The Cathedral Builders Part 25

[198] Merzario, _I Maestri Comacini_, Vol. II. ch. x.x.xviii. p. 420.

BOOK IV

ITALIAN-GOTHIC, AND RENAISSANCE ARCHITECTS

CHAPTER I

THE SECESSION OF THE PAINTERS

Painting is not generally supposed to be connected in any great degree with architecture: indeed it has now become a distinctly independent art. In the Middle Ages I believe the case was different. The great primitive Comacine Guild seems to have embraced all the decorative arts, though especially sculpture, as integral branches of architecture. There are indisputable proofs of the many-sided nature of the training in a Comacine _laborerium_. There were _Magistri insigneriorum_, or Master architects; _Magistri lapidum_, or sculptors, and _Magistri lignorum_, or master carpenters. These latter seem in old times to have been the designers of scaffoldings and makers of beams for roofing; wood-carvers and inlayers were called _Maestri d'intaglio_. Then there were certainly ironworkers and masters in metal, and fresco-painters, who also attained to the rank of Master. But no one branch was entirely separate from the others, until the fourteenth century, when the painters' companies were founded. We find the same man building, designing, sculpturing, painting, and even working in gold or iron, and seeming equally good in all styles, so that the training of the _laborerium_ must have been especially comprehensive.

The reason appears to be that all the fine arts--painting, sculpture and metal-working--were considered by the Comacines as indispensable handmaids to architecture, and no builder was in their eyes fit to be a Master till he could not only erect his edifice, but adorn it. Their symbolic church was to them a kind of Bible, figuring all the points of creeds, but the building itself was but the paper and binding of the Bible; the sculptor put the frontispiece which explained its inner meaning, and the mosaicist and fresco-painter added as it were the letter-press and ill.u.s.trations. The churches of Ravenna show how full and rich was this inner ill.u.s.tration, how Christ and the Apostles, angels and prophets, saints and martyrs, have shone on those walls, a beautiful Bible picture-book for ages. That this was the light in which the early Christians regarded their churches is plain from many pa.s.sages in the early Fathers. St. Basil (A.D. 379) in preaching, says--"Rise up, now, I pray you, ye celebrated painters of the good deeds of this army. Make glorious by your art the mutilated images of their leader. With colours laid on by your cunning, make ill.u.s.trious the crowned martyr, by me too feebly pictured. I retire vanquished before you in your painting of the excellences of the martyr, etc.

etc."[199]

[Ill.u.s.tration: EIGHTH-CENTURY WALL DECORATION IN SUBTERRANEAN CHURCH OF S. CLEMENTE, ROME.

_See pages 10 and 268._]

Here is the description of a Christian shrine by St. Gregory of Nyssa (fourth century)--"Whoso cometh unto some spot like this, where there is a monument of the just and a holy relic, his soul is gladdened by the magnificence of what he beholds, seeing a house as G.o.d's temple elaborated most gloriously, both in the magnitude of the structure, and the beauty of the surrounding ornament. There the artificer has fashioned wood into the shape of animals; and the stone-cutter has polished the slabs to the smoothness of silver; and the painter has introduced the flowers of his art, depicting and imaging the constancy of the martyrs, their resistance, their torments, the savage forms of their tyrants, their outrages, the blazing furnace and the most blessed end of the champion; the representation of Christ in human form presiding over the contest--all these things as it were in a book gifted with speech; shaping for us by means of colours, has he cunningly discoursed to us of the martyr's struggles, has made this temple glorious as some brilliant fertile mead. For the silent tracery on the walls has the art to discourse, and to aid most powerfully. And he who has arranged the mosaics has made this pavement on which we tread equal to a history." (From Father Mulroody's translation, in _San Clemente_, pp. 34, 35. St. Gregory wrote before A.D. 395.[200])

No doubt the richness of colour in these Byzantine mosaics inspired the taste for pictorial embellishment in the interiors of buildings, and the Comacines, not having Greek mosaicists at command, found an easier and quicker method of writing their scriptures on their walls--_i.e._ fresco. The first mention of frescoes is of those in the palace of Theodolinda, where her Lombards were portrayed on the walls.

Several Lombard churches also retain signs of having been frescoed.

But if one desires to see what the early Christian Comacine could do in fresco, let him go to that interesting Roman church of San Clemente, where some excavations made in 1857 revealed the ancient fourth-century Basilica, almost complete under the present one, which dates from about the twelfth century. This ancient church was built by St. Clement, the third bishop of Rome, and in it Gregory the Great read his thirty-second and thirty-eighth homilies. From the subterranean remains, with their grand ancient marble pillars and the huge semi-circle of the tribune, masked and built in though they are by the foundations of the upper church, we judge that it was a far finer building than the one above. Its walls were moreover covered with frescoes, some of which are precisely similar in style to the ones at S. Piero a Grado, also said to date before the tenth century.

The frescoes, which have been discovered on the subterranean walls, are, as will be seen by our ill.u.s.trations of them, in three rows, which appear to be of three different eras--two certainly. The upper band of saints and martyrs are distinctly Byzantine in style, drawing, and colouring. They show the usual rows of immobile saints and martyrs in set robes with jewelled borders, which are seen in the mosaics of the Ravenna churches. These would, I believe, date from the fourth-century church, when the Roman builders were employing Byzantine decoration. The second row beneath this is of the more naturalistic Comacine school, and would probably date from Pope Hadrian's restoration in the eighth century. In these and the frescoes of S. Piero a Grado one gets the veritable link between the conventional Byzantine school and the naturalistic Renaissance in Tuscany. Here are no longer icons or abstract images of saints; the people are no longer rigid and set, but are full of action and expression, though both are imperfectly expressed. They are, in fact, real persons and their stories. The life of St. Clement is all told in scenes. There are even portraits of living people, such as Beno di Rapizo and his wife Maria, who "for love of the blessed Clement"

caused the frescoes to be painted. Nor are their children, the boy Clement (_puerulus Clemens_) and little Atilia his sister, forgotten.

They are veritable portraits, for the face of Beno in two different scenes is identical. The colouring, too, is unlike the Byzantine saints above. Those are rich with solid heavy tints; these are lighter, and more in the style of the early Sienese or Tuscan ones.

Beneath this row of scenes are ornamental friezes, in which one recognizes Roman cla.s.sical forms naturalized into floriated scrolls, and under these a line of panelling in fresco. One panel appears to be copied from the mosaic of the ceiling at the circular church of Sta.

Costanza; another is suggestive of the emblematic circles and signs of the Catacombs. A third, the most interesting of all, is the one commemorating the building of the church to which we have before referred. Here stands Sisinius, and whether he be the hero of St.

Clement's miracle, as Father Mulroody a.s.serts, or not, he is certainly a Master architect standing in his toga, and wearing a Freemason's ap.r.o.n under it, directing his men, Albertus, Cosma, and Carvoncelle, in the moving of a column. The figures in this are so much more rude and out of drawing than the ones above, that they scarcely would seem to be by the same hands. I account for it by the fact that in representing a natural sketch from real life, the artist had no traditionary models to guide him, as he had for his saints and virgins, and consequently he found it difficult to depict his fellow-workmen in complicated att.i.tudes. The art of the Catacombs has no affinity with these frescoes, which are of a more free and natural style, and the true ancestors of the Tuscan school of fresco-painting.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FRESCOES OF THE 8TH CENTURY IN THE SUBTERRANEAN CHURCH OF S. CLEMENTE, ROME, WITH PORTRAITS OF THE PATRON BENO DI RAPIZO AND HIS FAMILY.

_See pages 10 and 268._]

We might place these as the earliest revival of nature after the Byzantine conventional influence was withdrawn; the next link is to be seen in the church of S. Piero a Grado, three miles from Pisa, where are extant by far the finest specimens of Comacine fresco-painting.

The church, which I have described in the chapter on the Carlovingian era, was built soon after the time of Pope Leo III. (795-816). The frescoes are said to date before A.D. 1000. Like those of St. Clement they are not Byzantine, and yet, though full of life and action, they have an Eastern air; they are not like the later Tuscan art, the colouring being lighter and the drawing of the figures different. The prevailing tint is a beautiful ethereal pale green, which is like nothing in Tuscan art, though Peruzzi produced a tint something like it in the sixteenth century. Standing at one end of the church and looking down the nave, one could imagine a Ravenna church, with its mosaics softened and toned down into frescoes. They are a valuable proof that among the Comacine Masters pictorial decoration was considered an integral part of a building. They told the articles of their creed in their sculptures outside, but they wrote the history of the church on the walls inside. The story of the church in the abstract is told in the line of popes above the arches, ending at Leo III.; the story of this church in particular is told in large scenes above them. Here is the church as it looked when built, and here is the ship of St. Peter cast ash.o.r.e at Grado, and his preaching and baptizing, imprisonment, etc. In fact all his life still glows, though fading out on the south wall. The north wall is given to his death and miracles. Here is his crucifixion, near an obelisk on the Janicular Hill, and the beheading of his fellow-martyr St. Paul at the Tre Fontane, with the mysterious blood-red bird that drank his blood.

Another scene shows the Pope Symmachus (A.D. 498) disinterring the bodies of the two Saints, and his vow of building S. John Lateran, and the last scene shows his consecration of that church. It is interesting to mark the Comacine influence in the drawing. The towers are Lombard towers, and the buildings all have round apses. The people who are not ecclesiastic or saints seem to be Longobardic, with reddish tunics, leather-thonged sandals, and long hair. As for the lions, which lie waiting before the cross of St. Peter, they are in the precise form of the crouching lions beneath a Comacine arch. The drawing of other beasts shows that the artists were less accustomed to them than to their traditional lions.

[Ill.u.s.tration: INTERIOR OF CHURCH OF SAN PIERO A GRADO NEAR PISA, WITH FRESCOES OF THE 9TH CENTURY.

_See page 270._]

If it be true that these frescoes, like the ones beneath San Clemente, were really of the ninth or tenth centuries, and if they were by native artists, this would place Pisa far before Siena in the history of art, and Merzario would be wrong when he a.s.serts that there was no school of art in Pisa before the cathedral was begun. The state of art in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries strongly inclines me to place these Byzantino-naturalistic paintings, according to legend, in the ninth century--that is, before the fall of art, which took place during the times of German invasion and feudal oppression after Charlemagne.

Certainly Cimabue, who is called the "Father of Tuscan Art," could not have painted them, though in the revival of his time he may have studied them, as earlier works of his guild, for we have doc.u.mental evidence of his connection as a _Magister_ with the Pisan Lodge. The first great painter of that lodge was Giunta di Pisa, sometimes written _Magister Juncte_. He was the son of a still older painter, Guidotto dal Colle, who was a Master in A.D. 1202, and lived till 1255.[201] We give a facsimile of an old print showing two of his paintings, one a figure from the fall of Simon Magus, in the church of St. Francis at a.s.sisi; another a St. John from an ancient crucifix in S. M. degli Angeli at a.s.sisi. The Byzantine style in Cimabue's painting may be traced to the influence of Giunta, of whom an ancient writer, Padre Angeli, when speaking of his paintings at a.s.sisi, says--"that though his teachers were Greeks, yet he learned his art in Italy, about A.D. 1210."[202] This is a proof of the connection of Eastern artists with the Western architects.

Giunta, who became a _Magister_ in 1210, preceded Giotto by a century, in the frescoes of St. Francis of a.s.sisi, where among other things he painted a crucifix with Frate Elias kneeling at the foot. Brother Elias was a scholar of St. Francis, and contemporary with Giunta himself, who has inscribed on his crucifix--

FRATER ELIAS FIERI FECIT JESU CHRISTE PIE MISERERE, PRECAUTIS HELIC.

GIUNTA PISa.n.u.s ME PINXIT A.D. 1236. IND. 9.

Morrona has reproduced, by a copper engraving, a veritable work of Giunta's--a crucifix with the Holy Father above, and the Madonna and St. John at the sides, which was for many years left in the smoke of the kitchen of the Monastery of St. Anna at Pisa. There is a decided effort to overcome the stiffness of his first Byzantine teachers, and a good deal of lifelike expression in the smaller figures. The same leaning toward nature is visible in the figures of his _Fall of Simon Magus_ at a.s.sisi. Del Valle and Morrona, judging by evidences of style, a.s.sert that Giunta di Pisa was the master of Cimabue. But as Giunta graduated as _Magister_ in 1210, and Cimabue was not born till 1240, this does not seem possible. It is more likely, in regard to time, that Guido of Siena, painter of the famous Madonna in San Domenico, may have learned something of Giunta; but as all three of these primary Masters, each of whom became the head of the painting school in his own lodge, were members of the great guild, the source of instruction might have been common to all, and moreover that source must have been originally or partly Byzantine.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FROM PAINTINGS IN a.s.sISI BY MAGISTER GIUNTA OF PISA.

_See page 271._]

While mentioning that Giunta learned of Greek masters in Italy, we may note that Vasari, _a propos_ of Cimabue, tells a story of the Florentines calling in Greek masters to teach painting there. The a.s.sertion has been much derided by modern authors, but it might contain a grain of truth after all. Taking it with the fact (which becomes impressed on us the more we study early Comacine churches) that the architecture is Roman, and the ornamentation shows a Greek influence naturalized, we get at what may be the truth; that the Byzantine brethren who joined the guild after the edict of Leo the Isaurian, still had their descendants in it, among the ranks of the painters, as the Campionese and Buoni families had for centuries theirs among the architects. This would account for Andrea Tafi working, together with Apollonius the Greek, at the mosaics in the tribune of the Florentine Baptistery.[203]

Del Migliore, in his _Aggiunte_ to Vasari's _Lives_, says that in a contract dated 1297 he read "Magister Apollonius pictor Florentinus."

Here we get one of the very Greek masters Vasari has been derided for mentioning, and he is certainly connected with the Masonic lodge.

With a common origin, each lodge nevertheless developed its own distinct style, yet so much was general to the whole guild, that in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries one spirit seemed to permeate them all, and only experts can tell a Lorenzetti from a Memmi, or a Giotto from a Spinello Aretino. We find them working now in one lodge, now in another. Cimabue, though his princ.i.p.al work was in Florence where his school was, is found working in the Pisan Lodge in 1301.

The archives of the Duomo there have three doc.u.ments of that year referring to him. One proves the payment of X solidi II libr. a day to "Magister Cimabue" and his _famulus_ (apprentice) for their work there. Who knows whether the _famulus_ may not have been young Giotto, or Joctus, as he is written in old deeds!

The second paper is Cimabue's receipt for the payment by the _Lord operaio_ (_Dominus operarius_) for a figure of St. John, painted for that guild (_Magiestatem_).

The third seems to be the payment for a coloured gla.s.s window which had been painted on gla.s.s by Baccio, son of Jovenchi of Milan, from Magister Cimabue's design.[204]

Cimabue's school in Florence must have prospered greatly. A long list of names of painters between 1294 and 1296, who are qualified and who agree to teach their art in Florence, may be made from an ancient law register kept at that date by the notary Ser Matteo Biliotti, which is preserved in the general archives of Contracts in Florence.[205] Here we find several of the Masters trained at Pisa, such as Lapo de Cambio, Lapo di Beliotto, Lapo di Taldo, Corso di Buono, Andrea di Cante, Grifo di Tancredi, Tura di Ricovero, Vanni di Rinuccio, Michele di Pino, Ranuccio di Bogolo, Guiduccio di Maso, Cresta di Piero, Bindaccio di Bruno, Guccio di Lippo, Bertino della Marra, Rossello e Scalore di Lettieri, Dino and Lippo Benivieni, Asinello d'Alberto, Lapo di Compagno, called Scartapecchia, Vanuccio di Duccio, and Bruno di Giovanni, the companion of Buffalmacco and Calandrino, of whom Vasari tells such funny stories.

Another act, dated 1282, is a contract by which Azzo, son of the late Mazzetto painter, of the parish of S. Tommaso, engaged to teach his art for six years to Vanni di Bruno; probably Giovanni the father of Bruno mentioned above.

Rossello di Lottieri was the great-grandfather of Cosimo Rosselli.

Vanuccio was the son of the famous Duccio of the Sienese Lodge. Indeed I think we could find, by close investigation, that most of these _Magistri pittori_ were connected with one or other of the Tuscan Lodges.

Painters abounded in the guild at this era. There was Tommaso de Mutina (Modena) whose Madonna painted in 1297 is in the Gallery at Vienna. There was Margaritone of Arezzo (1216-1293), a great tre-cento painter of Madonnas and crucifixes, whose works are yet preserved in Florence, London, Siena, etc. He generally signed them "Margarit ...

de Aretio pingebat." A portrait of St. Francis, however, in the Capuchin Convent at Sinigaglia, is inscribed "Margaritonis devotio me fec..." A Madonna enthroned in the church at Monte San Savino is not only signed but dated 1284. Guido of Siena and Margaritone were the leaders of that flourishing school at Siena which culminated in Spinello Aretino and the Lorenzetti, one of whom, Lorenzo Monaco, rivalled our Fra Angelico.

Various painters are found in Pisa up to the fourteenth century, artistic descendants from the school of Giunta. Signor Morrona (_Pisa Ill.u.s.trata nelle Arti del Disegno_, vol. ii. p. 154) gives a list of Giunta's scholars. There are Bonaventura and Apparecchiato da Lucca, Dato Pisano, Vincino da Pistoja, a list which proves the affinity between all the Tuscan schools. A little later in 1321 we find a certain Vicino of Pisa as Gaddo Gaddi's scholar in Florence, where he finished his master's mosaics in the Baptistery. Ciampi has written a long dissertation to prove that Vicino of Pisa ought to be Vincino of Pistoja, because he has found the latter name in some doc.u.ments. But as his doc.u.ments refer to paintings done by Vincino of Pistoja in 1290, and the mosaics of Vicino and Gaddi date 1321, it seems more probable they were really two different men--one, the Pistojan, being the scholar of Giunta at Pisa mentioned above; the other, the Pisan, a scholar of Gaddi in Florence somewhat later. In 1302 we find painters from all the lodges a.s.sembled in Pisa. Here are Magister Franciscus, painter from S. Simone, named as a _Magister_ of the highest rank. He works with his son Victorius, and his apprentice Sandruccio. Here are Lapo of Florence, Benozzo Gozzoli,[206] and "Michaelis the painter"; Duccio and Tura of Siena, painters; and Datus Pictor, who might be that Dato Pisano mentioned as a scholar of Giunta.[207]

The books of the Duomo of Pisa contain among other things an entry which indicates the use of oil-painting long before the time of Antonello de Messina. It is nothing less than the payment by the _Provveditore_ of the _Opera_ for 29 lbs. of turpentine, 104 lbs. of linseed oil at 28 denari per lb., and 43 lbs. of varnish, all of which were for the use of the painters of the _operam Magiestatis_. The entry is dated 1301, and is No. 26 in the books of the _Provveditore_ of the _Opera_ at Pisa in the year MCCCI. "Johannes Orlandi sua sponte dixit se habuisse ad Operario libras duas den. pis. pro pretio libre viginti novem trementine operate adoreram Magiestatis.

"Libras quinquaginta quatuor, et solidos decem et octo den. pisanorum minutorum pro pretio centinarum quatuor olei linseminis ad operaio Magiestatis, et aliarum figurarium que fiunt in majori Ecclesia, ad rationem denariorum XXVIII pro qualibet libra."

Upechinus Pictor[208] pro libris quadraginta tribus vernicis emptis Comunis an. 1303, is named as a painter of Pisa.

These entries clearly prove what a large part the painters took in the work of the Masonic brotherhood, and how the frescoing of the wall was a component part of a Comacine church, and carried on, like their building, by the joint labour of many Masters. If proof of this is wanting, go where you will in Italy, and if you can find any church that has a wall of its original early Christian or mediaeval building remaining, of any age between the fourth and the fourteenth century, scratch that wall, and you will find frescoes have been there. For instance, in Santa Croce, and San Miniato at Florence, and at Fiesole, wherever the restorer's plaster has been taken off, precious works of the old Masters have come to light. But in all these we have to imagine what a mediaeval church was like from the fragments that remain: to see the real Comacine church of the twelfth or thirteenth century, one must go to the ancient city of San Gimignano with its many towers, where they remain untouched by the restorer, and unwhitewashed by the seventeenth-century destroyer. There the whole churches, every inch of them, are covered with scripture or saintly story in glowing colours. Our ill.u.s.tration shows one by Barna of Siena before the painters seceded.

The Spanish chapel at S. Maria Novella is another unspoiled and entire specimen of the profuse use of fres...o...b.. the guild. Most of these churches were decorated by fresco artists who belonged to the Masonic Guild before the secession of the painters, and being so, it is probable that they worked together, as the architectural Masters were accustomed to do, and this would account for the difficulty of distinguishing in the Spanish chapel between the work of the Memmi and that of the Lorenzetti, who certainly worked together at Siena, and probably also in Florence. Cimabue and Giotto were undoubtedly _Magistri_ of the Masonic Guild, for both of them were builders as well as painters, and were employed together with other Masters.

When Cimabue discovered Giotto drawing his sheep, he took him into his school in the lodge, he being then a qualified Master. But the boy must have pa.s.sed his novitiate, not only in Magister Cimabue's own _atelier_, but also in the wider teaching of the school and _laborerium_, or he would never have got the commission to build the tower, nor the power to sculpture his "Hymn of Labour" around it.