The life and writings of Henry Fuseli Volume III Part 10

Opere di R. Mengs, t. ii. p. 161.

[38] John, called da Bologna, showed a model to Michael Angelo smoothly polished; Michael Angelo took, and, heedless of its finish, twisted it about; then giving it back to the student, "Learn," said he, "to sketch before you attempt to finish."

[39] Such was the proud answer of Fra Sebastian del Piombo, grown fat by the signet of St. Peter, when asked why he had entirely resigned all exercise of his art.

[40] Said Michael Angelo, when asked whether the copy of the Laoc.o.o.n by Baccio Bandinelli was not equal or superior to the original. t.i.tiano, with more mordacity though surely with less discrimination, ridiculed the copyist by a caricature in which the Trojan with his sons were changed to baboons.

[41] "Sineret se plebeculam pascere," said Vespasian to the artist who had contrived a machine to convey some large columns with a trifling expense to the Capitol, and rewarded him without accepting his offer.

[42] Cosmo Rosselli, one of the Tuscan painters who preceded Michael Angelo in decorating the Chapel of Sixtus IV.

[43] This is the Madonna painted for Angelo Doni, now in the Tribuna of Florence, and probably the only existing oil-picture of Michael Angelo, though Lanzi rejects its t.i.tle to that. Vasari mentions it with his usual extravagance of praise, but appears ignorant of the real meaning of the figures.

A HISTORY OF ART IN THE SCHOOLS OF ITALY.

THE TUSCAN SCHOOL.

The a.n.a.logy of style observable in the figures impressed on Tuscan coins of the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth century, and those found in the miniatures that decorate the ma.n.u.scripts of the contemporary periods, proves that Tuscany had its artists long before the epoch which Vasari and his copyists fix for the importation of Greek art with Greek artists: whether those paintings be all pure Tuscan, or here and there interspersed with Greek ones, none will venture to decide, who knows the impossibility of drawing a limitary line sufficiently severe to distinguish the last spasms of an expiring art from the first stammerings of an infant one. Of the still surviving monuments of painting during those epochs, it may be sufficient to mention the famed Christ, painted on canva.s.s and glued to a wooden cross, of a date anterior to 1003.

In subsequent times, the earliest and least unsuccessful essays in art, were made by the Pisano. Whilst a Greek sarcophagus at Pisa, storied with the incidents of Hippolytus and Phaedra, furnished some elements of form to the sculptors Niccolo and Giovanni Pisano, painting made some progress with Giunta Pisano: his composition of Christ on the Cross at the Angeli of a.s.sisi, though defective in design, possesses life and expression.[44]

A similar progress was made by his contemporary Guido or Guidone of Sienna; a name not mentioned by Vasari, though in his frequent excursions to Sienna, he could not remain unacquainted with the works of Guido, at least one which still exists in the chapel of the Malevolti in S. Dominico, with the following often repeated inscription and date:--

Me Guido de senis diebus depinxit amenis Quem Christus lenis nullis velit agere p.e.n.i.s.

A.D. M.CCXXI.

This Madonna, twenty years anterior to the birth of Cimabue, is superior to his Madonna in expression, and nearly equal in taste and colour, though inferior in style.

Duccio di Boninsegna, probably of his school, was celebrated as the restorer of that inlaid kind of Mosaic, called "Lavoro di Commesso." His works are from 1275, the year in which he received a commission for Sta. Maria Novella at Florence, to 1311, the period at which he was employed in the Domo of Sienna. If these dates be genuine, he can scarcely have lived till 1357, the year at which Fiorillo fixes his death. It is not probable that he should have stretched his span beyond a century, which must have been the case, if we suppose that he was twenty at the time he painted in S. Maria Novella; it is not probable that he should have chosen, or been suffered, to remain idle with the celebrity he had acquired in the labours of the Domo; and it is still less probable, that, if he was employed, what he produced in the interval, between that period and his death, should have perished or been destroyed, whilst we are still in possession of the paintings in the Domo, which made nearly an epoch in art, at which he laboured three years, for which he was paid upwards of 3000 scudi d'oro, the expense of gilding and ultramarine included. That part of it which faced the audience, represented in large figures the Madonna and various saints; that which fronted the choir, divided into many compartments, exhibited numerous compositions of Gospel subjects in figures of small proportion; it cannot be denied, that with all its copiousness, the whole savours strongly of the Greek manner.

Andrea Taffi, born 1213, the scholar of Apollonius, a Greek painter, and his a.s.sistant in some mosaics at S. Giovanni of Florence, is not mentioned out of that line by Vasari and Baldinucci: but the discovery of a picture with his name by Ign.a.z.io Stugford adds another legitimate name to the predecessors of Cimabue.

Buonamico di Cristofano, or Buffalmacco, of facetious memory, was the pupil of Taffi. His best works are lost, but from the remains it may be suspected that he owes at least as much to the tales of Boccaccio and Sacchetti, for the preservation of his name, as to his own powers. There still exists in Campo Santo at Pisa, a fresco of the Creation with a G.o.d Father five ells high, supporting Heaven and the elements; and three other stories of Adam, Noah and his Sons; a Crucifix, a Resurrection, and an Ascension. We must not look here for much symmetry of design or Giottesque elegance; his heads have little variety, and less beauty; sameness of features, a vulgar cast, and a gaping deformity of mouth, characterize his women; but now and then attention rests on the vivacity or physiognomy of some male countenance, especially that of Cain.

Sometimes he s.n.a.t.c.hes some movement from nature, such as that of the terrified man who flies from Calvary: he overflows in particoloured drapery, and delights in laboured ornaments of flowers and lace. A St.

John the Baptist of his, yet existing, deserves to be mentioned as an instance of the utility of comparing works in painting and sculpture with contemporary coins, in order to ascertain their dates; for the same figure is exactly repeated on the Florentine scudo d'oro of that age. A jocular host of artists, scholars of this school, we pa.s.s over, as more important to the reader of the Decamerone and the Novelle, than to the student of art.

Lucca, about 1235, possessed Bonaventura Berlingieri, whose St. Francis still exists in the castle of Guiglia, near Modena, and is described as a work of considerable merit for its time: Margaritone of Arezzo, a pupil and follower of the Greeks, appears to have been several years anterior to Cimabue. He painted on canva.s.s, and was the first, according to Vasari, who found the method of giving a more solid texture to pictures. Some crucifix of his is still seen at Arezzo, and another at Santa Croce in Florence, facing one of Cimabue. The style of both is antiquated, but not so different in merit to make us refuse a painter's name to Margaritone if we grant it to Cimabue.

Giovanni Cimabue,[45] of n.o.ble lineage, was an architect and painter. He is considered as the father of Italian art, because with him legitimate history and a less interrupted series of dates, begin; because he succeeded better than his predecessors in disentangling himself from the shackles of Greek barbarity, and chiefly because he discovered and called forth the genius of Giotto. Vasari may be right in making him the scholar of those Greeks whom the Florentine Government had employed to paint the Church of Santa Maria Novella; but he errs in placing them in the Chapel Gondi, which, with the body of the church, was not erected till the subsequent century; he should have a.s.signed them another chapel under the church, where time has discovered some vestiges of ancient painting. It seems, however, more probable, that Giunta Pisano gave Cimabue instruction, if it be ascertained, as Fiorillo a.s.serts, that he worked in the great church of a.s.sisi, 1253, when he was in his thirteenth year, and Giunta superintended the decorations of that fabric.

The pompous visit which Charles of Anjou paid to Cimabue in pa.s.sing through Florence, sufficiently proves the celebrity he enjoyed, if it has not been sanctioned by the authority of Dante, who calls him the unrivalled champion of his day. Cimabue was then painting the Madonna with the Infant adored by six angels; the picture when finished was carried in procession from Borgo Allegro to Santa Maria Novella, and placed in the Chapel Rucellai, where it still exists. The heraldic arrangement of the figures, their physiognomic monotony, the exility of the detail and barbarous execution, contrast strangely with the elevation and novelty of the artist's conception. Cimabue lost the female and the mother in the Queen of Heaven. Insensible to the blandishments of beauty, fierce like the age in which he lived, he excelled in male, especially aged characters; these he impressed with something of a stern grandeur, not often surpa.s.sed since. Vast and comprehensive in his ideas, he seized on subjects of numerous composition, and expressed them in large proportions; those features of prophetic grandeur which surprise in his frescoes at the Dominicans and Santa Trinita of Florence, are still excelled by the features which he displayed in the upper church of a.s.sisi--meteors of the age in which he lived. They still exist, nor is it easily conceived how works of so different style, against the testimony of Vasari, and the uniform tradition of five centuries, could, as they were of late, be ascribed to the more regulated hand and gentler spirit of Giotto.

Giotto's year of birth has been disputed; Vasari fixes it to 1276, Baldinucci to 1265. He was the son of a cottager at Vespignano, and bred to be a shepherd; but, a painter born, he amused himself from infancy with attempts to draw whatever object struck his fancy. A sheep which he had copied on a flat stone caught the eye of Cimabue, who was in the neighbourhood, happened to pa.s.s by, demanded him of his father, and carried him to Florence to instruct him; but he soon rivalled, and in a short time eclipsed his master by a grace and an amenity of execution which remained unequalled to the time of Masaccio.

For the rapidity of this progress, unless we were to ascribe it to inspiration, we must account from the happy coincidence of external advantages with the genius of the man. A period so obscure, admits of little more than conjecture, but there is no improbability in supposing that Giotto outstripped his master and the times by the same means which rendered Michael Agnolo so soon superior to Ghirlandaio,--modelling and the study of the antique. We know that he was a sculptor, and that his models still existed in the time of Lorenzo Ghiberti. Good originals he could find among the fragments of antiquity discovered before his time, and scattered over Florence and Rome: from what other source could he derive the character of his male heads, and that squareness of form so different from the exility and indecision of all contemporary styles?

The few majestic natural folds of his draperies, and the composure and unaffected air of his figures, breathe the spirit of the antique. His very defects are the consequences of such a study. His manner has been charged with a kind of _statuine_ precision (del statuino), unknown to other schools, and unknown to artists who do not form themselves on the antique.

If to these conjectures it be objected, that the want of uniformity, dryness of design, extremities either faulty or hid under a preposterous length of drapery, rather betray a nurseling of Pisa than a pupil of the ancients; it ought to be considered that uniformity is the result of settled principles; that he who had to remove the rubbish could not be expected to give the polish; that he who had to teach eyes to look, hands to move, and feet to stand, could not be supposed to make them do it with all the correctness, propriety or elegance, they were capable of; that a certain gymnophobia equally attends the infancy and the decrepitude of taste, and that the approbation of a public and an artist's flattery are always reciprocal.

And no artist commanded more of public favour than Giotto. Legislator of taste, not in Tuscany alone, but at Rome, Naples, Bologna, and the Venetian State, he excelled his master as much in celebrity as he had excelled him in grace and method. How soon he did this may be seen on comparing his earliest works at a.s.sisi with those of his master in the same place. Genuine elements of composition, expressions inspired by Nature, accuracy of design, progressively appear. It is no hyperbole to affirm, that in certain characters no artist ever went nearer the source of expression than Giotto, and that in the maiden airs of untainted virginity none ever excelled, and perhaps, Raphael and Domenichino excepted, few ever approached him.

Though not the inventor, Giotto was the restorer of portrait-painting; resemblance, with character of face and att.i.tude, date from him. He gave us Dante, Brunetto Latini, Corso Donato, &c. Mosaic was improved by him, and his powers in it shown by the celebrated Navicella, or boat of Saint Peter, in the portico of the Basilica at Rome; though restoration has transformed it to a work of shreds and patches, and reduced his claim on it to the mere name. Missal painting likewise owes him some grat.i.tude; and in architecture the grand steeple of the Domo at Florence is the work of Giotto.

Implicit imitation checks progress; the numerous school of Giotto were for the greater part content to walk behind their master. Taddeo Gaddi, the most familiar and most favoured of his pupils, is said by Vasari, whom time still suffered to judge with some competence, to have excelled him in colouring and mellowness. The works of Taddeo in Sta. Croce are inferior in originality and execution to his compositions in the Capitolo degli Spagnuoli, where, in the ceiling, he represented some Gospel subjects, and in the Cenacolo the Descent of the Holy Spirit, one of the beautiful relics of the fourteenth century. On the sides he painted the Sciences, with their most eminent professors under each, no unfair specimen of poetic conception; here is what remains of vivacity and brightness in his tints. Taddeo outlived the period a.s.signed him by Vasari; we find him mentioned as late as 1352, which still might not be the ultimate date of his life.

Another conspicuous name among his pupils is Stefano of Florence, (Fiorentino,) whom Vasari, without hesitation, in every part of the art prefers to his master. He was the son of one Catharina, a daughter of Giotto; an ardent and inquisitive spirit, quick to discover and eager to overcome difficulties; the first who ventured on foreshortening, and if success did not fully second his efforts in that, it favoured him in perspective, which he much improved, and in the att.i.tudes, variety and vivacity of heads. Landino fancied to compliment his memory by repeating the silly epithet of "Scimia della Natura," "Ape of Nature," which, from the resemblance of his portraits, was given him by the vulgar and the dilettanti of his day. His works in Ara Cli at Rome, at S. Spirito of Florence, and elsewhere, perished, and nothing can safely be stamped with his name, if it be not a Madonna in Campo Santo at Pisa, grander in style than those of his master, but retouched.

Of Tommaso, his son and reputed scholar, a Pieta, which might be taken for a work of Giotto, exists at S. Remigi of Florence; and still some frescoes at a.s.sisi. They ent.i.tle him to the surname of "Giottino," given him by his fellow-citizens, who used to say that the spirit of Giotto had pa.s.sed into him and animated his hand.

Without embarra.s.sing ourselves with conjectures on Ugolino da Sienna, we pa.s.s to the more celebrated name of Simone Memmi, or Simon di Martino, a native of the same place, the painter of Laura, and the friend of Petrarca, who in two affected sonnets has transmitted him to posterity.

Whether Simone were the pupil of Maestro Mino as the Siennese, or of Giotto as the Florentine writers pretend, is a point beyond decision: he restored a picture of the first, and his style has some a.n.a.logy to that of the second, though with more suavity of colour, and more poetry of conception. He was the first who dared to fill a s.p.a.cious facade with one composition without dividing it into compartments. Such is that in the Capitolo degli Spagnuoli of Santa Maria Novella at Florence, where Vasari discovered every beauty of his own time, and where, in the crowd of introduced portraits, many have fancied, in spite of chronology, to discover the portraits of Laura and her friend; whom probably he did not become personally acquainted with till four years after the completion of that work, 1336, when he was sent to the Pope at Avignon, became familiar with Petrarca, painted Laura, and, strange to tell, reached the expectation of the lover, who saw

"Il lampegiar dell' angelico riso."

Miniature, though the last object of this work, was not the least of Memmi's powers. Lanzi has noticed one which fronts a MS. Virgil with the commentary of Servius, now in the Ambrosiana at Milan, but formerly possessed by Petrarca, who probably dictated the subject, and added the following lines:-

Mantua Virgilium qui talia carmina finxit, Sena tulit Simonem digito qui talia pinxit.

The painting represents Virgil in a sitting att.i.tude ready to write, with his face turned upwards as invoking the Muse. aeneas, in martial vest and att.i.tude, stands before him, and pointing to his sword, alludes to the subject of the aeneis, "Arma Virumque." A shepherd and a husbandman, symbols of the Pastorals and Georgics, placed somewhat lower, listen to the theme; whilst Servius draws a transparent curtain, to denote his labours in unveiling the beauties and removing the obscurities of the poet. In this miniature, the originality of conception, the beauty and harmony of colour, the varied and appropriate drapery, are, however, balanced by rudeness of design, vulgarity of character, and deformed extremities.

It was a barbarous singularity of Simone, promiscuously to admit different proportions on the same plane: to flank or cross figures of natural size with figures a third less than nature.

Lippo, or Filippo Memmi, was the relative, scholar, and imitator, of Simone: a.s.sisted by his designs, Lippo often executed works, which, had he not marked them with his name, would be ascribed to the master: when left to his own invention, he rose in nothing above mediocrity, but in colour. Sometimes they were partners in the same picture, as in that at S. Ansano di Castel Vecchio, at Sienna; sometimes the second finished what the first began, as in some works at Ancona and a.s.sisi; and at Sienna there remains still something entirely executed by Lippo.

Simone co-operated in the works of S. Maria Novella with Taddeo Gaddi, who, with his son, Angelo Gaddi, left a number of pupils, imitators through him of Giotto, inferior to both, not much distinguished by tradition, and less favoured by time. Of Jacopo di Casentino, the most conspicuous, what vestiges remain in the church of Orsanmichele at Florence, are in conformity with the style of Taddeo; barriers soon overleaped by the vivid fancy of his scholar, Spinello the Aretine, whom his own conception of a demon is said to have terrified into insanity and death. His son, Parri Spinelli, with barbarous incongruities of line, possessed exquisite colour; and his pupil, Lorenzo di Bicci, has been compared to Vasari, for the number, dispatch, and opinion of his works. Antonio, surnamed Veneziano, whether he were a Venetian or a Florentine, is, against evidence of dates and style, supposed to have been a pupil of Angelo Gaddi, and to have educated Paolo Uccello, the first master of perspective, and Gherardo Starnina, an artist of gay style, whose relics live still a chapel of Sta. Croce. They are numbered among the last productions of Giotto's expiring epoch, and the verge of the fourteenth century, in which we have still to mark, though pupils of some other school, the family of Orcagna; Bernardo, a painter; Jacopo, a sculptor; but chiefly Andrea, conspicuous for writing, painting, sculpture, and architecture, in a degree little inferior to Giotto himself. Architects date from him the abolition of the acute angle and restoration of semicircular arches, as in the Loggia of the Lanzi, which he likewise decorated with sculpture. Some, without attention to time, have supposed him the pupil of Angelo Gaddi, but he was probably trained to the art by his brother Bernardo, jointly with whom he painted in the Capella Strozzi of Sta. Maria Novella, in the Campo Santo at Pisa, and alone and better in Sta. Croce, Death, Judgement, Paradise, and h.e.l.l, placing with Dantesque licence his friends among the elect, his enemies with the d.a.m.ned.

The downfall of Pisa had raised Florence to the metropolis of Tuscany, and the spirit of its citizens to render its appearance worthy of that pre-eminence. Cosmo, styled the father of his country, who tuned the public affairs, might with better right have been called the father of distinguished talents: never was tyranny meditated on a less suspicious plan, or approached by more popular means. The house of the Medici, in the quaint Italian phrase, became the Lyceum of Philosophers, the Arcadia of Poets, the Academy of Artists. Dello, Paolo, Masaccio, the two Peselli, both the Lippi, Benozzo, Sandro, the Ghirlandai, were the clients of the family, and emulated each other in their homage. Their pictures, according to the usage of the age, full of portraits, perpetually presented to the people likenesses of the Medici, and often in the characters of the Magi royally robed, the sceptre firmly held in the gripe of the Medici, to prepare the public eye gradually for what it was soon to witness, the firm establishment of sovereignty in that House. The compet.i.tion of rival citizens, and still more the wide-extended influence of religion, diffused Taste and beckoned Talent to Florence as to its centre, from every part of Italy. At her call Donatello, Brunelleschi, Ghiberti, Filarete, the Rossellini, Verrocchio arose, and with their works spread the Elements of Art.

Poetry, that supplies the real features and materials of expression when it inspires the thought, arrives at the full display of its powers long before its sisters have disentangled themselves from the impediments of infancy; and of these, Sculpture, whose aim is infinitely less complex, raises the vigorous fabric of forms, whilst Painting is still impotently struggling with the rudiments of line, perspective, keeping, chiaroscuro, colour; which to unite in an equal degree has. .h.i.therto been found above the lot of humanity. The imitators of Giotto were in this state of struggle; they saw little in chiaroscuro, and less in perspective and line; their figures still slip from their planes, their fabrics have no true point of sight, their fore-shortenings depended solely on the eye: Stefano dal Ponte rather saw than overcame; the rest either avoided or palliated these difficulties. The Umbrian Pietro della Francesca seems to have been the first who called geometry to the a.s.sistance of painting, and taught by his works at Arezzo the principles of perspective; Brunelleschi formed it into system for architecture, and the mathematician Manetti roused the attention of Paolo Uccello, who owes the perpetuity of his name nearly exclusively to the study of that science. His immoderate attachment to perspective is become proverbial;[46] and almost equalled his fondness for birds, from which he got his surname. He applied it, from grounds and buildings, to the human body, which he foreshortened with a skill unknown to his predecessors: and some proofs of it still exist in the figures of G.o.d and Noe among the chiaroscuroes in the chiostro of Sta. Maria Novella, and in the equestrian colossus of Gio. Aguto (John Montacute), which he painted in chiaroscuro of terra verde, and which is still in the duomo. The art, since its revival, perhaps for the first time showed that, if it had dared much, it had dared well: nor did he fall short of it in the gigantic imagery of the House Vitali at Bologna; he was, however, more employed in painting private furniture: the triumphs of Petrarch on some small presses in the gallery of Florence are supposed to come from his hand. That he was a master of expression, the instances adduced by Vasari leave no doubt; and in describing the flying drapery of some friar in the series of pictures relative to S. Benedetto, the same writer tells us, that it served as a model to all succeeding artists: to such powers, praise of variety is added by the truth and diligence with which he copied trees, plants, birds and animals, and for which some critic styles him the Ba.s.sano of the first epoch. In the nearly general wreck of Paolo's works, it is difficult to form a judgment of his technic character independent of tradition: but, comparing what remains with what we are told, it is evident that he reached from one extreme of the Art to the other; and that, if he was blameable for frequently playing with a tool instead of using it, mistaking an instrument of the Art for Art itself, and means for the end of execution, he has been deprived by partiality of the praise due to powers which he appears to have possessed in a degree unknown to the times that preceded Masaccio.

Masolino da Panicale cultivated chiaroscuro: he was enabled to treat it with more truth than his predecessors, by a long practice of modelling under the tuition of Lorenzo Ghiberti, the master of design and grouping in those days, but whose animation he did not attain. Starnina instructed him in colour; and thus by uniting the characteristics of two schools, he produced that new style, which, though still infected by dryness and clogged by inelegance, possesses grandeur, union and breadth: the proofs still remain in the chapel of S. Pietro al Carmine, where, besides the Evangelists, he painted several subjects from the story of that Apostle. The remaining ones, which he did not live to finish, were some years afterward added by his scholar Tomaso Gisioli, celebrated by the name of Masaccio from his careless way of living.

Historians, biographers, and poets, unite in dating a new period from Masaccio. The compa.s.s of his mind led him to uniformity of pursuit, and the introduction of style; he had formed his principles on the works of Ghiberti and Donatello; perspective he had learnt of Brunelleschi, and in an excursion to Rome, it is unreasonable to suppose that he did not improve himself on the antique. Gentile da Fabriano and Vittore Pisanello were then at Rome, and the high opinion which they are said to have expressed of him[47] as the first painter of the age has been recorded: it is, however, difficult to say on what that opinion could be founded: they were too far advanced in life to see more of Masaccio than his juvenile essays, perhaps such as the S. Anna in S. Ambrogio at Florence, or what he painted in the chapel of St. Catherine, in the church of St. Clemens of Rome, the figures of the ceiling excepted, all retouched, and though fine works for the time, of doubtful authority, and in no manner to be compared to the pictures del Carmine. Here appear the virility of his powers and the legitimacy of his superior claim: here the figures, however varied by att.i.tude, pose or are foreshortened with that truth and uniformity of success which the less established principles of Paolo Uccello did not always reach. In expression, sublimity distinguishes Donatello; he always aims at, and sometimes succeeds in personifying a sentiment or a pa.s.sion.[48] Masaccio, more dramatic, poises expression by character and propriety; hence he has been said, and truly said, to resemble Raffaello.

To be praised immoderately for what, with regard to judgment, deserved it least, has, as of others, been likewise the lot of Masaccio: the introduction and masterly execution of the man who, in the baptism of St. Peter, appears to shiver with cold, is extolled by Vasari, and makes, by the verdict of Lanzi, an epoch in art. Had the apostle immersed the race of a Northern clime, a man frost-bitten, (_a.s.siderando di freddo_,) or impatient of cold, might have been admitted without impropriety, but under an Asiatic sun he is worse than superfluous. This either Masaccio did not consider, or if he did, fondly sacrificed propriety to the expression of an incident, which, had it even been admissible, had in itself less dignity, and incomparably less pathos, than that of the sick monk on whose eyes and lips the hope of recovery seemed to tremble, introduced among the series of pictures from the life of St. Benedict, by Paolo Uccello.[49]

A higher and more legitimate praise of Masaccio's expression is, that Raffaello not only imitated its general character, but in the same or similar subjects sometimes individually adopted it, as in the gesture of Paul in the Cartoon of the Areopagus, and that of Adam dismissed from Paradise, in the Loggia; and that, if he improved the taste and added elegance to the Tuscan's drapery, he closely adhered to its principles, simplicity, propriety, and breath.

Of Masaccio's colour, what remains possesses truth, variety, delicacy, union, and great relief. He lived not to finish the whole of the Chapel, some stories still remaining to be added in 1443, the reputed year of his death,[50] which was not without suspicion of having been hastened by poison. His other frescoes at Florence have been destroyed by time, and perhaps no gallery can produce an authentic picture by his hand, if we except the portrait of a youth in the Pitti palace, a work that breathes life.

Ghiberti and Donatello had taught Masaccio to find style by selection from nature; his followers for half a century, content to look at him without adhering to his method, gradually shrunk back to the exility and meagreness of the preceding age: without embarra.s.sing ourselves with the angelic prettinesses of Fra Giovanni da Fiesole, a name dearer to sanct.i.ty than to art, and whom both his age and missal-taste prove the nursling of another school, we pa.s.s to Benozzo Gozzoli, his pupil, who strove to forget his puny lessons in the bolder dictates of Masaccio.