We have already considered the Presepio as an example of Giotto’s power of giving the actual setting of a scene without losing its heroic quality. It is also an example of his power of visualising the psychological situation; here, the sudden thrill which permeates an assembly at a moment of unwonted exaltation. It depicts the first representation of the Nativity instituted at Greccio by S. Francis; it is the moment at which he takes the image of the Infant Christ in his arms, when, to the ecstatic imaginations of the bystanders, it appeared for an instant transformed into a living child of transcendent beauty. The monks at the back are still singing the Lauds (one can almost tell what note each is singing, so perfect is Giotto’s commandof facial expression), but the immediate bystanders and the priest are lost in wrapt contemplation of S. Francis and the Child.[29]
One of the most beautiful of the whole series is the fresco which represents the nuns of S. Clare meeting the Saint’s body as it is borne to burial. Throughout the series Giotto took Bonaventura’s life as his text, and it is interesting to see how near akin the two renderings are, both alike inspired by that new humanity of feeling which S. Francis’ life had aroused. Having described the beauty of the Saint’s dead body, “of which the limbs were so soft and delicate to the touch that they seemed to have returned to the tenderness of a child’s, and appeared by many manifest signs to be innocent as never having done wrong, so like a child’s were they,” he adds,
Therefore it is not to be marvelled at if seeing a body so white and seeing therein those black nails and that wound in the side which seemed to be a fresh red rose of spring, if those that saw it felt therefor great wonder and joy. And in the morning when it was day the companies and people of the city and all the country round came together, and being instructed to translate that most holy body from that place to the city of Assisi, moved with great solemnity of hymns and songs and divine offices, and with a multitude of torches and of candles lighted and with branches of trees in their hands; and with such solemnity going towards the city of Assisi and passing by the church of S. Damiano, in which stayed Clara the noble virgin who is to-day a saint on earth and in heaven, they rested there a little. She and her holy virgins were comforted to see and kiss that most holy body of their father the blessed Francis adorned with those holy stigmata and white and shining as has been said.
Therefore it is not to be marvelled at if seeing a body so white and seeing therein those black nails and that wound in the side which seemed to be a fresh red rose of spring, if those that saw it felt therefor great wonder and joy. And in the morning when it was day the companies and people of the city and all the country round came together, and being instructed to translate that most holy body from that place to the city of Assisi, moved with great solemnity of hymns and songs and divine offices, and with a multitude of torches and of candles lighted and with branches of trees in their hands; and with such solemnity going towards the city of Assisi and passing by the church of S. Damiano, in which stayed Clara the noble virgin who is to-day a saint on earth and in heaven, they rested there a little. She and her holy virgins were comforted to see and kiss that most holy body of their father the blessed Francis adorned with those holy stigmata and white and shining as has been said.
Bonaventura, we see, had already conceived the scene with such consummate artistic skill that it was, as it were, ready made for Giotto. He had only to translate that description into line and colour; and in doing so he has lost nothing of its beauty. Giotto, like Bonaventura, is apparently perfectly simple, perfectly direct and literal, and yet the result is in both cases a work of the rarest imaginative power. Nor is it easy to analyse its mysterious charm. Giotto was a great painter in the strictest and most technical sense of the word, but his technical perfection is not easily appreciated in these damaged works, and one cannot explain the effect this produces by any actual beauty of the surface quality of the painting; it depends rather on our perception, through the general disposition and action of the figures, of Giotto’s attitude to life, of the instinctive rightnessof feeling through which he was enabled to visualise the scene in its simplest and most inevitable form.
We come now to the three last frescoes of the series which show such marked differences from the rest, though some of the peculiarities, the minute hands and elegant features, appear in parts of some of the preceding frescoes, notably in our last: we may imagine that an assistant working under Giotto was, as the work progressed, given a larger and larger share in the execution, and finally carried out the three last frescoes alone. But this is pure hypothesis; all we can do at present is to note the difference not only of types, but even to some extent in the manner of conception, that they evince. One of them recounts the story of a woman of Benevento devoted to S. Francis, who died after forgetting one of her sins in her last confession. At the intercession of the dead Saint she was allowed to come to life again, finish her confession, and so defeat of his prey the black devil who had already come for her soul. Here the whole spacing out of the composition indicates a peculiar feeling, very different from Giotto’s. The artist crowds his figures into narrow, closely-packed groups, and leaves vast spaces of bare wall between. In this particular instance the result is very impressive; it intensifies the supreme importance of the confession and emphasises the loneliness and isolation of the soul that has already once passed away. When we look at the individual figures the differences are even more striking; the long thin figures, the repetition of perpendicular lines, the want of variety in the poses of the heads, a certain timidity in the movements, the long masks, too big in proportion for the heads, the tiny elegant features, elongated necks, and minute hands—all these characteristics contrast with Giotto’s tendency to massive proportions and easy expansive movements. Not that these figures have not great beauty; only it is of a recondite and exquisite kind. The artist that created these types must have loved what was sought out and precious; though living so long before Raphael, he must have been something of a “pre-Raphaelite.”
We have no clue to the identity of this pseudo-Giotto; he is quite distinct from Giotto’s known pupils, and indeed may rather have been a contemporary artist who came under Giotto’s influence than one trained by him. Besides the frescoes at Assisi, we arefortunate enough to possess one other picture by this interesting artist. It is a small altar-piece dedicated to S. Cecilia, which hangs in the corridor of the Uffizi, and has been attributed both to Cimabue and to Giotto. The long Rosetti-like necks and heads, the poses, in which elegance is preferred to expressiveness, and the concentration of the figures so as to leave large empty spaces even in these small compositions, are sufficient grounds for attributing it to Giotto’s fellow-worker at Assisi.[30]
In the year 1298 Giotto entered into a contract with Cardinal Stefaneschi to execute for him the mosaic of the “Navicella,” now in the porch of S. Peter’s. We have in this the first ascertainable date of Giotto’s life. It is one which, however, fits very well with the internal evidences of his style, as it would give the greater part of the last decade of the thirteenth century as the period of Giotto’s activity in the Upper Church at Assisi. One other work on the evidence of style we may attribute to the master’s pre-Roman period, and that is the Madonna of the Academy at Florence. Here Giotto followed the lines of Cimabue’s enthroned Madonnas, though with his own greatly increased sense of solidity in the modelling and vivacity in the poses. It cannot, however, be considered as a prepossessing work. It may be due to restoration that the picture shows no signs of Giotto’s peculiar feeling for tonality; but even the design is scarcely satisfactory, the relation of the Madonna to the throne is such that her massive proportions leave an impression of ungainliness rather than of grandeur. In the throne itself he has made an experiment in the new Gothic architecture, but he has hardly managed to harmonise it with the earlier classic forms of the Cosmati, which still govern the main design. We shall see that in his work at Rome he overcame all these difficulties.
In Rome Giotto worked chiefly for Cardinal Stefaneschi. This is significant of Giotto’s close relations with the Roman school, for it was Bartolo, another member of the same family, who commissioned the remarkable mosaics of Sta. Maria in Trastevere, executed in 1290,mosaics which show how far the Roman school had already advanced towards the new art, of which Giotto’s work was the consummation.
The mosaic of the “Navicella,” which was the greatest undertaking of Giotto’s activity in Rome, is unfortunately terribly restored. We can, however, still recognise the astonishing dramatic force of the conception and the unique power which Giotto possessed of giving a vivid presentation of a particular event, accompanied by the most circumstantial details, and at the same time suggesting to the imagination a symbolical interpretation of universal and abstract significance. Even the surprising intrusion of agenremotive in the fisherman peacefully angling on the shore does not disturb our recognition of this universal interpretation, which puts so clearly the relation of the ship of the Church, drifting helplessly with its distraught crew, to the despairing Peter, who has here the character of an emissary and intermediary, and the impassive and unapproachable figure of Christ himself.
The daring originality which Giotto shows in placing the predominant figure at the extreme edge of the composition, the feeling for perspective which enabled him to give verisimilitude to the scene by throwing back the ship into the middle distance, the new freedom and variety in the movements of the Apostles in the boat, by which the monotony of the eleven figures crowded into so limited a space is evaded, are proofs of Giotto’s rare power of invention, a power which enabled him to treat even the most difficult abstractions with the same vivid sense of reality as the dramatic incidents of contemporary life. It is not to be wondered at that this should be the work most frequently mentioned by the Italian writers of the Renaissance. The storm-gods blowing their Triton’s horns are a striking instance of how much Giotto assimilated at this time from Pagan art.
But of far greater beauty are the panels for the high altar of S. Peter’s, also painted for Cardinal Stefaneschi, and now to be seen in the sacristy, where the more obvious beauties of Melozzo da Forli’s music-making angels too often lead to their being overlooked. And yet, unnoticed in the dark corners of the room, they have escaped the attentions of restorers and glow with all the rare translucency of Giotto’s tempera.
These are the first pictures we have examined by Giotto in whichwe are able to appreciate at all the beauty and subtlety of his tone contrasts, for not only have the frescoes of the upper church at Assisi and the “Madonna” of the Academy suffered severely from restoration, but it is probable that in his youthful works he had not freed himself altogether from the harsher tonality of earlier art. Here, however, Giotto shows that power which is distinctive of the greatest masters of paint, of developing a form within a strictly limited scale of tone, drawing out of the slightest contrasts their fullest expressiveness for the rendering of form; a method which, though adopted from an intuitive feeling for pure beauty, gives a result which can only be described as that of an enveloping atmosphere surrounding the forms.[31]
The kneeling figure, presumably Cardinal Stefaneschi himself, in the “Christ enthroned” is an admirable instance of this quality. With what tender, scarcely perceptible gradations, with what a limited range from dark to light is the figure expressed; and yet it is not flat, the form is perfectly realised between the two sweeping curves whose simplicity would seem, but for the masterly modelling, to prevent the possibility of their containing a human figure. The portrait is as remarkable in sentiment as in execution. The very conception of introducing a donor into such a composition was new.[32]It was a sign of the new individualism which marked the whole of the great period of Italian art, and finally developed into extravagance. The donor having once found his way into pictures of sacred ceremonial remained, but he not infrequently found it difficult to comport himself becomingly amid celestial surroundings; as he became more important, and heaven itself became less so, he asserted himself with unseemly self-assurance, until at last his matter-of-fact countenance, rendered with prosaic fidelity, stares out at the spectator in contemptuous indifference to the main action of the composition, the illusion of which it effectually destroys.
But here, where the idea is new, it has no such jarring effect; it is not yet a stereotyped formula, an excuse for self-advertisementor social display, but the direct outcome of a poetical and pious thought; and Giotto, with his unique rightness of feeling, has expressed, by the hand clinging to the throne and the slightly bent head, just the appropriate attitude of humble adoration, which he contrasts with the almost nonchalant ease and confidence of the angels. Even in so purely ceremonial a composition as this Giotto contrives to create a human situation.
In the planning of this picture Giotto has surpassed not only Duccio’s and Cimabue’s versions of the Enthronement motive but his own earlier work at Florence. The throne, similar in construction to that in the Academy picture, no longer shows the inconsistencies of two conflicting styles, but is of pure and exquisitely proportioned Gothic; the difficult perspective of the arches at the side is rendered with extraordinary skill though without mathematical accuracy. The relation of the figure of Christ to the throne is here entirely satisfactory, with the result that the great size of the figure no longer appears unnatural, but as an easily accepted symbol of divinity. In the drawing of the face of the Christ he has retained the hieratic solemnity given by the rigid delineation of Byzantine art.
But if the “Christ enthroned” is a triumph of well-calculated proportions, the “Crucifixion of S. Peter” which formed one side of the triptych, is even more remarkable for the beauty of its spacing and the ingenuity of its arrangement.
In designing such a panel with its narrow cusped arch and gold background, the artist’s first consideration must be its effect as mere pattern when seen on the altar at the end of a church. In his frescoes, Giotto’s first preoccupation was with the drama to be presented; here it was with the effect of sumptuous pattern.
And the given data out of which the pattern was to be made were by no means tractable. The subject of the Crucifixion of S. Peter was naturally not a favourite one with artists, and scarcely any succeeded in it entirely, even in the small dimensions of a predella piece, to which it was generally relegated. For it is almost impossible to do away with the unpleasant effect of a figure seen thus upside down. The outstretched arms, which in the crucifixion of Christ give a counterbalancing line to the long horizontal of the spectators, here only increases the difficulty of the single upright. But Giotto,by a brilliant inspiration,[33]found his solution in the other fact given by his subject—namely, that the martyrdom took place between the goals of the Circus of Nero. By making these huge pyramids adapted from two well-known Roman monuments (the Septizonium and the pyramid of Cestius), he has obtained from the gold background just that dignified effect of spreading out above and contracting below which is so effective in renderings of the crucifixion of Christ, an effect which he still further emphasises by the two angels, whose spreading wings and floating draperies increase the brocade-like richness of the symmetrical pattern.
Nor, the pattern once assured, has Giotto failed of vivid dramatic presentation. It is surprising to find crowded into so small a space so many new poses all beautifully expressive of the individual shades of a common feeling: the woman to the left of the cross leaning her head on her hand as though sorrow had become a physical pain; the beautiful figure of the youth, with long waving hair, who throws back both arms with a despairing gesture; the woman lifting her robe to wipe her tears; and, most exquisite of all, and most surprising, in its novelty and truth to life, the figure of the girl to the left, drawn towards the terrible scene by a motion of sympathy and yet shrinking back with instinctive shyness and terror. In the child alone Giotto has, as was usually the case, failed of a rhythmical and expressive pose. And what an entirely new study of life is seen here in the variety of the types! In one—the man whose profile cuts the sky to the left—he seems to have been indebted to some Roman portrait-bust; another, on horseback to the left, is clearly a Mongolian type, with slant eyes and pigtail, a curious proof of the intercourse with the extreme East which the Franciscan missionaries had already established. In the drawing of the nude figure of S. Peter, in spite of the unfortunate proportion of the head, the same direct study of nature has enabled Giotto to realise the structure of the figure more adequately than any artist since Roman times. One can well understand the astonishment and delight of Giotto’s contemporaries at this unfolding of the new possibilities of art, which could now interpret all the variety and richness of human life and could so intensify its appeal to the emotions. One other peculiarity of this picture isinteresting and characteristic of Giotto’s attitude. In painting the frame of his panel he did not merely add figures as decorative and symbolic accessories, he brought them into relation with the central action, for each of them gazes at S. Peter with a different expression of pity and grief. Giotto had to be dramatic even in his frames.[34]
That Giotto remained in Rome till after the great Jubilee of 1300 is shown by the fragment of his fresco of the Papal Benediction which still remains on a pillar of S. John Lateran. There is every probability that at this time he met Dante, who was collecting the materials for the terrible portrait of Boniface VIII. which he drew in the “Inferno.”
The next ascertainable date in Giotto’s life is that of the decoration of the Arena chapel at Padua, begun in 1305. Here at last we are on indisputable ground. The decoration of this chapel was conceived by Giotto as a single whole, and was entirely carried out by him, though doubtless with the help of assistants, and although it has suffered from restoration it remains the completest monument to his genius. The general effect of these ample silhouettes of golden yellow and red on a ground of clear ultramarine is extraordinarily harmonious, and almost gay. But essentially the design is made up of the sum of a number of separate compositions. The time had not come for co-ordinating these into a single scheme, as Michelangelo did in the ceiling of the Sistine. In the composition of the separate scenes Giotto here shows for the first time his full powers. Nearly every one of these is an entirely original discovery of new possibilities in the relation of forms to one another. The contours of the figures evoke to the utmost the ideal comprehension of volume and mass. The space in which the figures move is treated almost as in a bas-relief, of which they occupy a preponderant part. As compared with the designs at Assisi the space is restricted, and the figures amplified so that the plastic unity of the whole design is more immediately apprehended. I doubt whether in any single building one can see so many astonishing discoveries of formal relations as Giotto has here made. Almost every composition gives one the shock of a discovery at
Image unvavailable: Giotto. Pietà Arena Chapel, Padua Plate VI.Giotto. PietàArena Chapel, PaduaPlate VI.
once simple, inevitable, and instantly apprehended, and yet utterly unforeseeable. In most compositions one can guess at some of the steps by which the formal relations were established. Here one is at a loss to conceive by what flight of imagination the synthesis has been attained. We will consider a few in greater detail.
Giotto was, I believe, the first artist to represent the Resurrection by theNoli me tangere. The Byzantines almost invariably introduced the Descent into Hades or the Three Maries at the Tomb. In any case it is characteristic of Giotto to choose a subject where the human situation is so intimate and the emotions expressed are so poignant. Here, as in the “Navicella,” where he was free to invent a new composition, he discards the bilateral arrangement, which was almost invariable in Byzantine art, and concentrates all the interest in one corner of the composition. The angels on the tomb are damaged and distorted, but in the head and hands of the Magdalene we can realise Giotto’s greatly increased power and delicacy of modelling as compared with the frescoes at Assisi. It is impossible for art to convey more intensely than this the beauty of such a movement of impetuous yearning. The action of the Christ is as vividly realised; almost too obviously, indeed, does he seem to be edging out of the composition in order to escape the Magdalene’s outstretched hands. This is a striking instance of that power which Giotto possessed more than any other Italian, more indeed than any other artist except Rembrandt, the power of making perceptible the flash of mutual recognition which passes between two souls at a moment of sudden illumination.
In the “Pietà” (Plate) a more epic conception is realised, for the impression conveyed is of a universal and cosmic disaster: the air is rent with the shrieks of desperate angels whose bodies are contorted in a raging frenzy of compassion. And the effect is due in part to the increased command, which the Paduan frescoes show, of simplicity and logical directness of design. These massive boulder-like forms, these draperies cut by only a few large sweeping folds, which suffice to give the general movement of the figure with unerring precision, all show this new tendency in Giotto’s art as compared with the more varied detail, the more individual characterisation, of his early works. It is by this consciously acquired and masterlysimplicity that Giotto keeps here, in spite of the unrestrained extravagance of passion, the consoling dignity of style. If one compares it, for example, with the works of Flemish painters, who explored the depths of human emotion with a similar penetrating and sympathetic curiosity, one realises the importance of what all the great Italians inherited from Græco-Roman civilisation—the urbanity of a great style. And nowhere is it felt more than here, where Giotto is dealing with emotions which classical art scarcely touched.
It is interesting that Giotto should first have attained to this perfect understanding of style at Padua, where he was, as we know, in constant intercourse with Dante. Dante must have often watched him, perhaps helped him by suggestions, in decorating the chapel built with the ill-gotten wealth of that Scrovegni whom he afterwards seated amid the usurers on the burning sands of Hell.
It is mainly by means of the composition and the general conception of pose and movement that Giotto expresses the dramatic idea. And regarded from that point of view, these frescoes are an astounding proof of Giotto’s infallible intuitions. The characters he has created here are as convincing, as ineffaceable, as any that have been created by poets. The sad figure of Joachim is one never to be forgotten. In every incident of his sojourn in the wilderness, after the rejection of his offering in the temple, his appearance indicates exactly his mental condition. When he first comes to the sheepfold, he gazes with such set melancholy on the ground that the greeting of his dog and his shepherds cannot arouse his attention; when he makes a sacrifice he crawls on hands and knees in the suspense of expectation, watching for a sign from heaven; even in his sleep we guess at his melancholy dreams; and in the scene where he meets his wife at the Golden Gate on his return, Giotto has touched a chord of feeling at least as profound as can be reached by the most consummate master of the art of words.
It is true that in speaking of these one is led inevitably to talk of elements in the work which modern criticism is apt to regard as lying outside the domain of pictorial art. It is customary to dismiss all that concerns the dramatic presentation of the subject as literature or illustration, which is to be sharply distinguished from the qualities of design. But can this clear distinction be drawn in fact? Theimaginings of a playwright, a dramatic poet, and a dramatic painter have much in common, but they are never at any point identical. Let us suppose a story to be treated by all three: to each, as he dwells on the legend, the imagination will present a succession of images, but those images, even at their first formation, will be quite different in each case, they will be conditioned and coloured by the art which the creator practises, by his past observation of nature with a view to presentment in that particular art. The painter, like Giotto, therefore, actually imagines in terms of figures capable of pictorial presentment, he does not merely translate a poetically dramatic vision into pictorial terms. And to be able to do this implies a constant observation of natural forms with a bias towards the discovery of pictorial beauty. To be able, then, to conceive just the appropriate pose of a hand to express the right idea of character and emotion in a picture, is surely as much a matter of a painter’s vision as to appreciate the relative “values” of a tree and cloud so as to convey the mood proper to a particular landscape.
Before leaving the Paduan frescoes, I must allude to those allegorical figures of the virtues and vices in which Giotto has, as it were, distilled the essence of his understanding of human nature. These personified virtues and vices were the rhetorical commonplaces of the day, but Giotto’s intuitive understanding of the expression of emotion enabled him to give them a profound significance. He has in some succeeded in giving not merely a person under the influence of a given passion, but the abstract passion itself, not merely an angry woman, but anger. To conceive thus a figure possessed absolutely by a single passion implied, an excursion beyond the regions of experience; no merely scientific observation of the effects of emotion would have enabled him to conceive the figure of Anger. It required an imagination that could range the remotest spaces thus to condense in visible form the bestial madness of the passion, to depict what Blake would have called the “diabolical abstract” of anger.
We come now to the last great series of frescoes by Giotto which we possess, those of the Bardi and Peruzzi chapels of Sta. Croce, his maturest and most consummate works. From the very first Giotto had to the full the power of seizing upon whatever in the forms ofnature expressed life and emotion, but the perfect understanding of the conditions of a suave and gracious style was only slowly acquired. In the Florentine frescoes it is the geniality, the persuasiveness of the style which first strikes us. They have, indeed, an almost academic perfection of design.
The comparison of the “Death of S. Francis” here with the early fresco of the subject at Assisi shows how far Giotto has moved from the literal realism of his first works. At Assisi crowds of people push round the bier, soldiers and citizens come in to see, there is all the shifting variety of the actual event. Here the composition is sublimated and refined, reduced to its purest elements. The scene is still vividly, intensely real, but it is apprehended in a more pensive and meditative vein. There is in the composition a feeling for space which imposes a new mood of placidity and repose. This composition became the typical formula for such subjects throughout the Renaissance, but it was never again equalled. In spite of its apparent ease and simplicity, it is really by the subtlest art that all these figures are grouped in such readily apprehended masses without any sense of crowding and with such variety of gesture in the figures. The fresco, which had remained for more than a century under a coat of whitewash, was discovered in 1841 and immediately disfigured by utter restoration. The artist,[35]with a vague idea that Giotto was a decorative artist, and that decoration meant something ugly and unnatural, surrounded the figures with hard inexpressive lines. We can, therefore, only guess, by our knowledge of Giotto elsewhere, and by the general idea of pose, how perfect was the characterisation of the actors in the scene, how each responded according to his temperament to the general sorrow, some in humble prostration, one with a more intimate and personal affection, and one, to whom the vision of the ascending soul is apparent, wrapt in mystic ecstasy.
An interesting characteristic of these late frescoes is the revival which they declare of Giotto’s early love for classical architecture. He may well have recognised the pictorial value of the largeuntroubled rectangular spaces which it allowed. In the “Salome” he has approached even more nearly to purely classic forms than in his earliest frescoes at Assisi. The building has an almost Palladian effect with its square parapets surmounted by statues, some of which are clearly derived from the antique. In the soldier who brings in the Baptist’s head he has reverted to the costume of the Roman soldier, whereas, in the allegory of Chastity, the soldiers wear mediæval winged helmets.
The fact that there is a free copy of this fresco by the Lorenzetti at Siena made in 1331 gives us the period before which this must have been finished. Here again the mood is singularly placid, but the intensity with which Giotto realised a particularly dramatic moment is shown by a curious detail in which this differs from the usual rendering of the scene. Most artists, wishing to express the essentials of the story, make Salome continue her dance while the head is brought in. But Giotto was too deep a psychologist to make such an error. At the tragic moment she stops dancing and makes sad music on her lyre, to show that she, too, is not wanting in proper sensibility.
There is evidence in these frescoes of an artistic quality which we could scarcely have believed possible, and yet, as it is most evident in those parts which are least damaged, it is impossible not to believe that Giotto possessed it; and that is the real feeling for chiaroscuro which these paintings show. It is not merely that the light falls in one direction, though even that was a conception which was scarcely grasped before Masaccio, but that Giotto actually composes by light and shade, subordinates figures or groups of figures by letting them recede into gloom and brings others into prominent light. This is particularly well seen in the “Ascension of S. John” where the shadow of the building is made use of to unify the composition and give depth and relief to the imagined space. It is also an example of that beautiful atmospheric tonality of which I have already spoken. In the figure of S. John himself, Giotto seems to have the freedom and ease which we associate with art of a much later date. There is scarcely a hint of archaism in this figure. The head, with its perfect fusion of tones, its atmospheric envelopment, seems already nearly as modern as a head by Titian. Even the colour scheme, the richearthy reds, the intense sweet blues of the figures relieved against a broken green-grey, is a strange anticipation of Cinquecento art. It seems as though Giotto in these works had himself explored the whole of the promised land to which he led Italian painting.
It is true that we are conscious of a certain archaism here in the relations of the figures and the architecture. A certain violence is done to that demand for verisimilitude which, perhaps wrongly, we now invariably make. But in the “Raising of Drusiana,” even this demand is met. Here the figures all have their just proportions to one another, and to the buildings, and to the town wall which stretches behind them. The scene is imagined, not merely according to the conditions of the dramatic idea, but according to the possibilities and limitations of actual figures moving in a three dimensional space; even the perspective of the ground is understood. Such an imaginative construction of three dimensional space had its disadvantages as well as its advantages for art, but in any case it is an astonishing indication of Giotto’s genius that he thus foresaw the conditions which in the end would be accepted universally in European art. There is scarcely anything here that Raphael would have had to alter to adapt the composition to one of his tapestry cartoons.
Of the dramatic power of this I need add nothing to what has already been said, but as this is the last of his works which we shall examine it may afford an example of some of the characteristics of Giotto’s draughtsmanship. For Giotto was one of the greatest masters of line that the world has seen, and the fact that his knowledge of the forms of the figure was comparatively elementary in no way interferes with his greatness. It is not how many facts about an object an artist can record, but how incisive and how harmonious with itself the record is, that constitutes the essence of draughtsmanship.
In considering the qualities of line, three main elements are to be regarded: First, the decorative rhythm, our sense of sight being constructed like our sense of sound, so that certain relations, probably those which are capable of mathematical analysis, are pleasing, and others discordant. Secondly, the significance of line as enabling us imaginatively to reconstruct a real, not necessarily an actual, object from it. The greatest excellence of this quality will be the condensation of the greatest possible suggestion of real form into the simplest,most easily apprehended line; the absence of confusing superfluity on the one hand, and mechanical, and therefore meaningless simplicity, on the other. Finally, we may regard line as a gesture, which impresses us as a direct revelation of the artist’s personality in the same way that handwriting does.
Now, with Giotto, beautiful as his line undoubtedly is, it is not the first quality, the decorative rhythm, that most immediately impresses us. That is not the object of such deliberate and conscious research as with some artists. It is in its significance for the expression of form with the utmost lucidity, the most logical interrelation of parts that his line is so impressive. Here, for instance, in the figure of the kneeling woman, the form is expressed with perfect clearness; we feel at once the relation of the shoulders to one another, the relation of the torso to the pelvis, the main position of the thighs, and all this is conveyed by a curve of incredible simplicity capable of instant apprehension. To record so much with such economy requires not only a rare imaginative grasp of structure, but a manual dexterity which makes the story of Giotto’s O perfectly credible should one care to believe it.
Giotto’s line, regarded as an habitual gesture, is chiefly striking for its breadth and dignity. It has the directness, the absence of preciosity, which belongs to a generous and manly nature. The large sweeping curves of his loose and full draperies are in part the direct outcome of this attitude.
It is difficult to avoid the temptation to say of Giotto that he was the greatest artist that ever lived, a phrase which has been used of too many masters to retain its full emphasis. But at least he was the most prodigious phenomenon in the known history of art. Starting with little but the crude realism of Cimabue, tempered by the effete accomplishment of the Byzantines,[36]to have created an art capable of expressing the whole range of human emotions; to have found, almost without a guide, how to treat the raw material of life itself in a style so direct, so pliant to the idea, and yet so essentially grandiose and heroic; to have guessed intuitively almost all the principles of representation which it required nearly two centuries of enthusiastic researchto establish scientifically—to have accomplished all this is surely a more astounding performance than any other one artist has ever achieved.
But the fascination Giotto’s art exercises is due in part to his position in the development of modern culture. Coming at the same time as Dante, he shares with him the privilege of seeing life as a single, self-consistent, and systematic whole. It was a moment of equilibrium between the conflicting tendencies of human activity, a moment when such men as Dante and Giotto could exercise to the full their critical and analytical powers without destroying the unity of a cosmic theory based on theology. Such a moment was in its nature transitory: the free use of all the faculties which the awakening to a new self-consciousness had aroused, was bound to bring about antitheses which became more and more irreconcilable as time went on. Only one other artist in later times was able again to rise, by means of the conception of natural law, to a point whence life could be viewed as a whole. Even so, it was by a more purely intellectual effort, and Leonardo da Vinci could not keep the same genial but shrewd sympathy for common humanity which makes Giotto’s work so eternally refreshing.
Image unvavailable: Castagno. Crucifixion Fresco in St. Apollonia, Florence Plate VII.Castagno. CrucifixionFresco in St. Apollonia, FlorencePlate VII.
THE “artistic temperament”—as used in the press and the police court, these words betray a general misunderstanding of the nature of art, and of the artist whenever he becomes fully conscious of its purpose. The idea of the artist as the plaything of whim and caprice, a hypersensitive and incoherent emotionalist, is, no doubt, true of a certain class of men, many of whom practise the arts; nothing could be further from a true account of those artists whose work has had the deepest influence on the tradition of art; nothing could be less true of the great artists of the Florentine School.
From the rise of modern art in the thirteenth century till now Florence and France have been the decisive factors in the art of Europe. Without them our art might have reflected innumerable pathetic or dramatic moods, it might have illustrated various curious or moving situations, it would not have attained to the conception of generalised truth of form.
To Florence of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and to France of the seventeenth and succeeding centuries we owe the creation of generalised or what, for want of a better word, we may call “intellectual” art.
In speaking of intellect it is necessary to discriminate between two distinct modes of its operation. The intellect may seek to satisfy curiosity by observation of the distinctions between one object and another by means of analysis; but it may concern itself with the discovery of fundamental relations between these objects, by the construction of a synthetic system which satisfies the mind, both for its truth to facts and its logical coherence. The artist may employ both these modes. His curiosity about the phenomena of nature may lead him to accurate observation and recognition of the variety and distinctness of characters, but he also seeks to construe these distinct formsinto such a coherent whole as will satisfy the æsthetic desire for unity. Perhaps the processes employed by the artist may not be identical with the intellectual processes of science, but it is evident that they present a very close analogy to them.
It is a curious fact that at the beginning of the fifteenth century in Italy, art was deeply affected by both kinds of intellectual activity. Curiosity about natural forms in all their variety and complexity—naturalismin the modern sense—first manifested itself in European art in Flanders, France, and North Italy about the second decade of the fifteenth century. It appears that Italy actually led the way in this movement, and that Lombardy was the point of origin. Pisanello and Jacopo Bellini are the great exemplars in Italy of this idea of exploring indefatigably and somewhat recklessly all those detailed aspects of nature which their predecessors, occupied in the grand Giottesque style, had scorned to notice.
In Florence, too, this impulse was undoubtedly felt, but it is the great distinction of the Florentine artists that, however much their curiosity about particular forms may have been excited, their high intellectual passion for abstract ideas impelled them more to the study of some general principles underlying all appearance. They refused to admit the given facts of nature except in so far as they could become amenable to the generalising power of their art. Facts had to be digested into form before they were allowed into the system.
We can get an idea of what Florence of the fifteenth century meant for the subsequent tradition of European art if we consider that if it had not been for Florence the art of Italy might have been not altogether unlike the art of Flanders and the Rhine—a little more rhythmical, a little more gracious, perhaps, but fundamentally hardly more significant.
Although this typically Florentine attitude defined itself most clearly under the stress of naturalism it was, of course, already characteristic of earlier Florentine art. Giotto, indeed, had left the tradition of formal completeness so firmly fixed in Florence that whatever new material had to be introduced it could only be introduced into a clearly recognised system of design.
Of Giotto’s own work we rarely get a sight in England, the National Gallery having missed the one great chance of getting himrepresented some twenty years ago. But though Lady Jekyll’s single figure of Christ can by its nature give no idea of his amazing and almost unequalled power of discovering unexpected inevitabilities of formal relations, it gives none the less something of Giotto’s peculiar beauty of drawing, wherein the completest reality is attained without any attempted verisimilitude. In Mr. Harris’s Bernardo Daddi we get nearer perhaps to Giotto as a composer, and even in his Giovanni da Milano, in spite of some Lombard grossness and sentimentality, the great tradition still lives.
Masaccio, represented here by Mr. Rickett’s single figure, is one of the most mysterious personalities in art, and typically Florentine. His mystery lies partly in our ignorance about him, partly in the difficulty of grasping the rapidity of action, the precocity, of genius such as his. Coming at the very beginning of the naturalistic movement he seized with a strange complacency and ease upon the new material it offered, but (and this is what astounds one) he instantly discovered how to assimilate it perfectly to the formal requirements of design. So that not only the discovery of the new material, but its digestion was with him a simultaneous and almost instantaneous process. He was helped perhaps by the fact that the new naturalism was as yet only a general perception of new aspects of natural form. It was left for his younger contemporaries to map out the new country methodically—to the group of adventurous spirits—Brunelleschi, Donatello, Castagno, and Uccello—who founded modern science, and gave to the understanding of classic art a methodical basis. It is in this group that the fierce intellectual passion of the Florentine genius manifests itself most clearly. Perspective and anatomy were the two studies which promised to reveal to them the secrets of natural form. The study of anatomy exemplifies mainly the aspect of curiosity, though even in this the desire to find the underlying principles of appearance is evident—on the other hand perspective, to its first discoverers, appeared to promise far more than an aid to verisimilitude, it may have seemed a visual revelation of the structure of space and through that a key to the construction of pictorial space.
To our more penetrating study of æsthetic (for of all sciences, æsthetic has been the greatest laggard) it is evident that neitherperspective nor anatomy have any very immediate bearing upon art—both of them are means of ascertaining facts, and the question of art begins where the question of fact ends. But artists have always had to excite themselves with some kind of subsidiary intoxicant, and perspective and anatomy, while they were still in their infancy, acted admirably as stimulants. That they have by now become, for most artists, the dreariest of sedatives may make it difficult to conceive this. But at all events in that first generation they excited their devotees to an ardent search for abstract unity of design. And this excitement went on to the next generation as exemplified by the works of the Umbro-Florentines—Piero della Francesca and Signorelli—and in Florence itself of Pollajuolo.
But the scientific spirit once aroused was destined not to remain for long so stimulating and helpful an assistant to the creation of design. It was bound in the end to start trains of thought too complex and too absorbing to occupy a subordinate place. Already in the rank and file of Florentine artists, the Ghirlandajos, Filippino Lippis, and their kindred, mere curiosity—naïve literalism—had undermined the tradition, so that towards the last quarter of the century hardly any artist knew how to design intelligibly on the scale of a fresco, whereas the merest duffer of the fourteenth century could be certain of the volumes and quantities of his divisions.
But it is with Leonardo da Vinci that the higher aspects of the scientific spirit first came into conflict with art. Doubtless this conflict is not fundamental nor final, but only an apparent result of human limitations; but to one who, like Leonardo, first had a Pisgah prospect of that immense territory, to the exploration of which four centuries of the intensest human effort have been devoted without yet getting in sight of its boundaries—to such a man it was almost inevitable that the scientific content of art should assume an undue significance. Up till Leonardo one can say that the process of digesting the new found material into æsthetic form had kept pace with observation, though already in Verrocchio there is a sign of yielding to the crude phenomenon. But with Leonardo himself the organising faculty begins to break down under the stress of new matter. Leonardo himself shared to the full the Florentine passion for abstraction, but it was inevitable that he should be dazzled and fascinatedby the vast prospects that opened before his intellectual gaze. It was inevitable that where such vast masses of new particulars revealed themselves to his curiosity their claim for investigation should be the most insistent. Not but what Leonardo did recognise the necessity for his art of some restriction and choice. His keen observation had revealed to him the whole gamut of atmospheric colour which first became a material for design under Monet and his followers. But having described a picture which would exactly correspond to a French painting of 1870, he rejects the whole of this new material as unsuitable for art. But even his rejection was not really a recognition of the claims of form, but only, alas! of another scientific trend with which his mind had become possessed. It was his almost prophetic vision of the possibilities of psychology which determined more than anything else the lines of his work. In the end almost everything was subordinated to the idea of a kind of psychological illustration of dramatic themes—an illustration which was not to be arrived at by an instinctive reconstruction from within, but by deliberate analytic observation. Now in so far as the movements of the soul could be interpreted by movements of the body as a whole, the new material might lend itself readily to plastic construction, but the minuter and even more psychologically significant movements of facial expression demanded a treatment which hardly worked for æsthetic unity. It involved a new use of light and shade, which in itself tended to break down the fundamental divisions of design, though later on Caravaggio and Rembrandt managed, not very successfully, to pull it round so as to become the material for the basic rhythm. And in any case the analytic trend of Leonardo’s mind became too much accentuated to allow of a successful synthesis. Michelangelo, to some extent, and Raphael still more, did, of course, do much to re-establish a system of design on an enlarged basis which would admit of some of Leonardo’s new content, but one might hazard the speculation that European art has hardly yet recovered from the shock which Leonardo’s passion for psychological illustration delivered. Certainly literalism and illustration have through all these centuries been pressing dangers to art—dangers which it has been the harder to resist in that they allow of an appeal to that vast public to whom the language of form is meaningless.
In Florentine art, then, one may see at happy moments of equilibrium the supreme advantages of intellectual art and at other and less fortunate moments the dangers which beset so difficult an endeavour. It was after all a Florentine who made the best prophecy of the results of modern æsthetic when he said: “Finally good painting is a music and a melody which intellect only can appreciate and that with difficulty.”