors of solely Christian arts. The truth is, that in the Church, in politics, and in society, the fifteenth century witnessed a sensible decrease of religious fervour, and a very considerable corruption of morality. Painting felt this change; and the secularisation, which was inevitable, pa.s.sed onward into paganism. Yet the art itself cannot be said to have suffered, when on the threshold of the sixteenth century stand the greatest painters whom the world has known--neither Catholics nor Heathens, but, in their strength of full accomplished art and science, human. After Italy, in the course of that century, had been finally enslaved, then, and not till then, painting suffered from the general depression of the national genius. The great luminaries were extinguished one by one, till none were left but Michael Angelo in Rome, and Tintoret in Venice. The subsequent history of Italian painting is occupied with its revival under the influences of the counter-Reformation, when a new religious sentiment, emasculated and ecstatic, was expressed in company with crude naturalism and cruel sensualism by Bolognese and Neapolitan painters.

I need scarcely repeat the tale of Cimabue's picture, visited by Charles of Anjou, and borne in triumph through the streets with trumpeters, beneath a shower of garlands, to S. Maria Novella.[123] Yet this was the birthday festival of nothing less than what the world now values as Italian painting. In this public act of joy the people of Florence recognised and paid enthusiastic honour to the art arisen among them from the dead. If we rightly consider the matter, it is not a little wonderful that a whole community should thus have hailed the presence in their midst of a new spirit of power and beauty. It proves the widespread sensibility of the Florentines to things of beauty, and shows the sympathy which, emanating from the people, was destined to inspire and brace the artist for his work.[124]

In a dark transept of S. Maria Novella, raised by steps above the level of the church, still hangs this famous "Madonna" of the Rucellai--not far, perhaps, from the spot where Boccaccio's youths and maidens met that Tuesday morning in the year of the great plague; nor far, again, from where the solitary woman, beautiful beyond belief, conversed with Machiavelli on the morning of the first of May in 1527.[125] We who can call to mind the scenes that picture has looked down upon--we who have studied the rise and decadence of painting throughout Italy from this beginning even to the last work of the latest Bolognese--may do well to visit it with reverence, and to ponder on the race of mighty masters whose lineage here takes its origin.

Cimabue did not free his style from what are called Byzantine or Romanesque mannerisms. To unpractised eyes his saints and angels, with their stiff draperies and angular att.i.tudes, though they exhibit stateliness and majesty, belong to the same tribe as the grim mosaics and gaunt frescoes of his predecessors. It is only after careful comparison that we discover, in this picture of the Rucellai for example, a distinctly fresh endeavour to express emotion and to depict life. The outstretched arms of the infant Christ have been copied from nature, not merely borrowed from tradition. The six kneeling angels display variety of att.i.tude suited to several shades of devout affection and adoring service.

The head of the Madonna, heavy as it is and conventional in type, still strives to represent maternal affection mingled with an almost melancholy reverence. Prolonging our study, we are led to ask whether the painter might not have painted more freely had he chosen--whether, in fact, he was not bound down to the antique mode of presentation consecrated by devout tradition. This question occurs with even greater force before the wall-paintings ascribed to Cimabue in the church of S. Francis at a.s.sisi.

It remained for Giotto Bondone, born at Vespignano in 1276, just at the date of Niccola Pisano's death, to carry painting in his lifetime even further than the Pisan sculptor had advanced the sister art. Cimabue, so runs a legend luckily not yet discredited, found the child Giotto among the sheep-folds on the solemn Tuscan hill-side, drawing with boyish art the outline of a sheep upon a stone.[126] The master recognised his talent, and took him from his father's cottage to the Florentine _bottega_, much as young Haydn was taken by Renter to S. Stephen's at Vienna. Gifted with a large and comprehensive intellect, capable of sustained labour, and devoted with the unaffected zeal of a good craftsman to his art, Giotto in the course of his long career filled Italy with work that taught succeeding centuries of painters. As we travel from Padua in the north, where his Arena Chapel sets forth the legend of Mary and the life of Christ in a series of incomparable frescoes, southward to Naples, where he adorned the convent of S. Chiara, we meet with Giotto in almost every city. The "Pa.s.sion of our Lord" and the "Allegories of S. Francis"

were painted by him at a.s.sisi. S. Peter's at Borne still shows his mosaic of the "Ship of the Church." Florence raises his wonderful bell-tower, that lily among campanili, to the sky; and preserves two chapels of S.

Croce, illuminated by him with paintings from the stories of S. Francis and S. John. In the chapel of the Podesta he drew the portraits of Dante, Brunetto Latini, and Charles of Valois. And these are but a t.i.the of his productions. Nothing, indeed, in the history of art is more remarkable than the fertility of this originative genius, no less industrious in labour than fruitful of results for men who followed him. The sound common sense, the genial temper, and the humour of the man, as we learn to know him in tales made current by Vasari and the novelists, help to explain how he achieved so much, with energy so untiring and with excellence so even.

It is no exaggeration to say that Giotto and his scholars, within the s.p.a.ce of little more than half a century, painted out upon the walls of the churches and public palaces of Italy every great conception of the Middle Ages. And this they achieved without ascetic formalism, energetically, but always reverently, aiming at expressing life and dramatising Scripture history. The tale told about Giotto's first essay in drawing might be chosen as a parable: he was not found beneath a church roof tracing a mosaic, but on the open mountain, trying to draw the portrait of the living thing committed to his care.

What, therefore, Giotto gave to art was, before all things else, vitality.

His Madonnas are no longer symbols of a certain phase of pious awe, but pictures of maternal love. The Bride of G.o.d suckles her divine infant with a smile, watches him playing with a bird, or stretches out her arms to take him when he turns crying from the hands of the circ.u.mcising priest.

By choosing incidents like these from real home-life, Giotto, through his painting, humanised the mysteries of faith, and brought them close to common feeling. Nor was the change less in his method than his motives.

Before his day painting had been without composition, without charm of colour, without suggestion of movement or the play of living energy. He first knew how to distribute figures in the given s.p.a.ce with perfect balance, and how to ma.s.s them together in animated groups agreeable to the eye. He caught varied and transient shades of emotion, and expressed them by the posture of the body and the play of feature. The hues of morning and of evening served him. Of all painters he was most successful in preserving the clearness and the light of pure, well-tempered colours. His power of telling a story by gesture and action is unique in its peculiar simplicity. There are no ornaments or accessories in his pictures. The whole force of the artist has been concentrated on rendering the image of the life conceived by him. Relying on his knowledge of human nature, and seeking only to make his subject intelligible, no painter is more unaffectedly pathetic, more unconsciously majestic. While under the influence of his genius, we are sincerely glad that the requisite science for clever imitation of landscape and architectural backgrounds was not forthcoming in his age. Art had to go through a toilsome period of geometrical and anatomical pedantry, before it could venture, in the frescoes of Michael Angelo and Raphael, to return with greater wealth of knowledge on a higher level to the divine simplicity of its childhood in Giotto.

In the drawing of the figure Giotto was surpa.s.sed by many meaner artists of the fifteenth century. Nor had he that quality of genius which selects a high type of beauty, and is scrupulous to shun the commonplace. The faces of even his most sacred personages are often almost vulgar. In his choice of models for saints and apostles we already trace the Florentine instinct for contemporary portraiture. Yet, though his knowledge of anatomy was defective, and his taste was realistic, Giotto solved the great problem of figurative art far better than more learned and fastidious painters. He never failed to make it manifest that what he meant to represent was living. Even to the non-existent he gave the semblance of reality. We cannot help believing in his angels leaning waist-deep from the blue sky, wringing their hands in agony above the Cross, pacing like deacons behind Christ when He washes the feet of His disciples, or sitting watchful and serene upon the empty sepulchre. He was, moreover, essentially a fresco-painter, working with rapid decision on a large scale, aiming at broad effects, and willing to sacrifice subtlety to clearness of expression. The health of his whole nature and his robust good sense are everywhere apparent in his solid, concrete, human work of art. There is no trace of mysticism, no ecstatic piety, nothing morbid or hysterical, in his imagination. Imbuing whatever he handled with the force and freshness of actual existence, Giotto approached the deep things of the Christian faith and the legend of S.

Francis in the spirit of a man bent simply on realising the objects of his belief as facts. His allegories of "Poverty," "Chast.i.ty," and "Obedience,"

at a.s.sisi, are as beautiful and powerfully felt as they are carefully constructed. Yet they conceal no abstruse spiritual meaning, but are plainly painted "for the poor laity of love to read." The artist poet who coloured the virginal form of Poverty, with the briars beneath her feet and the roses blooming round her forehead, proved by his well-known _canzone_ that he was free from monastic Quixotism, and took a practical view of the value of worldly wealth.[127] His homely humour saved him from the exaltation and the childishness that formed the weakness of the Franciscan revival. By the same firm grasp upon reality he created more than mere abstractions in his _chiaroscuro_ figures of the virtues and vices at Padua. Fort.i.tude and Justice, Faith and Envy, are gifted by him with a real corporeal existence. They seem fit to play their parts with other concrete personalities upon the stage of this world's history.

Giotto in truth possessed a share of that power which belonged to the Greek sculptors. He embodies myths in physical forms, adequate to their intellectual meaning. This was in part the secret of the influence he exercised over the sculptors of the second period;[128] and had the conditions of the age been favourable to such development, some of the allegorical types created by him might have pa.s.sed into the Pantheon of popular worship as deities incarnate.

The birth of Italian painting is closely connected with the religious life of the Italians. The building of the church of S. Francis at a.s.sisi gave it the first great impulse; and to the piety aroused by S. Francis throughout Italy, but mostly in the valleys of the Apennines, it owed its animating spirit in the fourteenth century. The church of a.s.sisi is double. One structure of nave, and choir, and transept, is imposed upon another; and the walls of both, from floor to coping-stone, are covered with fresco-painted pictures taking here the place occupied by mosaic in such churches as the cathedral of Monreale, or by coloured gla.s.s in the northern cathedrals of the pointed style. Many of these frescoes date from years before the birth of Giotto. Giunta the Pisan, Gaddo Gaddi, and Cimabue, are supposed to have worked there, painfully continuing or feebly struggling to throw off the decadent traditions of a dying art. In their school Giotto laboured, and modern painting arose with the movement of new life beneath his brush. Here, pondering in his youth upon the story of Christ's suffering, and in his later manhood on the virtues of S. Francis and his vow, he learned the secret of giving the semblance of flesh and blood reality to Christian thought. His achievement was nothing less than this. The Creation, the Fall, the Redemption of the World, the moral discipline of man, the Judgment, and the final state of bliss or misery--all these he quickened into beautiful and breathing forms. Those were n.o.ble days, when the painter had literally acres of walls given him to cover; when the whole belief of Christendom, grasped by his own faith, and firmly rooted in the faith of the people round him, as yet unimpaired by alien emanations from the world of cla.s.sic culture, had to be set forth for the first time in art. His work was then a Bible, a compendium of grave divinity and human history, a book embracing all things needful for the spiritual and the civil life of man. He spoke to men who could not read, for whom there were no printed pages, but whose heart received his teaching through the eye. Thus painting was not then what it is now, a decoration of existence, but a potent and efficient agent in the education of the race. Such opportunities do not occur twice in the same age. Once in Greece for the pagan world; once in Italy for the modern world;--that must suffice for the education of the human race.

Like Niccola Pisano, Giotto not only founded a school in his native city, but spread his manner far and wide over Italy, so that the first period of the history of painting is the Giottesque. The Gaddi of Florence, Giottino, Puccio Capanna, the Lorenzetti of Siena, Spinello of Arezzo, Andrea Orcagna, Domenico Veneziano, and the lesser artists of the Pisan Campo Santo, were either formed or influenced by him. To give an account of the frescoes of these painters would be to describe how the religious, social, and philosophical conceptions of the fourteenth century found complete expression in form and colour. By means of allegory and pictured scene they drew the portrait of the Middle Age in Italy, performing jointly and in combination with the followers of Niccola Pisano what Dante had done singly by his poetry.

It has often been remarked that the drama of the life beyond this world--its prologue in the courts of death, the tragedy of judgment, and the final state of bliss or misery prepared for souls--preoccupied the mind of the Italians at the close of the Middle Ages. Every city had its pictorial representation of the "Dies Irae;" and within this framework the artist was free to set forth his philosophy of human nature, adding such touches of satire or admonition as suited his own temper or the circ.u.mstances of the place for which he worked. Dante's poem has immortalised this moment of Italian consciousness, when the belief in another world was used to intensify the emotions of this life--when the inscrutable darkness toward which men travel became for them a black and polished mirror reflecting with terrible luminousness the events of the present and the past. So familiar had the Italians become with the theme of death artistically treated, that they did not shrink from acted pageants of the tragedy of h.e.l.l. Giovanni Villani tells us that in 1304 the companies and clubs of pleasure, formed for making festival throughout the town of Florence on the 1st of May, contended with each other for the prize of novelty and rarity in sports provided for the people. "Among the rest, the Borgo S. Friano had it cried about the streets, that whoso wished for news from the other world, should find himself on Mayday on the bridge Carraja or the neighbouring banks of Arno. And in Arno they contrived stages upon boats and various small craft, and made the semblance and figure of h.e.l.l there with flames and other pains and torments, with men dressed as demons horrible to see; and others had the shape of naked souls; and these they gave unto those divers tortures with exceeding great crying and groaning and confusion, the which seemed hateful and appalling unto eyes and ears. The novelty of the sport drew many citizens, and the bridge Carraja, then of wood, was so crowded that it brake in several places and fell with the folk upon it, whereby were many killed and drowned, and many were disabled; and as the crier had proclaimed, so now in death went much folk to learn news of the other world."

Such being the temper of the people, we find that some of the greatest works of art in this age were paintings of Death and h.e.l.l, Heaven and Judgment. Orcagna, in the Strozzi Chapel of S. Maria Novella, set forth these scenes with a wonderful blending of beauty and grotesque invention.

In the treatment of the Inferno he strove to delineate the whole geography of Dante's first _cantica_, tracing the successive circles and introducing the various episodes commemorated by the poet. Interesting as this work may be for the ill.u.s.tration of the "Divine Comedy" as understood by Dante's immediate successors, we turn from it with a sense of relief to admire the saints and angels ranged in goodly row, "each burning upward to his point of bliss" whereby the painter has depicted Paradise. Early Italian art has nothing more truly beautiful to offer than the white-robed Madonna kneeling at the judgment seat of Christ.[129]

It will be felt by every genuine student of art that if Orcagna painted these frescoes in S. Maria Novella, whereof there is no doubt, he could not have executed the wall-paintings in the Campo Santo at Pisa attributed to him by Vasari. To what artists or artist we owe those three grave and awful panels, may still be regarded an open question.[130] At the end of the southern wall of the cemetery, exposed to a cold and equal north light from the cloister windows, these great compositions, after the lapse of five centuries, bring us face to face with the most earnest thoughts of mediaeval Christianity. Their main purpose seems to be to ill.u.s.trate the advantage of the ascetic over the secular mode of life, and to school men into living with the fear of death before their eyes. The first displays the solitary vigils, self-imposed penances, cruel temptations, firm endurance, and beatific visions of the anchorites in the Thebaid. The second is devoted to the triumph of Death over the pomp, strength, wealth, and beauty of the world. The third reveals a grimly realistic and yet awfully imaginative vision of judgment, such as it has rarely been granted to a painter to conceive. Thus to the awakening soul of the Italians, on the threshold of the modern era, with the sonnets of Petrarch and the stories of Boccaccio sounding in their memories, this terrible master presented the three saddest phantoms of the Middle Ages--the spectre of death omnipotent, the solitude of the desert as the only refuge from a sinful and doomed world, the dread of Divine justice inexorable and inevitable. In those piles of the promiscuous and abandoned dead, those fiends and angels poised in mid-air struggling for souls, those blind and mutilated beggars vainly besieging Death with prayers and imprecations for deliverance, while she descends in her robe of woven wire to mow down with her scythe the knights and ladies in their garden of delight; again in those horses snuffing at the open graves, those countesses and princes face to face with skeletons, those serpents coiling round the flesh of what was once fair youth or maid, those mult.i.tudes of guilty men and women trembling beneath the trump of the archangel--tearing their cheeks, their hair, their b.r.e.a.s.t.s in agony, because they see h.e.l.l through the prison-bars, and hear the raging of its fiends, and feel the clasp upon their wrists and ankles of clawed hairy demon hands; in all this terrific amalgamation of sinister and tragic ideas, vividly presented, full of coa.r.s.e dramatic power, and intensified by faith in their material reality, the Lorenzetti brethren, if theirs be indeed the hands that painted here, summed up the nightmares of the Middle Age and bequeathed an ever memorable picture of its desolate preoccupations to the rising world. They have called to their aid poetry, and history, and legend. Boccaccio supplies them with the garden scene of youths and damsels dancing among roses, while the plague is at their gates, and death is in the air above.

From Petrarch they have borrowed the form and mystic robe of Death herself[131]. Uguccione della f.a.ggiuola has sat for the portrait of the Captain who must quail before the terrors of the tomb, and Castruccio Castracane is the strong man cut off in the blossom of his age. The prisons of the Visconti have disgorged their victims, cast adrift with maiming that makes life unendurable but does not hasten death.[132] The lazar houses and the charnels have been ransacked for forms of grisly decay. Thus the whole work is not merely "an hieroglyphical and shadowed lesson" of ascetic philosophy; it is also a realisation of mediaeval life in its cruellest intensity and most uncompromising truth. For mere beauty these painters had but little regard.[133] Their distribution of the subjects chosen for treatment on each panel shows, indeed, a keen sense for the value of dramatic contrast and a masterly power of varying while combining the composition. Their chief aim, however, is to produce the utmost realism of effect, to translate the poignancy of pa.s.sion, the dread certainty of doom, into forms of unmistakable fidelity. Therefore they do not shrink from prosaic and revolting details. The knight who has to hold his nose above the open grave, the lady who presses her cheek against her hand with a spasm of distress, the horse who p.r.i.c.ks his ears and snorts with open nostrils, the grooms who start aside like savage creatures, all suggest the loathsomeness of death, its physical repulsiveness. In the "Last Judgment" the same kind of dramatic force is used to heighten a sublime conception. The crouching att.i.tude and the shrouded face of the Archangel Raphael, whose eyes alone are visible above the hand that he has thrust forth from his cloak to hide the grief he feels, prove more emphatically than any less realistic motive could have done, how terrible, even for the cherubic beings to whose guardianship the human race has been a.s.signed, will be the trumpet of the wrath of G.o.d.[134]

Studying these frescoes, we cannot but reflect what nerves, what brains, what hearts encased in triple bra.s.s the men who thought and felt thus must have possessed. They make us comprehend not merely the stern and savage temper of the Middle Ages, but the intense and fiery ebullition of the Renaissance, into which, as by a sudden liberation, so much imprisoned pent-up force was driven.

A different but scarcely less important phase of mediaeval thought is imaged in the frescoes of the Cappella degli Spagnuoli in S. Maria Novella.[135] Dogmatic theology is here in the ascendant. While S. Francis bequeathed a legend of singular suavity and beauty, overflowing with the milk of charity and mildness, to the Church, S. Dominic a.s.sumed the att.i.tude of the saint militant and orthodox. Dante's words about him--

L'amoroso drudo[136]

Della fede Cristiana, il santo atleta, Benigno a' suoi, ed a' nemici crudo,

omit nothing that is needed to characterise the impression produced upon the Christian world by this remorseless foe of heresy, this champion of the faith who dealt in butcheries and burnings. S. Francis taught love; S.

Dominic taught wrath: and both, perhaps, were needed for the safety of the mediaeval Church--the one by resuscitating the spirit of the Gospels, the other by resisting the intrusion of alien ideals ere the time for their triumph had arrived. What the painters of these frescoes undertook to delineate for the Dominicans of Florence, was the fabric of society sustained and held together by the action of inquisitors and doctors issued from their order. The Pope with his Cardinals, the Emperor with his Council, represent the two chief forces of Christendom, as conceived by the mediaeval jurists and the school of Dante. Seated on thrones, they are ready to rise in defence of Holy Church, symbolised by a picture of S.

Maria del Fiore. At their feet the black and white hounds of the Dominican order--_Domini canes_, according to the monkish pun--are hunting heretical wolves. Opposite this painting is the apotheosis of S. Thomas Aquinas.

Beneath the footstool of this "dumb ox of Sicily," as he was called, grovel the heresiarchs--Arius, Sabellius, Averroes. At again a lower level, as though supporting the saint on either hand, are ranged seven sacred and seven profane sciences, each with its chief representative.

Thus Rhetoric and Cicero, Civil Law and Justinian, Speculative Theology and the Areopagite, Practical Theology and Peter Lombard, Geometry and Euclid, Arithmetic and Abraham, are grouped together. It will be seen that the whole learning of the Middle Age--its philosophy as well as its divinity--is here combined as in a figured abstract, for the wise to comment on and for the simple to peruse. None can avoid drawing the lesson that knowledge exists for the service of the Church, and that the Church, while she instructs society, will claim complete obedience to her decrees.

The _ipse dixit_ of the Dominican author of the "Summa" is law.

Such frescoes, by no means uncommon in Dominican cloisters, still retain great interest for the student of scholastic thought. In the church of S.

Maria Sopra Minerva at Rome, where Galileo was afterwards compelled to sign his famous retractation, Filippino Lippi painted another triumph of S.

Thomas, conceived in the spirit of Taddeo Gaddi's, but expressed with the freedom of the middle Renaissance. Nor should we neglect to notice the remarkable picture by Traini in S. Caterina at Pisa. Here the doctor of Aquino is represented in an aureole surrounded by a golden sphere or disc, on the edge of which are placed the four evangelists, together with Moses and S. Paul.[137] At his side, within the burnished sphere, Plato and Aristotle stand upright, holding the "Timaeus" and the "Ethics" in their hands. Christ in glory is above the group, emitting from His mouth three rays upon the head of S. Thomas. Single rays descend in like manner upon the evangelists and Moses and S. Paul. They, like Plato and Aristotle, hold open books; and rays from these eight volumes converge upon the head of the angelical doctor, who becomes the focus, as it were, of all the beams sent forth from Christ and from the cla.s.sic teachers, whether directly effused or transmitted through the writers of the Bible. S.

Thomas lastly holds a book open in his hand, and carries others on his lap; while lines of light are shed from these upon two bands of the faithful, chiefly Dominican monks, arranged on each side of his footstool.

Averroes lies prostrate beneath his feet with his book face downwards, lightning-smitten by a shaft from the leaves of the volume in the saint's hand, whereon is written: _veritatem meditabitur guttur meum et l.a.b.i.a mea detestabuntur impium_.[138]

This picture, afterwards repeated by Benozzo Gozzoli with some change in the persons,[139] has been minutely described, because it is important to bear in mind the measure of inspiration conceded by the mediaeval Church to the fathers of Greek philosophy, and her utter detestation of the peripatetic traditions transmitted through the Arabic by Averroes.

Averroes, though Dante placed him with the great souls of pagan civilisation in the first circle of Inferno,[140] was regarded as the protagonist of infidelity. The myth of incredulity that gathered round his memory and made him hated in the Middle Ages, has been traced with exquisite delicacy by Renan,[141] who shows that his name became a rallying point for freethinkers. Scholars like Petrarch were eager to confute his sect, and artists used him as a symbol of materialistic disbelief. Thus we meet with Averroes among the lost souls in the Pisan Campo Santo, distinguished as usual by his turban and long beard. On the other hand, the frank acceptance of pagan philosophy, insofar as it could be accommodated to the doctrine of the Church, finds full expression in the art of this early period. On the walls of the Palazzo Pubblico at Siena were painted the figures of Curius Dentatus and Cato,[142] while the pavement of the Duomo showed Hermes Trismegistus instructing both a pagan and a Christian, and Socrates ascending the steep hill of virtue.

Perugino, some years later, decorated the Sala del Cambio at Perugia with the heroes, philosophers, and worthies of the ancient world. We are thus led by a gradual progress up to the final achievement of Raphael in the Vatican. Separating the antique from the Christian tradition, but placing them upon an equality in his art, Raphael made the "School of Athens" an epitome of Greek and Roman wisdom, while in the "Dispute of the Sacrament"

he symbolised the Church in heaven and Church on earth.

Another cla.s.s of ideas, no less ill.u.s.trative of mediaevalism, can be studied in the Palazzo Pubblico at Siena. There, on the walls of the Sala della Pace or de' Nove, may be seen the frescoes whereby Ambrogio Lorenzetti expressed theories of society and government peculiar to his age.[143] The panels are three in number. In the first the painter has delineated the Commune of Siena by an imperial male figure in the prime of life, throned on a judgment-seat, holding a sceptre in his right hand and a medallion of Justice in his left.[144] He wears no coronet, but a burgher's cap; and beneath his footstool are the Roman twins, suckled by the she-wolf.[145] Above his head in the air float Faith, Charity, and Hope--the Christian virtues; while Justice, Temperance, Magnanimity, Prudence, Fort.i.tude, and Peace, six women, crowned, and with appropriate emblems, are enthroned beside him. The majestic giant of the Commune towers above them all in bulk and stature, as though to indicate the people's sovereignty. The virtues are his a.s.sessors and inspirers--he is King. Beneath the das occupied by these supreme personages, are ranged on either hand mailed and visored cavaliers, mounted on chargers, the guardians of the State. All the citizens in their degrees advance toward the throne, carrying between them, pair by pair, a rope received from the hands of Concord; while some who have transgressed her laws, are being brought with bound hands to the judgment-seat. Concord herself, being less the virtue of the government than of the governed, is seated on a line with the burghers in a place apart beneath the throne of Civil Justice, who is allegorised as the dispenser of rewards and punishments, as well as controller of the armed force and the purse of the community. The whole of this elaborate allegory suffers by the language of description. Those who have seen it, and who are familiar with Sienese chronicles, feel that, artistically laboured as the painter's work may be, every figure had a pa.s.sionate and intense meaning for him[146]. His picture is the epitome of government conducted by a sovereign people. Nor can we fail to be struck with the beauty of some details. The pale earnest faces of the hors.e.m.e.n are eminently chivalrous, with knightly honour written on their calm and fearless features. Peace, reclining at ease upon her pillow, is a lovely woman in loose raiment, her hair wreathed with blossoms, in her hand an olive branch, her feet reposing upon casque and shield. She is like a painted statue, making us wonder whether the artist had not copied her from the "Aphrodite" of Lysippus, ere the Sienese destroyed this statue in their dread of paganism[147].

In the other two panels of this hall Ambrogio Lorenzetti painted the contrast of good and bad government, harmony and discord. A city full of brawls and bloodshed is set in opposition to one where the dance and viol do not cease. Merchants are plundered as they issue from the gates on one side; on the other, trains of sumpter mules are securely winding along mountain paths. Tyranny, with all the vices for his council and with Terror for prime minister, presides over the ill-governed town. The burghers of the happy commune follow trade or pleasure, as they list; a beautiful winged genius, inscribed "Securitas," floats above their citadel. It should be added that in both these pictures the architecture is the same; for the painter has designed to teach how different may be the state of one and the same city according to its form of government.

Such then were the vivid images whereby Ambrogio Lorenzetti expressed the mediaeval curse of discord, and the ideal of a righteous rule. It is only necessary to read the "Diario Sanese" of Allegretto Allegretti in order to see that he drew no fancy picture. The torchlight procession of burghers swearing amity by couples in the cathedral there described, receives exact pictorial ill.u.s.tration in the fresco of the Sala della Pace[148]. Siena, by her b.l.o.o.d.y factions and her pa.s.sionate peacemakings, expressed in daily action what the painter had depicted on her palace walls.

The method of treatment adopted for these chapters has obliged me to give priority to Florence, and to speak of the two Lorenzetti, Pietro in the Pisan Campo Santo and Ambrogio in the Sala della Pace at Siena, as though they were followers of Giotto; so true is it that the main currents of Tuscan art were governed by Florentine influences, and that Giotto's genius made itself felt in all the work of his immediate successors. It must, however, be observed that painting had an independent origin among the Sienese, and that Guido da Siena may claim to rank even earlier than Cimabue.[149] In the year 1260, just before engaging in their duel with Florence, the Sienese dedicated their city to the Virgin; and the victory of Montaperti, following immediately upon this vow, gave a marked impulse to their piety.[150] The early masters of Siena devoted themselves to religious paintings, especially to pictures of Madonna suited for chapels and oratories. We find upon these mystic panels an ecstasy of adoration and a depth of fervour which are alien to the more sober spirit of Florence, combined with an almost infantine delight in pure bright colours, and in the decorative details of the miniaturist.

The first great painter among the Sienese was Duccio di Buoninsegna.[151]

The completion of his masterpiece--a picture of the Majesty of the Virgin, executed for the high altar of the Duomo--marked an epoch in the history of Siena. Nearly two years had been spent upon it; the painter receiving sixteen soldi a day from the Commune, together with his materials, in exchange for his whole time and skill and labour. At last, on June 9, 1310, it was carried from Duccio's workshop to its place in the cathedral.

A procession was formed by the clergy, with the archbishop at their head, followed by the magistrates of the Commune, and the chief men of the Monte de' Nove. These great folk crowded round their Lady; after came a mult.i.tude of burghers bearing tapers; while the rear was brought up by women and children. The bells rang and trumpets blew as this new image of the Sovereign Mistress of Siena was borne along the summer-smiling streets of her metropolis to take its throne in her high temple. Duccio's altar-piece presented on one face to the spectator a Virgin seated with the infant Christ upon her lap, and receiving the homage of the patron saints of Siena. On the other, he depicted the princ.i.p.al scenes of the Gospel story and the Pa.s.sion of our Lord in twenty-eight compartments.

What gives peculiar value to this elaborate work of Sienese art is, that in it Duccio managed to combine the tradition of an early hieratic style of painting with all the charm of brilliant colouring and with dramatic force of presentation only rivalled at that time by Giotto. Independently of Giotto, he performed at a stroke what Cimabue and his pupil had achieved for the Florentines, and bequeathed to the succeeding painters of Siena a tradition of art beyond which they rarely pa.s.sed.

Far more than their neighbours at Florence, the Sienese remained fettered by the technical methods and the pietistic formulae of the earliest religious painting. To make their conventional representations of Madonna's love and woe and glory burn with all the pa.s.sion of a fervent spirit, and to testify their worship by the oblation of rich gifts in colouring and gilding ma.s.sed around her, was their earnest aim. It followed that, when they attempted subjects on a really large scale, the faults of the miniaturist clung about them. I need hardly say that Ambrogio and Pietro Lorenzetti form notable exceptions to this general statement. It may be applied, however, with some truth to Simone Martini, the painter, who during his lifetime enjoyed a celebrity only second to that of Giotto.[152] Like Giotto, Simone exercised his art in many parts of Italy. Siena, Pisa, a.s.sisi, Orvieto, Naples, and Avignon can still boast of wall and easel pictures from his hand; and though it has been suggested that he took no part in the decoration of the Cappella degli Spagnuoli, the impress of his manner remains at Florence in those n.o.ble frescoes of the "Church Militant" and the "Consecration of S.

Dominic."[153] Simone's first undisputed works are to be seen at Siena and at a.s.sisi, where we learn what he could do as a _frescante_ in compet.i.tion with the ablest Florentines. In the Palazzo Pubblico of his native city he painted a vast picture of the Virgin enthroned beneath a canopy and surrounded by saints;[154] while at a.s.sisi he put forth his whole power in portraying the legend of S. Martin. In all his paintings we trace the skill of an exquisite and patient craftsman, elaborately careful to finish his work with the utmost refinement, sensitive to feminine beauty, full of delicate inventiveness, and gifted with a rare feeling for grace. These excellent qualities tend, however, towards affectation and over-softness; nor are they fortified by such vigour of conception or such majesty in composition as belong to the greatest _trecentisti_. The Lorenzetti alone soared high above the Sienese mannerism into a region of masculine imaginative art. We feel Simone's charm mostly in single heads and detached figures, some of which at a.s.sisi have incomparable sweetness.

"Molles Senae," the delicate and femininely variable, fond of all things brilliant, and unstable through defect of sternness, was the fit mother of this ingenious and delightful master.

After the days of Duccio and Simone Martini, of Ambrogio and Pietro Lorenzetti, were over, there remained but little for the Sienese to do in painting. Taddeo di Bartolo continued the tradition of Duccio as the later Giottesques continued that of Giotto. His most remarkable wall-painting is a fresco of the Apostles visiting the Virgin, the motive of which is marked by great originality.[155] Our Lady is seated in an open loggia with a company of holy men and women round her. Descending from the sky and floating through the arches are three of the Apostles, while one who has just alighted from his aerial transit kneels and folds his hands in adoration. Seldom have the longing and the peace of loving worship been more poetically expressed than here. The seated, kneeling, standing, and flying figures are admirably grouped together; their draperies are dignified and ma.s.sive; and the architectural accessories help the composition by dividing it into three balanced sections.

Such power of depicting movement was rare in the fourteenth century. To find its a.n.a.logue, we must betake ourselves to the frescoes of Spinello Aretino, a master more decidedly Giottesque than his contemporary Taddeo di Bartolo.[156] A Gabriel, rushing down from heaven to salute Madonna, with all the whirr of arch-angelic pinions and the glory of Paradise around him, is a fine specimen of Spinello's vehemence. The same quality, more tempered, is noticeable in his frescoes of the legend of S. Ephesus at Pisa.[157] Few faces in the paintings of any period are more fascinating than the profiles under steel-blue battle-caps of that G.o.dlike pair--the knightly saint and the Archangel Michael--breaking by the irresistible force of their onset and their calm youthful beauty through the mailed ranks of the Sardinian pagans. Spinello was essentially a warlike painter; among the best of his compositions may be named the series of pictures from the history of the Venetian campaign against Frederick Barbarossa.[158] It is a pity that the war of liberation carried on by the Lombard communes with the Empire should have left but little trace on Italian art; and therefore these paintings of Spinello, in addition to their intrinsic merit, have rare historical interest.

Delighting in the gleam of armour and the shock of speared warriors, Spinello communicated something of this fiery spirit even to his saints.

The monks of Samminiato near Florence employed him in 1388 to paint their newly-finished sacristy with the legend of S. Benedict. In the execution of this task Spinello displayed his usual grandeur and vigour, treating the grey-robed brethren of Monte Ca.s.sino like veritable champions of a militant Church. When he died in 1410, it might have been truly said that the flame of the torch kindled by Giotto was at last extinguished.

The student of history cannot but notice with surprise that a city famed like Siena for its vanity, its factious quarrels, and its delicate living, should have produced an almost pa.s.sionately ardent art of piety.[159] The same reflections are suggested at Perugia, torn by the savage feuds of the Oddi and Baglioni, at warfare with a.s.sisi, reduced to exhaustion by the discords of jealous parties, yet memorable in the history of painting as the head-quarters of the pietistic Umbrian school.

The contradiction is, however, in both cases more apparent than real. The people both of Siena and Perugia were highly impressible and emotional, quick to obey the promptings of their pa.s.sion, whether it took the form of hatred or of love, of spiritual fervour or of carnal violence. Yielding at one moment to the preachings of S. Bernardino, at another to the persuasions of Grifonetto degli Baglioni, the Perugians won the character of being fiends or angels according to the temper of their leaders; while Siena might boast with equal right of having given birth to S. Catherine and nurtured Beccadelli. The religious feeling was a pa.s.sion with them on a par with all the other movements of their quick and mobile temperament: it needed ecstatic art for its interpretation. What was cold and sober would not satisfy the men of these two cities. The Florentines, more justly balanced, less abandoned to the frenzies of impa.s.sioned impulse, less capable of feeling the rapt exaltation of the devotee, expressed themselves in art distinguished for its intellectual power, its sanity, its scientific industry, its adequacy to average human needs. Therefore, Florentine influences determined the course of painting in Central Italy.

Therefore Giotto, who represented the Florentine genius in the fourteenth century, set his stamp upon the Lorenzetti. The mystic painters of Umbria and Siena have their high and honoured place in the history of Italian art. They supply an element which, except in the work of Fra Angelico, was defective at Florence; but to the Florentines was committed the great charge of interpreting the spirit of Italian civilisation in all its branches, not for the cloister only, or the oratory, but for humanity at large, through painting.