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 attitudes, 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 attitude 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 Assisi.

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 "Passion of our Lord" and the "Allegories of S. Francis" were painted by him at Assisi. 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 tithe 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 space 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 God 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 circumcising 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 space with perfect balance, and how to mass 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 surpassed 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," "Chastity," and "Obedience," at Assisi, 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. Fortitude 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 passed 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 Assisi 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 Assisi 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 glass 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 noble 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 classic 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 circumstances 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 Hell. 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 Hell 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 Hell, 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 illustration 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 illustrate 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 multitudes of guilty men and women trembling beneath the trump of the archangel—tearing their cheeks, their hair, their breasts in agony, because they see Hell 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 coarse 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 Faggiuola 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 passion, 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 pricks 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 attitude 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 assigned, will be the trumpet of the wrath of God.[134] Studying these frescoes, we cannot but reflect what nerves, what brains, what hearts encased in triple brass 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 assumed the attitude 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 classic 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 labia 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 class of ideas, no less illustrative 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, Fortitude, 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 assessors and inspirers—he is King. Beneath the dais 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 passionate 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 horsemen 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 illustration in the fresco of the Sala della Pace[148]. Siena, by her bloody factions and her passionate 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 multitude 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 principal scenes of the Gospel story and the Passion 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 passed.

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 passion of a fervent spirit, and to testify their worship by the oblation of rich gifts in colouring and gilding massed 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, Assisi, 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 noble 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 Assisi, where we learn what he could do as a frescante in competition 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 Assisi 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 Assisi 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 massive; 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 analogue, 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 godlike 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 Cassino 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 passionately 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 Assisi, 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 passion, 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 passion 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 impassioned 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.

Giotto and his followers, then, in the fourteenth century painted, as we have seen, the religious, philosophical, and social conceptions of their age. As artists, their great discovery was the secret of depicting life. The ideas they expressed belonged to the Middle Ages. But by their method and their spirit they anticipated the Renaissance. In executing their work upon the walls of palaces and churches, they employed a kind of fresco. Fresco was essentially the Florentine vehicle of expression. Among the peoples of Central Italy it took the place of mosaic in Sicily, Ravenna, and Venice, as the means of communicating ideas by forms to the unlettered laity, and as affording to the artist the widest and the freest sphere for the expression of his thoughts.[160]

FOOTNOTES:

[118] In the History of Painting in Italy, by Messrs. Crowe and Cavalcaselle.

[119] Nothing is more astonishing than the sterility of Genoa and of Rome. Neither in sculpture nor in painting did these cities produce anything memorable, though Genoa was well placed for receiving the influences of Pisa, and had the command of the marble quarries of Carrara, while Rome was the resort of all the art-students of Italy. The very early eminence of Apulia in architecture and the plastic arts led to no results.

[120] Milan, it is true, produced a brilliant school of sculptors, and the Certosa of Pavia is a monument of her spontaneous artistic genius. But in painting, until the date of Lionardo's advent, she achieved little.

[121] See Vol. I., Age of the Despots, pp. 182-188, for the constitutional characteristics of Florence and Venice; and Vol. II., Revival of Learning, pp. 118-120, for the intellectual supremacy of Florence.

[122] A glance at the map shows to what a large extent the Italians owed the progress of their arts to Tuscany. Pisa, as we have already seen, took the lead in sculpture. Florence, at a somewhat later period, revived painting, while Siena contemporaneously developed a style peculiar to herself. This Sienese style—thoroughly Tuscan, though different from that of Florence—exercised an important influence over the schools of Umbria, and gave a peculiar quality to Perugian painting. Through Piero della Francesca, a native of Borgo San Sepolcro, the Florentine tradition was extended to Umbria and the Roman States. Perugia might be even geographically claimed for Tuscany, inasmuch as the Tiber divides the old Etrurian territory from the Umbrians and the duchy of Spoleto. Lionardo was a Tuscan settled as an alien in Milan. Raphael, though a native of Urbino, derived his training from Florence, indirectly through his father and his master Perugino, more immediately from Fra Bartolommeo and Michael Angelo.

[123] If Vasari is to be trusted, this visit of Charles of Anjou to Cimabue's studio took place in 1267; but neither the Malespini nor Villani mention it, and the old belief that the Borgo Allegri owed its name to the popular rejoicing at that time is now somewhat discredited. See Vasari, Le Monnier, 1846, vol. i. p. 225, note 4. Gino Capponi, in his Storia della Repubblica di Firenze, vol. i. p. 157, refuses however to reject the legend.

[124] See Capponi, vol. i. pp. 59, 78, for a description of the gay and courteous living of the Florentines upon the end of the thirteenth century.

[125] See the Descrizione della Peste di Firenze.

[126] I wish I could here transcribe the most beautiful passage from Ruskin's Giotto and his Works in Padua, pp. 11, 12, describing the contrast between the landscape of Valdarno and the landscape of the hills of the Mugello district. I can only refer readers to the book, printed for the Arundel Society, 1854.

[127] See Trucchi, Poesie Italiane Inedite, vol. ii. p. 8.

[128] See above, Chapter III, Relation of Sculpture to Painting.

[129] The wonderful beauty of Orcagna's faces, profile after profile laid together like lilies in a garden border, can only be discovered after long study. It has been my good fortune to examine, through the kindness of Mrs. Higford Burr, of Aldermaston, a large series of tracings, taken chiefly by the Right Hon. A. H. Layard, from the frescoes of Giottesque and other early masters, which, by the selection of simple form in outline, demonstrate not only the grand composition of these religious paintings, but also the incomparable loveliness of their types. How great the Trecentisti were as draughtsmen, how imaginative was the beauty of their conception, can be best appreciated by thus artificially separating their design from their colouring. The semblance of archaism disappears, and leaves a vision of pure beauty, delicate and spiritual. The collection to which I have alluded was made some years ago, when access to the wall-paintings of Italy for the purpose of tracing was still possible. It includes nearly the whole of Lorenzetti's work in the Sala della Pace, much of Giotto, the Gozzoli frescoes at S. Gemignano, frescoes of the Veronese masters and of the Paduan Baptistery, a great deal of Piero della Francesca, Mantegna, Luini, Gaudenzio Ferrari, Pinturicchio, Masolino, &c. The earliest masters of Arezzo, Pisa, Siena, Urbino are copiously illustrated, while few burghs or hamlets of the Tuscan and Umbrian districts have been left unvisited.

[130] See Crowe and Cavalcaselle, vol. i. pp. 445-451, for a discussion of the question. They incline to the authorship of Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti. But the last Florentine edition of Vasari renders this opinion doubtful.

[131] Ed una donna involta in veste negra, Con un furor qual io non so se mai Al tempo de' giganti fosse a Flegra. Trionfo della Morte, cap. i. 31.

[132] On a scroll above these wretches is written this legend:—

Dacche prosperitade ci ha lasciati, O morte, medicina d'ogni pena, Deh vieni a darne omai l'ultima cena.

[133] This might be used as an argument against the Lorenzetti hypothesis; for their work at Siena is eminently beautiful.

[134] The attitude and the eyes of this archangel have an imaginative potency beyond that of any other motive used by any painter to suggest the terror of the Dies Irae. Simplicity and truth of vision in the artist have here touched the very summit of intense dramatic presentation.

[135] The "Triumph of S. Thomas Aquinas," in this cloister-chapel, has long been declared the work of Taddeo Gaddi. "The Triumph of the Church Militant," and the "Consecration of S. Dominic," used to be ascribed, on the faith of Vasari, to Simone Martini of Siena. Independently of its main subject, this vast wall-painting is specially interesting on account of its portraits. The work has a decidedly Sienese character; but recent critics are inclined to assign it to a certain Andrea, of Florence. See Crowe and Cavalcaselle, vol. ii. p. 89. The same critics doubt the hand of Taddeo Gaddi in the "Triumph of S. Thomas," vol. i. p. 374, and remark that "these productions of the art of the fourteenth century are, indeed, second-class works, executed by pupils of the Sienese and Florentine school, and unworthy of the high praise which has ever been given to them." Whatever may be ultimately thought about the question of their authorship and pictorial merit, their interest to the student of Italian painting in relation to mediaeval thought will always remain indisputable. Few buildings in the length and breadth of Italy possess such claims on our attention as the Cappella degli Spagnuoli.

[136] The amorous fere of the Christian faith, the holy athlete, gentle to his own, and to his foes cruel.

[137] Everything outside this golden region is studded with stars to signify an epoyranios topos or heaven of heavens. S. Thomas and the Greeks are inside the golden sphere of science, and below on earth are the heresiarchs and faithful. Rosini gives a faithful outline of this picture in his Atlas of Illustrations.

[138] "For my mouth shall speak truth; and wickedness is an abomination to my lips."—Prov. viii. 7.

[139] Gozzoli's picture is now in the Louvre. I think Guillaume de Saint Amour takes the place of Averroes.

[140] Inf. iv. 144.

[141] Averroes et l'Averroisme, pp. 236-316.

[142] In the chapel. They are the work of Taddeo di Bartolo, and bear this inscription: "Specchiatevi in costoro, voi che reggete." The mediaeval painters of Italy learned lessons of civility and government as willingly from classical tradition, as they deduced the lessons of piety and godly living from the Bible. Herein they were akin to Dante, who chose Virgil for the symbol of the human understanding and Beatrice for the symbol of divine wisdom, revealed to man in Theology.

[143] He began his work in 1337.

[144] A similar mode of symbolising the Commune is chosen in the bas-reliefs of Archbishop Tarlati's tomb at Arezzo, where the discord of the city is represented by an old man of gigantic stature, throned and maltreated by the burghers, who are tearing out his hair by handfuls. Over this figure is written "Il Comune Pelato."

[145] These were adopted as the ensign of Siena, in the Middle Ages.

[146] In the year 1336, just before Ambrogio began to paint, the Sienese Republic had concluded a league with Florence for the maintenance of the Guelf party. The Monte de' Nove still ruled the city with patriotic spirit and equity, and had not yet become a forceful oligarchy. The power of the Visconti was still in its cradle; the great plague had not devastated Tuscany. As early as 1355 the whole of the fair order represented by Ambrogio was shaken to the foundation, and Siena deserved the words applied to it by De Commines. See Vol. L, Age of the Despots, p. 162, note 2.

[147] Rio, perversely bent on stigmatising whatever in Italian art savours of the Renaissance, depreciates this lovely form of Peace. L'Art Chretien, vol. i. p. 57.

[148] See Muratori, vol. xxiii., or the passage translated by me in Vol. I., Age of the Despots, p. 480.

[149] His "Madonna" in S. Domenico is dated 1221. For a full discussion of Guido da Siena's date, see Crowe and Cavalcaselle, vol. i. pp. 180-185.

[150] On their coins the Sienese struck this legend: "Sena vetus Civitas Virginis." It will be remembered how the Florentines, two centuries and a half later, dedicated their city to Christ as king.

[151] Date of birth unknown; date of death, about 1320.

[152] He is better known as Simone Memmi, a name given to him by a mistake of Vasari's. He was born in 1283 at Siena. He died in 1344 at Avignon. Petrarch mentions his portrait of Madonna Laura, in the 49th and 50th sonnets of the "Rime in Vita di Madonna Laura." In another place he uses these words about Simone: "Duos ego novi pictores egregios, nec formosos, Jottum Florentinum civem, cujus inter modernos fama ingens est, et Simonem Senensem."—Epist. Fam. lib. v. 17, p. 653. Petrarch proceeds to mention that he has also known sculptors, and asserts their inferiority to painters in modern times.

[153] See above, Chapter IV, Theology and S. Dominic. Messrs. Crowe and Cavalcaselle reject, not without reason, as it seems to me, the tradition that Simone painted the frescoes of S. Ranieri in the Campo Santo at Pisa. See vol. ii. p. 83. What remains of his work at Pisa is an altar-piece in S. Caterina.

[154] To Simone is also attributed the interesting portrait of Guidoriccio Fogliani de' Ricci, on horseback, in the Sala del Consiglio. This, however, has been so much repainted as to have lost its character.

[155] In S. Francesco at Pisa.

[156] Spinello degli Spinelli was born of a Ghibelline family, exiled from Florence, who settled at Arezzo about 1308. He died at Arezzo in 1410, aged 92, according to some computations.

[157] South wall of the Campo Santo, on the left-hand of the entrance.

[158] In the Sala di Balia of the public palace at Siena.

[159] See Inferno, xxix. 121; the sonnets on the months by Cene dalla Chitarra, Poeti del Primo Secolo, vol. ii. pp. 196-207; the epithet "Molles Senae," given by Beccadelli; and the remarks of De Comines.

[160] I have not thought it necessary to distinguish between tempera and fresco. In tempera painting the colours were mixed with egg, gum, and other vehicles dissolved in water, and laid upon a dry ground. In fresco painting the colours, mixed only with water, were laid upon plaster while still damp. The latter process replaced the former for wall-paintings in the fourteenth century.



CHAPTER V

PAINTING

Mediaeval Motives exhausted—New Impulse toward Technical Perfection—Naturalists in Painting—Intermediate Achievement needed for the Great Age of Art—Positive Spirit of the Fifteenth Century—Masaccio—The Modern Manner—Paolo Uccello—Perspective—Realistic Painters—The Model—Piero della Francesca—His Study of Form—Resurrection at Borgo San Sepolcro—Melozzo da Forli—Squarcione at Padua—Gentile da Fabriano—Fra Angelico—Benozzo Gozzoli—His Decorative Style—Lippo Lippi—Frescoes at Prato and Spoleto—Filippino Lippi—Sandro Botticelli—His Value for the Student of Renaissance Fancy—His Feeling for Mythology—Piero di Cosimo—Domenico Ghirlandajo—In what sense he sums up the Age—Prosaic Spirit—Florence hitherto supreme in Painting—Extension of Art Activity throughout Italy—Medicean Patronage.

After the splendid outburst of painting in the first half of the fourteenth century, there came a lull. The thoughts and sentiments of mediaeval Italy had been now set forth in art. The sincere and simple style of Giotto was worked out. But the new culture of the Revival had not as yet sufficiently penetrated the Italians for the painters to express it; nor had they mastered the technicalities of their craft in such a manner as to render the delineation of more complex forms of beauty possible. The years between 1400 and 1470 may be roughly marked out as the second period of great, activity in painting. At this time sculpture, under the hands of Ghiberti, Donatello, and Luca della Robbia, had reached a higher point than the sister art. The debt the sculptors owed to Giotto, they now repaid in full measure to his successors, in obedience to the law whereby sculpture, though subordinated, as in Italy, to painting, is more precocious in its evolution. One of the most marked features of this period was the progress in the art of design, due to bronze modelling and bas-relief; for the painters, labouring in the workshops of the goldsmiths and the stone-carvers, learned how to study the articulation of the human body, to imitate the nude, and to aim by means of graduated light and dark at rendering the effect of roundness in their drawing. The laws of perspective and foreshortening were worked out by Paolo Uccello and Brunelleschi. New methods of colouring were attempted by the Peselli and the Pollajuoli. Abandoning the conventional treatment of religious themes, the artists began to take delight in motives drawn from everyday experience. It became the fashion to introduce contemporary costumes, striking portraits, and familiar incidents into sacred subjects, so that many pictures of this period, though worthless to the student of religious art, are interesting for their illustration of Florentine custom and character. At the same time the painters began to imitate landscape and architecture, loading the background of their frescoes with pompous vistas of palaces and city towers, or subordinating their figures to fantastic scenery of wood and rock and seashore. Many were naturalists, delighting, like Gentile da Fabriano, in the delineation of field flowers and living creatures, or, like Piero di Cosimo, in the portrayal of things rare and curious. Gardens please their eyes, and birds and beasts and insects. Whole menageries and aviaries, for instance, were painted by Paolo Uccello. Others, again, abandoned the old ground of Christian story for the tales of Greece and Rome; and not the least charming products of the time are antique motives treated with the freshness of romantic feeling. We look in vain for the allegories of the Giottesque masters: that stage of thought has been traversed, and a new cycle of poetic ideas, fanciful, idyllic, corresponding to Boiardo's episodes rather than to Dante's vision, opens for the artist. Instead of seeking to set forth vast subjects with the equality of mediocrity, like the Gaddi, or to invent architectonic compositions embracing the whole culture of their age, like the Lorenzetti, the painters were now bent upon realising some special quality of beauty, expressing some fantastic motive, or solving some technical problem of peculiar difficulty. They had, in fact, outgrown the childhood of their art; and while they had not yet attained to mastery, had abandoned the impossible task of making it the medium of universal expression. In this way the manifold efforts of the workers in the first half of the fifteenth century prepared the ground for the great painters of the Golden Age. It remained for Raphael and his contemporaries to achieve the final synthesis of art in masterpieces of consummate beauty. But this they could not have done without the aid of those innumerable intermediate labourers, whose productions occupy in art the place of Bacon's media axiomata in science. Remembering this, we ought not to complain that the purpose of painting at this epoch was divided, or that its achievements were imperfect. The whole intellectual conditions of the country were those of growth, experiment, preparation, and acquisition, rather than of full accomplishment. What happened in the field of painting, was happening also in the field of scholarship; and we have good reason to be thankful that by the very nature of the arts, these tentative endeavours have a more enduring charm than the dull tomes of contemporary students. Nor, again, is it rational to regret that painting, having started with the sincere desire of expressing the hopes and fears that agitate the soul of man, and raise him to a spiritual region, should now be occupied with lessons in perspective and anatomy. In the twofold process of discovering the world and man, this dry ground had inevitably to be explored, and its exploration could not fail to cost the sacrifice of much that was impassioned and imaginative in the earlier and less scientific age of art.[161] The spirit of Cosimo de' Medici, almost cynical in its positivism, the spirit of Sixtus IV., almost godless in its egotism, were abroad in Italy at this period;[162] indeed, the fifteenth century presents at large a spectacle of prosaic worldliness and unideal aims. Yet the work done by the artists was the best work of the epoch, far more fruitful of results and far more permanently valuable than that of Filelfo inveighing in filthy satires against his personal foes, or of Beccadelli endeavouring to inoculate modern literature with the virus of pagan vices. Petrarch in the fourteenth century had preached the evangel of humanism; Giotto in the fourteenth century had given life to painting. The students of the fifteenth, though their spirit was so much baser and less large than Petrarch's, were following in the path marked out for them and leading forward to Erasmus. The painters of the fifteenth, though they lacked the unity of aim and freshness of their master, were learning what was needful for the crowning and fulfilment of his labours on a loftier stage.

Foremost among the pioneers of Renaissance-painting, towering above them all by head and shoulders, like Saul among the tribes of Israel, stands Masaccio.[163] The Brancacci Chapel of the Carmine at Florence, painted in fresco almost entirely by his hand, was the school where all succeeding artists studied, and whence Raphael deigned to borrow the composition and the figures of a portion of his Cartoons. The "Legend of S. Catherine," painted by Masaccio in 8. Clemente at Rome, though an earlier work, is scarcely less remarkable as evidence that a new age had begun for art. In his frescoes the qualities essential to the style of the Renaissance—what Vasari calls the modern manner—appear precociously full-formed. Besides life and nature they have dignity and breadth, the grand and heightened manner of emancipated art. Masaccio is not inferior to Giotto in his power of telling a story with simplicity; but he understands the value of perspective for realising the circumstances of the scene depicted. His august groups of the Apostles are surrounded by landscape tranquillising to the sense and pleasant to the eye. Mountain-lines and distant horizons lend space and largeness to his compositions, and the figures of his men and women move freely in a world prepared for them. In Masaccio's management of drapery we discern the influence of plastic art; without concealing the limbs, which are always modelled with a freedom that suggests the power of movement even in stationary attitudes, the voluminous folds and broad masses of powerfully coloured raiment invest his forms with a nobility unknown before in painting. His power of representing the nude is not less remarkable. But what above all else renders his style attractive is the sense of aerial space. For the first time in art the forms of living persons are shown moving in a transparent medium of light, graduated according to degrees of distance, and harmonised by tones that indicate an atmospheric unity. In comparing Masaccio with Giotto we must admit that, with so much gained, something has been sacrificed. Giotto succeeded in presenting the idea, the feeling, the pith of the event, and pierced at once to the very ground-root of imagination. Masaccio thinks over-much, perhaps, of external form, and is intent on air-effects and colouring. He realises the phenomenal truth with a largeness and a dignity peculiar to himself. But we ask whether he was capable of bringing close to our hearts the secret and the soul of spiritual things. Has not art beneath his touch become more scenic, losing thereby somewhat of dramatic poignancy?

Born in 1402, Masaccio left Florence in 1429 for Rome, and was not heard of by his family again. Thus perished, at the early age of twenty-seven, a painter whose work reveals not only the originality of real creative genius, but a maturity that moves our wonder. What might he not have done if he had lived? Between his style in the Brancacci chapel and that of Raphael in the Vatican there seems to be but a narrow gap, which might perchance have been passed over by this man, if death had spared him.

Masaccio can by no means be taken as a fair instance of the painters of his age. Gifted with exceptional powers, he overleaped the difficulties of his art, and arrived intuitively at results whereof as yet no scientific certainty had been secured. His contemporaries applied humbler talents to severe study, and wrought out by patient industry those principles which Masaccio had divined. Their work is therefore at the same time more archaic and more pedantic, judged by modern standards. It is difficult to imagine a style of painting less attractive than that of Paolo Uccello.[164] Yet his fresco of the "Deluge" in the cloisters of S. Maria Novella, and his battlepieces—one of which may be seen in the National Gallery—taught nearly all that painters needed of perspective. The lesson was conveyed in hard, dry, uncouth diagrams, ill-coloured and deficient in the quality of animation. At this period the painters, like the sculptors, were trained as goldsmiths, and Paolo had been a craftsman of that guild before he gave his whole mind to the study of linear perspective and the drawing of animals. The precision required in this trade forced artists to study the modelling of the human form, and promoted that crude naturalism which has been charged against their pictures. Carefully to observe, minutely to imitate some actual person—the Sandro of your workshop or the Cecco from the marketplace—became the pride of painters. No longer fascinated by the dreams of mediaeval mysticism, and unable for the moment to invest ideals of the fancy with reality, they meanwhile made the great discovery that the body of a man is a miracle of beauty, each limb a divine wonder, each muscle a joy as great as sight of stars or flowers. Much that is repulsive in the pictures of the Pollajuoli and Andrea del Castagno, the leaders in this branch of realism, is due to admiration for the newly studied mechanism of the human form. They seem to have cared but little to select their types or to accentuate expression, so long as they were able to portray the man before them with fidelity.[165] The comeliness of average humanity was enough for them; the difficulties of reproducing what they saw, exhausted their force. Thus the master-works on which they staked their reputation show them emulous of fame as craftsmen, while only here and there, in minor paintings for the most part, the poet that was in them sees the light. Brunelleschi told Donatello the truth when he said that his Christ was a crucified contadino. Intent on mastering the art of modelling, and determined above all things to be accurate, the sculptor had forgotten that something more was wanted in a crucifix than the careful study of a robust peasant-boy.

A story of a somewhat later date still further illustrates the dependence of the work of art upon the model in Renaissance Florence. Jacopo Sansovino made the statue of a youthful "Bacchus" in close imitation of a lad called Pippo Fabro. Posing for hours together naked in a cold studio, Pippo fell into ill health, and finally went mad. In his madness he frequently assumed the attitude of the "Bacchus" to which his life had been sacrificed, and which is now his portrait. The legend of the painter who kept his model on a cross in order that he might the more minutely represent the agonies of death by crucifixion, is but a mythus of the realistic method carried to its logical extremity.

Piero della Francesca, a native of Borgo San Sepolcro, and a pupil of Domenico Veneziano, must be placed among the painters of this period who advanced their art by scientific study. He carried the principles of correct drawing and solid modelling as far as it is possible for the genius of man to do, and composed a treatise on perspective in the vulgar tongue. But these are not his only titles to fame. By dignity of portraiture, by loftiness of style, and by a certain poetical solemnity of imagination, he raised himself above the level of the mass of his contemporaries. Those who have once seen his fresco of the "Resurrection" in the hall of the Compagnia della Misericordia at Borgo San Sepolcro, will never forget the deep impression of solitude and aloofness from all earthly things produced by it. It is not so much the admirable grouping and masterly drawing of the four sleeping soldiers, or even the majestic type of the Christ emergent without effort from the grave, as the communication of a mood felt by the painter and instilled into our souls, that makes this by far the grandest, most poetic, and most awe-inspiring picture of the Resurrection. The landscape is simple and severe, with the cold light upon it of the dawn before the sun is risen. The drapery of the ascending Christ is tinged with auroral colours like the earliest clouds of morning; and His level eyes, with the mystery of the slumber of the grave still upon them, seem gazing, far beyond our scope of vision, into the region of the eternal and illimitable. Thus, with Piero for mystagogue, we enter an inner shrine of deep religious revelation. The same high imaginative faculty marks the fresco of the "Dream of Constantine" in S. Francesco at Arezzo, where, it may be said in passing, the student of art must learn to estimate what Piero could do in the way of accurate foreshortening, powerful delineation of solid bodies, and noble treatment of drapery.[166] To Piero, again, we owe most precious portraits of two Italian princes, Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta and Federigo of Urbino, masterpieces[167] of fidelity to nature and sound workmanship.

In addition to the many great paintings that command our admiration, Piero claims honour as the teacher of Melozzo da Forli and of Luca Signorelli. Little is left to show the greatness of Melozzo; but the frescoes preserved in the Quirinal are enough to prove that he continued the grave and lofty manner of his master.[168] Signorelli bears a name illustrious in the first rank of Italian painters; and to speak of him will be soon my duty. It was the special merit of these artists to elevate the ideal of form and to seek after sublimity, without departing from the path of conscientious labour, in an age preoccupied on the one hand with technicality and naturalism, on the other with decorative prettiness and pietism.

While the Florentine and Umbro-Tuscan masters were perfecting the arts of accurate design, a similar direction toward scientific studies was given to the painters of Northern Italy at Padua. Michael Savonarola, writing his panegyric of Padua about 1440, expressly mentions Perspective as a branch of philosophy taught in the high school;[169] and the influence of Francesco Squarcione, though exaggerated by Vasari, was not inconsiderable. This man, who began life as a tailor or embroiderer, was early interested in the fine arts. Like Ciriac of Ancona, he had a taste for travel and collection,[170] visiting the sacred soil of Greece and sojourning in divers towns of Italy, everywhere making drawings, copying pictures, taking casts from statues, and amassing memoranda on the relics of antiquity as well as on the methods practised by contemporary painters. Equipped with these aids to study, Squarcione returned to Padua, his native place, where he opened a kind of school for painters. It is clear that he was himself less an artist than an amateur of painting, with a turn for teaching, and a conviction, based upon the humanistic instincts of his age, that the right way of learning was by imitation of the antique. During the course of his career he is said to have taught no less than 137 pupils, training his apprentices by the exhibition of casts and drawings, and giving them instruction in the science of perspective.[171] From his studio issued the mighty Andrea Mantegna, whose life-work, one of the most weighty moments in the history of modern art, will be noticed at length in the next chapter. For the present it is enough to observe that through Squarcione the scientific and humanistic movement of the fifteenth century was communicated to the art of Northern Italy. There, as at Florence, painting was separated from ecclesiastical tradition, and a new starting-point was sought in the study of mathematical principles, and the striving after form for its own sake.

Without attempting the detailed history of painting in this period of divided energy and diverse effort, it is needful here to turn aside and notice those masters of the fifteenth century who remained comparatively uninfluenced by the scholastic studies of their contemporaries. Of these, the earliest and most notable was Gentile da Fabriano, the last great painter of the Gubbian school.[172] In the predella of his masterpiece at Florence there is a little panel, which attracts attention as one of the earliest attempts to represent a sunrise. The sun has just appeared above one of those bare sweeping hill-sides so characteristic of Central Italian landscape. Part of the country lies untouched by morning, cold and grey: the rest is silvered with the level light, falling sideways on the burnished leaves and red fruit of the orange trees, and casting shadows from olive branches on the furrows of a new-ploughed field. Along the road journey Joseph and Mary and the infant Christ, so that you may call this little landscape a "Flight into Egypt," if you choose. Gentile, with all his Umbrian pietism, was a painter for whom the fair sights of the earth had exquisite value. The rich costumes of the Eastern kings, their train of servants, their hawks and horses, hounds and monkeys, are painted by him with scrupulous fidelity; and nothing can be more true to nature than the wild flowers he has copied in the framework of this picture. Yet we perceive that, though he felt in his own way the naturalistic impulse of the age, he had scarcely anything in common with masters like Uccello or Verocchio.

Still less had Fra Angelico. Of all the painters of this period he most successfully resisted the persuasions of the Renaissance, and perfected an art that owed little to sympathy with the external world. He thought it a sin to study or to imitate the naked form, and his most beautiful faces seem copied from angels seen in visions, not from any sons of men. While the artists around him were absorbed in mastering the laws of geometry and anatomy, Fra Angelico sought to express the inner life of the adoring soul. Only just so much of realism, whether in the drawing of the body and its drapery, or in the landscape background, as seemed necessary for suggesting the emotion or for setting forth the story, found its way into his pictures. The message they convey might have been told almost as perfectly upon the lute or viol. His world is a strange one—a world not of hills and fields and flowers and men of flesh and blood, but one where the people are embodied ecstasies, the colours tints from evening clouds or apocalyptic jewels, the scenery a flood of light or a background of illuminated gold. His mystic gardens, where the ransomed souls embrace, and dance with angels on the lawns outside the City of the Lamb, are such as were never trodden by the foot of man in any paradise of earth.

Criticism has a hard task in attempting to discern the merit of the several painters of this time. It is clear that we must look not to Fra Angelico but to Masaccio for the progressive forces that were carrying art forward to complete accomplishment. Yet the charm of Masaccio is as nothing in comparison with that which holds us spell-bound before the sacred and impassioned reveries of the Fiesolan monk. Masaccio had inestimable value for his contemporaries. Fra Angelico, now that we know all Masaccio can teach, has a quality so unique that we return again and again to the contemplation of his visions. Thus it often happens that we are tempted to exaggerate the historical importance of one painter because he touches us by some peculiar quality, and to over-estimate the intrinsic value of another because he was a motive power in his own age. Both these temptations should be resolutely resisted by the student who is capable of discerning different kinds of excellence and diverse titles to affectionate remembrance. Tracing the history of Italian painting is like pursuing a journey down an ever-broadening river, whose affluents are Giotto and Masaccio, Ghirlandajo, Signorelli, and Mantegna. We have to turn aside and land upon the shore, in order to visit the heaven-reflecting lakelet, self-encompassed and secluded, called Angelico.

Benozzo Gozzoli, the pupil of Fra Angelico, but in no sense the continuator of his tradition, exhibits the blending of several styles by a genius of less creative than assimilative force. That he was keenly interested in the problems of perspective and foreshortening, and that none of the knowledge collected by his fellow-workers had escaped him, is sufficiently proved by his frescoes at Pisa. His compositions are rich in architectural details, not always chosen with pure taste, but painted with an almost infantine delight in the magnificence of buildings. Quaint birds and beasts and reptiles crowd his landscapes; while his imagination runs riot in rocks and rivers, trees of all variety, and rustic incidents adopted from real life. At the same time he felt an enjoyment like that of Gentile da Fabriano in depicting the pomp and circumstance of pageantry, and no Florentine of the fifteenth century was more fond of assembling the personages of contemporary history in groups.[173] Thus he showed himself sensitive to the chief influences of the earlier Renaissance, and combined the scientific and naturalistic tendencies of his age in a manner not devoid of native poetry. What he lacked was depth of feeling, the sense of noble form, the originative force of a great mind. His poetry of invention, though copious and varied, owed its charm to the unstudied grace of improvisation, and he often undertook subjects where his idyllic rather than dramatic genius failed to sustain him. It is difficult, for instance, to comprehend how M. Rio could devote two pages to Gozzoli's "Destruction of Sodom," so comparatively unimpressive in spite of its aggregated incidents, when he passes by the "Fulminati" of Signorelli, so tragic in its terrible simplicity, with a word.[174]

This painter's marvellous rapidity of execution enabled him to produce an almost countless series of decorative works. The best of these are the frescoes of the Pisan Campo Santo, of the Riccardi Palace of Florence, of San Gemignano, and of Montefalco. It has been well said of Gozzoli that, though he attempted grand subjects on a large scale, he could not rise above the limitations of a style better adapted to the decoration of cassoni than to fresco.[175] Yet within the range of his own powers there are few more fascinating painters. His feeling for fresh nature—for hunters in the woods at night or dawn, for vintage-gatherers among their grapes, for festival troops of cavaliers and pages, and for the marriage-dances of young men and maidens—yields a delightful gladness to compositions lacking the simplicity of Giotto and the dignity of Masaccio.[176] No one knew better how to sketch the quarrels of little boys in their nursery, or the laughter of serving-women, or children carrying their books to school;[177] and when the idyllic genius of the man was applied to graver themes, his fancy supplied him with multitudes of angels waving rainbow-coloured wings above fair mortal faces. Bevies of them nestle like pigeons on the penthouse of the hut of Bethlehem, or crowd together round the infant Christ.[178]

From these observations on the style of Benozzo Gozzoli it will be seen that in the evolution of Renaissance culture he may be compared with the romantic poets for whom the cheerfulness of nature and the joy that comes to men from living in a many-coloured world of inexhaustible delight were sufficient sources of inspiration. It should be mentioned lastly that he enjoyed the patronage and friendship of the Medicean princes.

Another painter favoured by the Medici was Fra Filippo Lippi, whose life and art-work were alike the deviation of a pleasure-loving temperament from its natural sphere into the service of the Church. Left an orphan at the age of two years, he was brought up by an aunt, who placed him, as a boy of eight, in the convent of the Carmine at Florence. For monastic duties he had no vocation, and the irregularities of his behaviour caused scandal even in that age of cynical indulgence. It can scarcely be doubted that the schism between his practice and profession served to debase and vulgarise a genius of fine imaginative quality, while the uncongenial work of decorating choirs and painting altar-pieces limed the wings of his swift spirit with the dulness of routine that savoured of hypocrisy. Bound down to sacred subjects, he was too apt to make angels out of street-urchins, and to paint the portraits of his peasant-loves for Virgins.[179] His delicate sense of natural beauty gave peculiar charm to this false treatment of religious themes. Nothing, for example, can be more attractive than the rows of angels bearing lilies in his "Coronation of the Virgin;"[180] and yet, when we regard them closely, we find that they have no celestial quality of form or feature. Their grace is earthly, and the spirit breathed upon the picture is the loveliness of colour, quiet and yet glowing—blending delicate blues and greens with whiteness purged of glare. The beauties as well as the defects of such compositions make us regret that Fra Filippo never found a more congenial sphere for his imagination. As a painter of subjects half-humorous and half-pathetic, or as the illustrator of romantic stories, we fancy that he might have won fame rivalled only by the greatest colourists. One such picture it was granted him to paint, and this is his masterpiece. In the prime of life he was commissioned to decorate the choir of the cathedral at Prato with the legends of S. John Baptist and S. Stephen. All of these frescoes are noteworthy for their firm grasp upon reality in the portraits of Florentine worthies, and for the harmonious disposition of the groups; but the scene of Salome dancing before Herod is the best for its poetic feeling. Her movement across the floor before the tyrant and his guests at table, the quaint fluttering of her drapery, the well-bred admiration of the spectators, their horror when she brings the Baptist's head to Herodias, and the weak face of the half-remorseful Herod are expressed with a dramatic power that shows the genius of a poet painter. And even more lovely than Salome are a pair of girls locked in each other's arms close by Herodias on the dais. A natural and spontaneous melody, not only in the suggested movements of this scene, but also in the colouring, choice of form, and treatment of drapery, makes it one of the most musical of pictures ever painted.

Fra Filippo was not so successful in the choir of the cathedral at Spoleto, where he undertook; to paint scenes from the life of the Virgin. Yet those who have not examined these frescoes, ruinous in their decay and spoiled by stupid restoration, can form no just notion of the latent capacity of this great master. The whole of the half-dome above the tribune is filled with, a "Coronation of Madonna." A circular rainbow surrounds both her and Christ. She is kneeling with fiery rays around her, glorified by her assumption into heaven. Christ is enthroned, and at His side stands a seat prepared for His mother, as soon as the crown that He is placing on her head shall have made her Queen. From the outer courts of heaven, thronged with multitudes of celestial beings, angels are crowding in, breaking the lines of the prismatic aureole, as though the ardour of their joy could scarcely be repressed; while the everlasting light of God sheds radiance from above, and far below, lies earth with diminished sun and moon. The boldness of conception in this singular fresco reveals a genius capable of grappling with such problems as Tintoretto solved. Fra Filippo died at Spoleto, and left his work unfinished, to the care of his assistant, the Fra Diamante. Over his tomb Lorenzo de' Medici caused a monument to be erected, and Poliziano wrote Latin couplets to commemorate the fame of a painter highly prized by his patrons.