_BOOKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR_—

             HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING IN THE RENAISSANCE
             THE COLLECTORS
             HOMER MARTIN, POET IN LANDSCAPE
             ESTIMATES IN ART
             THE PORTRAITS OF DANTE

  GIOTTO: DORMITION OF THE VIRGIN

  _Berlin_
]

                              A HISTORY OF
                            ITALIAN PAINTING

                                  _By_

                        FRANK JEWETT MATHER, JR.
                             PH.D., L.H.D.

        Professor of Art and Archaeology in Princeton University

                                   ❦

                                 LONDON

                        STANLEY PAUL & CO., LTD.

                   31, ESSEX STREET, STRAND, W. C. 2

                                  1923

                Printed in the United States of America

                                  _To_

                                =B. B.=

                             IN FRIENDSHIP

                                PREFACE

This book has grown out of lectures which were delivered at the
Cleveland Art Museum in 1919–20. There I had ideal hearers, beginners
who wanted to learn and were willing to follow a serious discussion.
Since I aim at the same sort of a reader now, I have only slightly
retouched and amplified the original manuscript. This is frankly a
beginner’s book. I have had to omit whatever might confuse the novice,
including many painters inherently delightful. Controversial problems
for the same reason have been when possible avoided. When, however, I
have had to cope with such, I have depended more on my own eyes and
judgment than on the written words of others. But the latest literature
has also been used, so that even the adept should here and there find
something to his purpose.

For opinions on contested points, I have given my authority or personal
reason in notes, which, in order not to clutter up the text, are printed
at the end. By the same token, hints on reading and private study are
tucked away in the last pages where they will not bother readers who do
not need or want them. While I hope the book will be welcome in the
classroom, I have had as much in mind the intelligent traveller in
Europe and the private student. Throughout I have had before me the kind
of introduction to Italian painting that would have been helpful to me
thirty years ago in those days of bewildered enthusiasm when I was
making my _Grand Tour_.

                                                              THE AUTHOR

                                CONTENTS

 CHAPTER                                                          PAGE
      I. GIOTTO AND THE NEW FLORENTINE HUMANISM                      1
     II. SIENA AND THE CONTINUING OF THE MEDIAEVAL STYLE            59
    III. MASACCIO AND THE NEW REALISM                              109
     IV. FRA FILIPPO LIPPI AND THE NEW NARRATIVE STYLE             157
      V. DAWN OF THE GOLDEN AGE: BOTTICELLI AND LEONARDO DA VINCI  201
     VI. THE GOLDEN AGE: RAPHAEL AND MICHELANGELO                  263
    VII. VENETIAN PAINTING BEFORE TITIAN                           323
   VIII. TITIAN AND VENETIAN PAINTING IN THE RENAISSANCE           389
     IX. THE REALISTS AND ECLECTICS                                451
         NOTES                                                     473
         HINTS FOR READING                                         489
         INDEX                                                     491

                               CHAPTER I
                 GIOTTO AND THE NEW FLORENTINE HUMANISM

  The Florentine ideal of Mass and Emotion—Its Humanism—The City of
      Florence about 1300—The Position and Methods of the Painter—The
      General demand for Religious Painting—Accelerated by the religious
      reforms of 1200, and changed in character—Insufficiency of the
      current Italo-Byzantine Style—Experiments towards a new manner:
      Duccio and the Sienese, Cimabue, Cavallini and the “Isaac
      Master”—Giotto—Immediate followers of Giotto, Andrea Orcagna and
      the return to sculptural methods—Later Panoramists, Andrea
      Bonaiuti and the Spanish Chapel.

Leonardo da Vinci, from the summit of Florentine art, has written “What
should first be judged in seeing if a picture be good is whether the
movements are appropriate to the mind of the figure that moves.” And
again he has expressed somewhat differently the highest merits of
painting as “the creation of relief (projection) where there is none.”
For Florence, at least, these notions are authoritative, and they may
well serve as text for most that I shall say about Florentine painting.
To give significant emotion convincing mass—this was the problem of the
Florentine painter from the moment when Giotto about the year 1300 began
to find himself, to that day more than two centuries and a half later
when Michelangelo died. No Florentine master of a strenuous sort ever
failed to perceive this mission, and no unstrenuous artist was ever
fully Florentine. This twofold aim—humanistic, in choice and mastery of
emotion; scientific, in search for those indications which most vividly
express mass where no mass is—this twofold endeavor Florence shared with
the only greater city of art, Athens. Thus Florence is to the art of
today what Athens was to that of classical antiquity.

In these two little communal republics were discovered and worked out to
perfection all our ideals of humanistic beauty. Florence saw God, His
Divine Son, the Blessed Virgin, and the saints quite as Athens had seen
the gods of Olympus, the demi-gods, and the heroes simply as men and
women of the noblest physical and moral type. Both agreed in magnifying
and idealizing the people one ordinarily sees. For greater beauty,
Athens represented them nude or lightly draped; for greater dignity,
Florence chose the solemn garb of the Roman forum. Whether pagan or
Christian, the guardians of a people’s morality were to be above haste,
excitement, or any transient emotion. They were to express intensities
of feeling, but a feeling more composed, permanent, and disciplined,
than that of every day. Judgment and criticism count for as much in both
arts as emotional inspiration. The great Florentine artist is a thinker;
he is often poet and scientist, sculptor and architect, besides being a
painter. Behind his painting lies always a problem of mind, and as sheer
personalities the greatest painters of Siena, Venice, and Lombardy often
seem mere nobodies when compared even with the minor Florentines. We
should know something about a city that produced personality so
generously, and before considering Giotto, the first great painter
Florence bred, we shall do well to look at Florence as he saw it about
the year 1300, being a man in the thirties.

Florence was then as now a little city, its population about 100,000
souls, but it was growing. The old second wall of about two miles’
circuit was already condemned in favor of a turreted circuit of over
six. Up the Arno the forest-clad ridge of Vallombrosa was much as it is
today; down the valley the jagged peaks of the Carrara mountains barred
the way to the sea. The surrounding vineyards and olive orchards by
reason of encroaching forest were less extensive than they are now, but
through every gate and from every tower one could see smiling fields
guarded by battlemented villas. In the city, the fortress towers of the
old nobility, partizans mostly of the foreign Emperor, rose thickly, but
already dismantled at their fighting tops, for the people, meaning
strictly the ruling merchant and manufacturing classes, had lately taken
the rule from the old nobles. Many of these had fled; some had been
banished, as was soon to be that reckless advocate of the emperor, Dante
Alighieri, an excellent poet of love foolishly dabbling in politics.
Other patricians sulked in their fortress palaces. Some shrewdly got
themselves demoted and joined the ruling trade guilds. Of these guilds a
big four, five, or six, governed the city, while a minor dozen had
political privilege. Only guild members voted for the city officers. The
guilds combined the function of a trade union and an employer’s
association, including all members of the craft from the youngest
apprentice to the richest boss-contractor. Such a guild as the notaries,
must have been much like a bar association, while the wholesale
merchants’ guild must have resembled a chamber of commerce. The guild
folk had early allied themselves with the Pope, the only permanent
representative of the principle of order in Italy. The Pope was also the
bulwark of the new free communes against the claims of the Teutonic
Emperors. So in Florence piety, liberty, and prosperity were convertible
terms.

Within the narrow walls was a bustling, neighborly, squabbling and
making-up life. Everybody knew everybody else. The craftsman worked in
the little open archways you may still see in the Via San Gallo, in
sight and hearing of the passing world. Of weavers’ shops alone there
were 300. No western city was ever prouder than Florence in those days.
Her credit was good from the Urals to the Pentland Hills. Her gold
florin was everywhere standard exchange. She had secret ways of
finishing the fine cloths that came in ships and caravans from Ghent,
Ypres, and Arras; she handled the silks of China and converted the raw
pelts of the north into objects of fashion.

Her civic pride was actively expressing itself in building. Between 1294
and 1299 she had projected a new cathedral, the great Franciscan church
of Santa Croce, a new town hall, and the massive walls we still see. For
stately buildings she had earlier had only the Baptistry, in which every
baby was promptly christened, and the new church of the Friars Preachers
(Dominicans), Santa Maria Novella. In considering this Florence you must
think of a hard-headed, full-blooded, ambitious community, frankly
devoted to money-making, but desiring wealth chiefly as a step towards
fame. Since the painter could provide fame in this world and advance
one’s position in the next, his estate was a favored one.

The painter himself was just a fine craftsman. He kept a shop and called
it such—a _bottega_. He worked only to order. There were no exhibitions,
no museums, no academies, no art schools, no prizes, no dealers. The
painters modestly joined the guild of the druggists (_speziali_), who
were their color makers, quite as the up-to-date newspaper reporter
affiliates himself with the typographical union. When a rich man wanted
a picture, he simply went to a painter’s shop and ordered it, laying
down as a matter of course the subject and everything about the
treatment that interested him. If the work was of importance, a contract
and specifications were drawn up. The kind of colors, pay by the job or
by the day, the amount to be painted by the contracting artist himself,
the time of completion, with or without penalty—all this was precisely
nominated in the bond. Naturally the painter used his shop-assistants
and apprentices as much as possible. Often he did little himself except
heads and principal figures. But he made the designs and carefully
supervised their execution on panel or wall. A Florentine painter’s
_bottega_ then had none of the preciousness of a modern painter’s
studio. It was rather like a decorator’s shop of today, the master being
merely the business head and guiding artistic taste. When we speak of a
fresco by Giotto, we do not mean that Giotto painted much of it, any
more than a La Farge window implies that our great American master of
stained-glass design himself cut and set the glass. The painter of
Florence had to be a jack-of-all-trades, a color grinder, a cabinet
maker, and a wood carver; a gilder; to be capable of copying any design
and of inventing fine decorative features himself. He must be equally
competent in the delicate methods of tempera painting as in the resolute
procedures of fresco.

These two methods set distinct limits to the work and its effects. The
colors were ground up day by day in the shop. Each had its little pot.
There was no palette. Hence only a few colors were used, and with little
mixing. For tempera painting a good wooden panel—preferably of
poplar—was grounded with successive coats of finest plaster of Paris in
glue and rubbed down to ivory smoothness. The composition was then
copied in minutely from a working drawing. The gold background inherited
from the workers in mosaic was laid on in pure leaf. The composition was
first lightly shaded and modelled either in green or brown earth, and
then finished up a bit at a time, in colors tempered with egg or
vegetable albumen. The paints were thick and could not be swiftly
manipulated; the whole surface set and so hardened that retouching was
difficult. How so niggling a method produced so broad and harmonious
effects will seem a mystery to the modern artist. It was due to system
and sacrifice. Though the work was done piecemeal, everything was
thought out in advance. Dark shadows and accidents of lighting which
would mar the general blond effect were ignored. The beauty desired was
not that of nature, but that of enamels and semi-precious stones. These
panels are glorious in azures, cinnabars, crimsons, emerald-greens, and
whites partaking of all of these hues. Their delicacy is enhanced by
carved frames, at this moment, 1300, simply gabled and moulded; later
built up and arched and fretted with the most fantastic gothic features.

If the painter in tempera required chiefly patience and delicacy, the
painter in fresco must have resolution and audacity. He must calculate
each day’s work exactly, and a whole day’s work could be spoiled by a
single slip of the hand in the tired evening hour. For fresco, the
working sketch was roughly copied in outline on a plaster wall. Then any
part selected for a day’s work was covered with a new coat of fine
plaster. The effaced part of the design must be rapidly redrawn on the
wet ground. Then the colors were laid on from their little pots, and
only the sound mineral colors which resist lime could be employed. The
vehicle was simply water. The colors were sucked deep into the wet
plaster, and united with it to form a surface as durable as the wall
itself. Generally the colors were merely divided into three
values,—light, pure colors, and dark. Everything was kept clear, rather
flat, and blond, highly simple and beautifully decorative. One of the
later painters, Cennino Cennini (active about 1400), tells us that a
single head was a day’s work for a good _frescante_. The touch had to be
sure, for a mis-stroke meant scraping the wet plaster off, relaying it,
and starting all over again. The fresco painter accordingly needed
discipline and method. Nothing could be farther from modern
inspirational methods. Where everything was systematized and calculated
in advance, you will see it was quite safe for a master to entrust his
designs to pupils who knew his wishes. Every fresco when dry was more or
less retouched in tempera, but the best artists did this sparingly,
knowing that the retouches would soon blacken badly or flake off.

So much for the shop methods. Now for him who makes shops possible—the
patron. A wealthy Florentine as naturally wanted to invest in a frescoed
chapel as a wealthy American does in a fleet of motor cars. Considering
the changed value of money, one indulgence was about as costly as the
other. But the Florentine never quite regarded paintings as luxuries.
They were necessary to him. He loved them. They enhanced his prestige in
this world and improved his chances in the next. Then to beautify a
church was really to magnify the liberty and prosperity of Florence,
which largely derived from the Holy See. Recall that every Florentine
was born a Catholic, baptized in the fair Church of St. John with the
name of a saint. This saint, he believed, could aid him morally and
materially, was in every sense his celestial patron. It paid to do the
saint honor, and that could best be done through the painter’s art. The
poorest man might have a small portrait of his patron, a rich man might
endow a chapel and cause all his patron’s miracles to be pictured on the
wall. Think also that every altar—a dozen or more in every large
church—was a shrine[1], containing the bread and wine that by the
never-ceasing miracle of the Mass became the Saviour’s body and blood;
and was also a reliquary or tomb, containing in whole or part the body
of some saint. Every altar then, and every chapel inclosing one, cried
out for a twofold interpretation of its meaning. Everything about the
Eucharist had to be explained (involving pretty nearly all of Biblical
history), and the particular relic required similar illumination. Since
many of the faithful could not read, and the Catholic Church has ever
been merciful as regards sermonizing, these explanations of the altar as
miracle shrine of Our Lord and as tomb of a particular saint were best
made pictorially, and generally were so made.

Such motives for picture-making Florence of course shared with the
entire Christian world. It remains to explain why she wanted more
painting and better than any other mediæval city. She wanted more
painting chiefly because of her exceptional civic pride and prosperity,
she wanted better painting because she had moved ahead of the world
towards finer, more passionate, and conscious experiences of life which
the older painting was powerless to express. About the year 1200, a
century before the time we are considering, there flourished two great
religious leaders who gave to Christianity a new dignity and appeal. St.
Dominic, with his disciple, St. Thomas Aquinas, endeavored to make
Christianity more reasonable, St. Francis of Assisi endeavored to make
it more heartfelt and compassionate. They founded two monastic orders
with divergent yet harmonious aims. The Dominicans called men to a life
of study and self-examination, enlisting the human reason to explain and
justify the universe under the Christian scheme; the Franciscans called
men to poverty, humility, and chastity, and service to the unfortunate.
Between the two—one supplying the light of the reason and the other the
light of the heart—they overcame heresies which had menaced both
Christianity and civilization and roused the Church out of its dogmatic
slumber. It was no longer enough for the Church to threaten. Men yielded
to her now only on condition that their heads be convinced or their
hearts touched. In Florence, where a rationalizing shrewdness and a real
warm-heartedness singularly blended, the double appeal was irresistible.
By and large the whole city either schematized with the Dominicans or
slummed with the Franciscans. Here was urgent new matter requiring an
art that could move and persuade.

Together with this religious revival and the political and commercial
progress we have noted, came a literary revival. Before the end of the
13th century such poets as Guido Guinizelli, Guido Cavalcanti, and Dante
Alighieri had so reshaped the rude vulgar tongue that it became worthy
of its Latin succession. The refinements of chivalric love came to
Florence in melodious verse, and what the poets called the “sweet new
style,” _il dolce stil nuovo_, in diction presaged a similar sweet new
style of painting. Alongside of the poets, Brunetto Latini in the
_Tesoro_ shows glimmerings of scientific interest, and Giovanni Villani
lends substance and dignity to the work of the chronicler. Already the
sculptors Nicola and Giovanni of neighboring Pisa had grasped the
beauties respectively of classic sculpture and the noble intensity of
that of the Gothic North. All this immensely increased that sum of fine
thinking, feeling, and seeing which underlies all great art.

To express these new emotions the old painting was inadequate. Italy
through the so-called Dark Ages produced art abundantly. Wherever power
and order asserted themselves amid the welter of war and oppression,
stately buildings rose and these were decorated. Thus at Rome, where the
popes gradually added temporal to spiritual power, splendid basilicas
grew over the tombs of the martyrs. At Ravenna, through the 6th and 7th
centuries the seat of the Byzantine and Gothic sovereignties,
magnificent churches and baptistries were covered with pictorial
mosaics. In Sicily, at Messina, Cefalù and Palermo, the sway of the
Norman kings in the eleventh and twelfth centuries expressed itself in
churches and civic buildings of the utmost splendor, which were adorned
with mosaics by Greek masters. When the fugitives from the valleys of
the Po, Adige, and Piave, and Brenta fled from Attila to the Venetian
fens, there again was a beginning of great building. Wherever there was
a powerful primate as at Milan, Como, Parma, Pisa, or a wide ruling
abbot as at Subiaco, Monte Cassino, Capua, you will find art.

But hardly, except perhaps in architecture, Italian art. We have
sporadic provincial expressions dominated from afar by the prestige of
the Eastern Roman Empire. At Constantinople there was a permanent court,
a ceremonious civilization, an artistic blending of the traditions of
old Greece and of the mysterious Levant. The merchants of the world
sought from Byzantium, jewelry, enamels, embroideries, brocades, carved
ivories, and pictured manuscripts. She was to the early Middle Ages what
Paris is to ours—the æsthetic fashion maker of the world,—and her
skilled artists went far afield as so many missionaries of the Byzantine
style. We find them making the mosaics of Ravenna in the 6th and 7th
centuries, of St. Mark’s at Venice from the 9th century, of many Roman
churches from an even earlier date, of Palermo in the 12th, and of the
Baptistry at Florence in the 13th. This Byzantine manner, as practiced
by the travelling Greek artists and by their innumerable Italian
imitators, is the real starting point and jump-off place for Italian
painting. Hence in first studying the Byzantine style we do but imitate
the Italian painters who immediately preceded Giotto.

  FIG. 1. Byzantine Narrative Style about 1300. Detail from Mosaic Book
    Covers in the Opera del Duomo.
]

  FIG. 2. Mosaic in the Cathedral, Pisa. St. John, left, is by Cimabue,
    1302; the Christ is in good Byzantine tradition; the Virgin, right,
    is some twenty years later.
]

Byzantine pictures have come down to us on the largest and on the
smallest scale—in the great mosaics and wall paintings, and as well on
small panels and in the illustrated books used in the ritual of the
church. Both are important. The mural decorations are what the early
Italian painter had constantly before his eye; the miniatured psalters,
Gospels, lectionaries, chorals and prayer books, afforded the patterns
from which he drew with little alteration the standard compositions of
the Annunciation to Mary, the Nativity of Christ, His Adoration by the
Shepherds and Kings, His Baptism, the Raising of Lazarus, the Last
Supper, Crucifixion, Descent into Hell, Resurrection, and Ascension. But
Byzantine design is most imposing in its monumental phase. The most
careless traveller still feels awe before those solemn figures of Christ
supreme ruler (_Pantokrator_) and his Mother queen of heaven which are
seen throned against a background of azure or gold and attended by
solemn figures of apostles and martyrs, Figure 2. The forms are
flat,—silhouettes enriched by interior tracery, the arrangement in the
space formal, symmetrical, highly decorative. The smaller narrative
compositions,[2] Figure 1, are clearly conceived but have small
emotional appeal. For this reason the Italians of the Golden Age spoke
of the Byzantine style as rude. This is an error. Rude in the hands of
half-trained local imitators, the style as formulated in the 9th century
at Constantinople was highly sophisticated and decoratively of great
refinement. It was based on an admirable system of color spotting and a
fine understanding of silhouette. The contours were cast in easy
conventional curves. These were enriched within by hatchings and
splintery angles of gold which contrasted effectively with the fluent
outlines. Everything was done by precept and copybook. In four centuries
before the year 1300, the style showed little change, indeed is still
alive in the mountains of Macedonia and, until the Revolution, in
Russia. The Byzantine artist seldom looked at a fellow mortal with
artistic intent. He looked at some earlier picture or considered his own
color preferences. Conventional and anæmic as the narrative style was,
it did all that was required of it. Nothing better serves the purpose of
an authoritative Church than the awe-inspiring Christs of the Lombard
and Sicilian and Roman apses, and so long as the Church felt no duty
beyond that of plain statement of her claims, the unfelt narratives from
the Scriptures served every religious need.

It was different when under the leading of St. Dominic and St.
Francis,[3] the Church eagerly wished to persuade men. Men may well have
been frightened or even instructed by a Byzantine picture; nobody was
ever persuaded by one. It took a century to work away from the Byzantine
style, so deeply was it rooted. In fact, from the year 1226, that of St.
Francis’s death, to about the end of the century, such artists as Guido
of Siena, Coppo di Marcovaldo, Giunta of Pisa, Jacopo Torriti, Giovanni
Cosma, Duccio, and Cimabue chiefly restudied the old Byzantine manner.
They wished to learn how to build creditably before they began to tear
down. Such reverent experiment extending over two generations only
proved that the breach with Byzantine formalism was inevitable.

  FIG. 3. Tuscan Master about 1285.—_Otto Kahn, N.Y._
]

  FIG. 4. Cimabue. Madonna in Majesty.—_Uffizi._
]

With the deepening and broadening of personal, civic, and religious
emotions, the painter found new exactions laid upon him which the
bloodless art of Byzantium could not satisfy. New life called for new
forms to express it. We find in sculpture from about the year 1260, that
of Giovanni Pisano’s first pulpit—wholly classical in its dignity—a
kindred endeavor in advance of the art of painting. The renewal took
three forms: the more conservative spirits accepted the Byzantine
formulas but endeavored to refine on them in a realistic sense, to add
grace to austerity. Such moderate development of the old style fixed the
character of the school of Siena and was magnificently initiated by its
greatest artist, Duccio, active about 1300. A very beautiful Madonna of
this general tendency is in the collection of Mr. Otto Kahn at New York,
Figure 3. It has been quite variously attributed.[4] It seems to me,
however, a pure Tuscan work by Coppo or a painter akin to him. For the
greater spirits such a reform was inadequate. Refine the Byzantine
formulas to the utmost—there was no gain, rather loss in strength.
Accordingly a vehement spirit like Cimabue,[1–5] acknowledgedly father
of the Florentine school, accepts the Byzantine tradition loyally, but
seeks to make its rigid mannerisms express the new religious passions.
At times he is successful at this unlikely task of putting new wine into
old bottles. His great enthroned Madonna at Florence, Figure 4, with
solemn angels in attendance and grim patriarchs below her throne, may
have been painted as early as 1285. It is faithful to the old monumental
tradition—akin to the Christs and Marys of the mosaics—in its impressive
richness is one of the most majestic things the century produced. It
reveals the docility of its creator but only partially his power. We
have hardly his hand but surely an echo of his influence in the tragic
crucifix in the museum of Santa Croce. It is the moment of agony, and
the powerful body writhes against the nails, while the head sinks in
death. It may represent hundreds of similar crosses that stood high in
air on the rood beam before the chancel, in sight both of the preacher
and his public.

Somewhere about 1294, Cimabue was called to Assisi to decorate the
church in which St. Francis was buried. His part was the choir and
transepts of the upper church. In the cross vault he painted the four
evangelists, on the walls he spread the stories of St. Peter and St.
Paul, the legends of the Virgin scenes from the Apocalypse, the gigantic
forms of the archangels and a Calvary, Figure 5, that is one of the most
moving expressions of Christian art. Chipped and blackened, their lights
become dark through chemical change, these wall paintings retain an
immense power and veracity. The Byzantine forms gain a paradoxical
solidity, like that of bronze. The convulsion of the figure of Christ is
given back in the wild gestures of the mourning women and the terrified
Jews. It is the moment of the earthquake and the opening of tombs; a
cosmic terror and despair pervade the place. The work is hampered and
rude but completely expressive. The sensitive Japanese critic and man of
the world, Okakura Kakuzo, used to regard these sooty frescoes in the
transepts of the Franciscan basilica as the high point of all European
art, which should at least induce the tourist and the student to give a
second look at these battered and fading masterpieces. Recently an
inscribed date, 1296, has been discovered on the choir wall which
settles a long vexed question of chronology. The upper part of the work
in the transepts and choir must have been going on for some years
earlier, and the entire decoration of the Upper Church should roughly be
comprised between 1294 and 1300. Cimabue died about 1302 while working
on the apsidal mosaic at Pisa, where the St. John is by his hand, Figure
2. He had brought life and passion into Italian painting, as his younger
contemporary Giovanni Pisano had into Italian sculpture. Cimabue’s
defect—that of a noble spirit—was the faith that the old pictorial form
could contain the new surging emotions.

  FIG. 5. Cimabue. Calvary. Fresco.—_Upper Church, Assisi._
]

  FIG. 6. Pietro Cavallini. Dormition of the Virgin. Mosaic.—_S. M. in
    Trastevere, Rome._
]

  FIG. 7. Pietro Cavallini. Apostles, fresco, from Last Judgment.—_Santa
    Cecelia in Trastevere._
]

Colder spirits, as is often the case, more readily found the right way.
And the discovery was made at Rome where the sculptured columns, arches,
and sarcophagi, the pagan wall paintings and the earliest Christian
mosaics combined to continue the lesson of classic humanism. A
remarkable family of decorators, the Cosmati; with such contemporaries
as Jacopo Torriti and Filippo Rusuti begin very cautiously to free
themselves from Byzantine trammels. But it was a painter, Pietro
Cavallini,[5] who more fully grasped that glory that had been Rome. In
1291 he designed for the church of Santa Maria in Trastevere a Madonna
and four stories of the Christ Child in mosaic. Here we glimpse a new
pictorial form, Figure 6. Those Byzantine hooks and hatchings which were
quite false to form give way to a reasonable structure in light and
dark, the hair no longer wild and ropy, is disposed in sculpturesque
locks, the draperies are no longer a cobweb pattern, but cast in broad
and classic folds. All these improvements may be noted in more complete
form in the frescoed Last Judgment which has recently been uncovered in
the church of Santa Cecilia, Figure 7. Here the heads of Christ and the
Apostles are well built in carefully graduated light and shade, while
the draperies suggest Hellenistic statuary. But the renovation is on the
whole cold and academic. Cavallini has not much more to say than the
Byzantines, but that little he says with far greater gravity and
truthfulness. He was a lucid and industrious but not a fine or strong
spirit. His work later at Naples—in the Church of the Donna Regina,
about 1310—shows that when he will express strong emotions he becomes
merely hectic. Yet he recovered for Italian painting more than a hint of
the choice naturalism of old Rome, and that is his sufficient glory.
There is greater power and knowledge than his in the work of such
contemporaries as the unknown painters of the frescoed heads of prophets
in Santa Maria Maggiore at Rome and of the stories of Isaac in the Upper
Church at Assisi.[6] These show a resolute and intelligent effort to
draw in masses of light and shade, and as well an ambition to recover
the gravity of the early Christian mosaics. It is no wonder that some
critics ascribe such dramatic and superbly constructed frescoes as The
Betrayal of Esau to young Giotto, Figure 8, but the art is too mature
for any young artist. We have rather to do with a great personality of
Roman training who broke the way for Giotto. Cavalcaselle suggests, I
think rightly, that the Florentine, Gaddo Gaddi, may have done some of
this work. But we are safe only in calling this great painter “The Isaac
Master.”

To recapitulate, there were three ways, all imperfect, open to a young
and progressive painter who like Giotto di Bondone was forming a style
about the year 1300. He might with the Sienese evade the issue of
passion and naturalism, choosing for gracefulness, he might try over
again the great adventure of his master Cimabue, endeavoring to bring
emotion into the old unfit forms, or he might, like Pietro Cavallini,
let emotion take care of itself and work academically towards better
structure, drapery, light, and shade. His choice was absolutely
momentous for modern painting, and I want you to feel that the issue was
quite consciously and vividly before him, for he had spent much of his
youth as a humble assistant in the basilica at Assisi, where frescoes in
the vehement Tuscan manner of Cimabue and in the dignified Roman style
of the Isaac Master were being painted side by side. His decision was to
combine the merits of the two manners—to seek, like his master,
sincerity and depth of emotion, but to embody it in the new and nobler
forms of the Roman school. This decision virtually fixed the character
of Christian art in Italy—it was to be warm and humanistic, but it was
to revive much of that abstract nobility which old Rome had inherited
from Greece. Thus Italian painting at the outset took a classic stamp
which when true to itself it has never lost. In fundamental ideas of
beauty, there is no real difference between Giotto, Masaccio, Leonardo
da Vinci, Raphael, Titian, Michelangelo.

  FIG. 8. “The Isaac Master.” Esau before Isaac. Fresco.—_Upper Church,
    Assisi._
]

Giotto di Bondone,[7] according to the best information we have on a
disputed point, was born in 1266, at the village of Colle, in the lovely
valley of the Mugello. His people were prosperous and his way smooth. I
see no reason for doubting the charming legend told by Ghiberti that
Cimabue found the lad Giotto by the roadside diligently scratching the
outlines of a sheep on a slate, and that that was the beginning of their
association. In any case, we may surmise that he was early with Cimabue
as apprentice and eventually went with the Master to Assisi to grind
colors, clean brushes, and paint under direction. To be at that moment
in the Franciscan Basilica was to be at the greatest creative center of
the world. It seems to me likely that Giotto may have had a considerable
part in the actual painting of the Old and New Testament stories in the
nave, and I believe we may find his earliest designs in certain frescoes
of the upper rows. The Lamenting over Christ’s Body, for example,
singularly combines the energy of Cimabue with the dignity of Cavallini,
and there are significant echoes of the composition in Giotto’s later
version of the same theme at Padua. Tradition also ascribes to Giotto,
maybe correctly, the Resurrection and Pentecost on the entrance wall.[8]

After 1296, according to Vasari’s entirely credible account, young
Giotto took over the direction of the work for the newly elected
Franciscan General, Giovanni dal Muro. What share he had in the
vivacious and justly loved stories of St. Francis,[9] in the lower range
of the nave, is greatly disputed. Of the twenty-eight frescoes involved,
it seems clear to me that the first and the last three are by an artist
more nearly in the Sienese tradition, that Nos. II to XVIII inclusive
are designed by Giotto in the style of the Old Testament stories above
and painted by him with a certain amount of assistance, and that the
rest are largely inspired by Giotto but executed in his absence and
without his final control. What is more important is the variety and
vivacity of these narratives. Young Giotto is free to improvise, as he
was not in the standard Bible subjects, and the mood shifts readily. We
have charity, with St. Francis giving his cloak to a beggar, in an
idyllic landscape; family strife in St. Francis renouncing his father,
Figure 9; sorcery in the exorcism of the devils from Arezzo; an odd
mixture of ogreishness and witchcraft, in St. Francis’s Fire Ordeal
before the Soldan, Figure 11; a great pious intentness, in the
choristers at the Cradle Rite; intense physical appetite, in the Miracle
of the Spring; an entrancing blend of reverence and humor, in the Sermon
to the Birds, Figure 10; stark tragedy in the Death of the Knight of
Celano.

  FIG. 10. The Sermon to the Birds.—_Upper Church, Assisi._
]

  FIG. 9.—St. Francis renounces His Father.—_Upper Church, Assisi._
]

  FIG. 11. St. Francis before the Soldan.—_Upper Church, Assisi._
]

  FIG. 12. Early Sketch Copy after Giotto’s Mosaic of the Navicella.
    Compare Fig. 31.—_Metropolitan Museum, New York._
]

Giotto is still chiefly a sprightly illustrator. He is as yet
insensitive to composition. He often perfunctorily splits his groups,
giving each a landscape—or architectural back-screen quite in the
Byzantine manner. His story-telling is brusque and without rhythm. His
sense of form is already strong and growing, but there is little of the
ease and style of the Isaac frescoes just above. In vitality the stories
of St. Francis mark a great advance, but they lack the gravity and
exquisiteness of balance proper to the best mural decoration.

It was at Rome that young Giotto was to broaden and refine his art. He
was called thither before the year 1300 to design the great mosaic of
Christ walking on the Sea of Galilee beside the tempest-tossed boat of
the Apostles. It stood over the inside cloister-portal of old St.
Peter’s, and has been many times moved in the rebuilding of the church,
and with each move restored, so that what we now see in the porch is
entirely remade. From certain fragments of the old mosaic, and old
sketch copies, Figure 12, we may judge that the Navicella, as the
Italians loved to call it, was an elaborate composition of great
dramatic power, the logical consummation of the experiments at Assisi.
Our best version of the Navicella is Andrea Bonaiuti’s adaptation,
Figure 31, for the vault of the Spanish Chapel, 1365.

But Giotto was soon to renounce the facile method of diffuse and genial
narrative in favor of a concise and massive style, akin to sculptured
relief, and deeply influenced by the antique. The arches and the columns
of Imperial Rome are teaching their silent lesson, the simple and noble
forms of Cavallini and his nameless rivals show how painting may vie
with sculpture in sense of mass and reality. With the problem of the
representation of mass on a flat surface, Giotto wrestled eagerly and
triumphantly. With a genius that few painters have equalled, he grasped
the truth that the figure painter’s problem of representing space is
chiefly that of emphatically suggesting mass. If you convince the eye of
the tangibility of your objects, the mind will supply elbow room and air
to breathe. It isn’t necessary to simulate a box, as the Sienese
painters often did. The painter who can give a convincing sense of mass
may handle accessories and perspective with the utmost freedom,
according to the inner law of his design. The painter who thinks first
of his space is in every way more bound to the smaller probabilities.
Much thinking of this sort must have been done by Giotto before he
worked out his new style at Padua.

After his return from Rome, Giotto sojourned for a time in Florence, and
in 1304 or thereabouts painted the gigantic Madonna formerly in the
Trinità, Figure 13. It is impressive in mass, admirable in the intent
expression of the attendant angels, rich in color, but the great figure
is unhappily crowded by the canopy. Giotto is still a bit uncertain as
to the rendering of space, and makes a good if unpleasing effort to
suggest depth despite the limitations of a gold background. With all its
nobility and tenderness, this is by no means so good a decoration as the
great Madonna by Cimabue, Figure 4, which hangs nearby in the Uffizi.

With the problems of space and mass, Giotto was soon to cope
triumphantly. A wealthy citizen of Padua, Enrico Scrovegni, was planning
a new chapel to the Virgin Annunciate. Doubtless he wished the repose of
his father’s soul, for his father had been a notorious usurer. Dante
incontinently puts him in hell with other profiteers. Enrico Scrovegni
built his chapel near the ruins of a Roman arena and dedicated it March
25, 1305. The Arena Chapel was a brick box, barrel vaulted within—a
magnificent space for a fresco painter. Giotto spread upon it the
noblest cycle of pictures known to Christian art. Over the chancel arch
he painted the Eternal, surrounded by swaying angels, and listening to
the counter-pleas of Justice and Mercy concerning doomed mankind, with
the Archangel Gabriel serenely awaiting the message that should bring
Christ to Mary’s womb and salvation to earth. This is the Prologue.
Opposite on the entrance wall is the Epilogue—a last judgment, with
Christ enthroned as Supreme Judge amid the Apostles, and the just being
parted from the wicked. Amid the just you may see Enrico Scrovegni
presenting the chapel to three angels.

The side walls are ruled off into three rows of pictures, with ornate
border bands and a basement of sculpturesque figures symbolizing the
seven virtues and vices. The story reads down from above. Below the
azure vault and still a little in the curve are the stories of the
Childhood of the Virgin—nothing in the chapel more simple and stately
than these.[10] The middle course is devoted to the early deeds of
Christ, from his birth to the expulsion of the money lenders from the
temple. The lower row depicts His Passion ending with the Miracle of
Pentecost. Much later a disciple of Giotto completed the story with the
last days of the Virgin, in the Choir. Thus the narrative in its
broadest sense is a life of the Virgin Mary, including that of her
Divine Son, and both lives are brought into an eternal scheme of things
by the prologue, which shows a relenting God, and the Epilogue which
shows a now relentless Christ awarding bliss and woe to the race for all
eternity.

  FIG. 13. Giotto. Madonna Enthroned.—_Uffizi._
]

The first impression of a visitor to the chapel will be a feeling of awe
qualified by joy in the loveliest of colors. The whites of the classical
draperies dominate. They are shot with rose, or pale blue, or grey
green. Certain old enamels have the same quality of making the most
splendid crimsons, blues, and greens seem merely foils to foreground
masses of white which seem to include by implication all the positive
colors. It is this bright and original color scheme balancing crimsons
and azures with violets and greens which makes a thing of beauty out of
what would otherwise be a stilted checkerboard arrangement.

  FIG. 13_a_. St. Joachim and St. Anna at the Beautiful Giotto
    Gate.—_Arena, Padua._
]

  FIG. 14. Giotto. The Flight into Egypt.—_Arena, Padua._
]

Next the eye will realize splendid people gravely occupied with solemn
acts. There is the strangest blend of passion and decorum. See the eager
old man who clutches his wife before a massive city gate while she
caresses him tenderly, Figure 13_a_, note the firm gentleness of the
bearded priest who handles a screaming baby before the altar, mark the
sense of strain and hurry where a mother and child mounted on an ass,
Figure 14, are pushed and dragged along by an old man and attendants. Or
again, what sinister power in the scene where three Jewish magistrates
press money upon a haggard, bearded, nervous man. You do not need the
bat-like demon prompting him to know that it is the arch-traitor Judas,
Figure 15. Then there is a strange, serene, processional composition,
with the Virgin moving homeward among her friends to a solemn music,
Figure 16. It has a rhythm like the frieze of the Parthenon. Perhaps
your eye will fix longest on the scene where about the pale body of the
dead Christ women wail with outstretched hands, or tend the broken body,
while bearded men, accustomed to the hardness of life, stand in mute
sympathy with folded hands, Figure 17. It is what the Gospel ought to
look like. How Giotto shows every feeling, pushing its expression just
to the verge, and there stopping, so that idyl and tragedy, devotion and
wrath, treachery and fealty, fear and courage, each keeps its proper and
distinguishing aspect, while all are invested in a common dignity and
nobility. You will perhaps never have seen an art at once so varied and
moving, and nevertheless so monumental, and you may well be curious as
to the method.

  FIG. 15. Giotto. Judas betraying Christ.—_Arena, Padua._
]

You will see readily that these compositions are conceived sculpturally.
Every one with the slightest change could be cut in marble. Indeed the
seven Virtues, Figure 18, and seven Vices impersonated in monochrome on
the dado of the chapel are direct imitations of sculpture. The figures
throughout the life of Christ and the Virgin are of even size, and
usually all on one plane. The landscapes and architectural features are
arranged simply as frames or backgrounds for the figure groups. The
figures are, whenever the subject permits, clad in drapery of a classic
cast. Expression is conveyed not much by the faces, which have a uniform
Gothic intentness, but by the action of the entire figure and especially
of the hands. The forms are rather squat and massive, yet have a homely
gracefulness. There is nothing like perspective, and small regard for
distance, yet the figures have convincing bulk and move gravely in
adequate space. All this is due to the most consummate draughtsmanship.
Giotto simplifies his seeing; what he cares for is the thrust of the
shoulder, or the poise of hip, the swing of the back from the pelvis,
the projection of the chest, the balance of the head on the neck and its
attachment to the shoulders. All these essential facts of mass he
represents by the simplest lines of direction, by broad masses of light
and shade, often merely by the tugging lines in drapery that tell of the
form beneath. The cave men would have understood Giotto, and so would
the post-impressionists of today. Conciseness, economy, force,
mass—these are the technical qualities of the work, as human insight and
tenderness are its grace. As the great analytical critic Bernard
Berenson has well remarked, this painting makes the strongest possible
appeal to our tactile sense, stirring powerfully all our memories of
touch, and presenting the painted indications as so many swiftly grasped
clues to reality. We have to do with a magnificently conceived
shorthand. No artist before or since has made a greater expenditure of
mind or achieved a more notable inventiveness than Giotto in the Arena
Chapel.

  FIG. 16. Giotto. The Virgin returning from her wedding.—_Arena,
    Padua._
]

  FIG. 17. Giotto. Lamentation over Christ.—_Arena, Padua._
]

It was dedicated March 25, 1305, Giotto being nearly forty years old,
and it was probably not completely painted on the day of dedication,
since many draperies were borrowed from St. Mark’s, Venice, to cover,
presumably, the still unpictured parts of the walls. Giotto lived some
four years in Padua, brought his family there, received the exiled poet
Dante and with him joked not too decorously about his own ugliness and
that of his children. It seems likely enough, though not certain, that
he followed the banished Pope to Avignon about 1309, and spent some
years in Southern France. What is certain is that he was again in
Florence by 1312, and that, having found his own solution of the problem
of mass in the Arena Chapel, he thereafter rested comfortably on his
discovery, never was quite as strenuous again, and spent his later years
at a new problem—that of decorative symmetry.

  FIG. 18. Giotto. Hope.—_Arena, Padua._
]

The first experiment towards a sweeter and more complex style was made
in the cross vaults of the Lower Church of Assisi, immediately above the
tomb of St. Francis. The subjects were the three virtues of the
Franciscan vow—Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience—with a St. Francis in a
glory of angels. In these great triangular compositions, allegory and
symbolism run riot, and we do well to recall Hazlitt’s shrewd remark on
Spenser’s “Faery Queene”—“the allegory will not bite.” Indeed one might
forget it for the radiance of the azures, moss-greens, rose pinks, and
deeper violets, for the delightful contrast of the freely composed
groups with the intricate geometrical formality of the rich borders. Yet
to ignore the allegory completely would be to forget the master’s
intention. We may savor it best in the great composition: St. Francis
Marries his Lady Poverty, Figure 18_a_. The bridal group stands on a
central crag, Christ serving as priest, St. Francis slipping a ring on
the gaunt hand of a haggard, yet strangely fascinating bride clothed in
a single ragged garment. Her bare feet show through a crisply drawn and
blossomless rose tree. Two urchins at the foot of the little cliff stand
ready to stone so unseemly a bride. From the central group to right and
left, earnest groups of angels spread in a descending curve. In the
lower angle, left, a young man gives his rich cloak to an old beggar,
while an angel points to the bridal: Poverty is accepted. At the lower
right corner, another angel attempts to detain a young man who passes
with a gesture of contempt in the company of two portly priests: Poverty
is rejected by such. From the apex of the great triangle, the hands of
God descend to welcome two angels, one of which offers the cloak given
to the beggar, and the other a model of the church which is the splendid
covering for the body of the Saint. The fantastic beauty of this and its
companion pieces can only be appreciated on the spot. No frescoes of
Italy surpass these for loveliness of color and perfection of condition.
It is the most beautiful pictured Gothic ceiling in the world, perhaps
the most fantastically beautiful of all figured ceilings whatever.

  FIG. 18_a_. Giotto. St. Francis’ Mystic Marriage with Poverty.—_Lower
    Church, Assisi._
]

Because the figures are a little slight and the expression a bit
sentimentalized, and the proportions rather arbitrarily handled to meet
the exigencies of the curved spaces, many good critics, including
Venturi and Berenson, deny these compositions to Giotto. One of them,
the St. Francis in Glory, is clearly of inferior design and quality. For
the others, it seems to me that the designs can only be by Giotto, while
the execution is mostly by a charming assistant whose work in this
ceiling and elsewhere in this church makes us wish we knew his name. No
middle-aged painter of established repute was likely to undertake
personally the dirty and fatiguing work of painting a ceiling in fresco.
If we are right in supposing that Giotto may have designed this ceiling,
shortly after his return from Avignon, say, after 1312, he would have
been towards fifty years old, and provided with a shop-staff of
well-trained assistants. From this time on, indeed, we may assume that
he rather directed the work of others than painted himself. Such a view
will permit us to accept as school works many fine pictures the design
of which a too strict criticism has denied to Giotto. For example, the
admirable Coronation of the Virgin, in Santa Croce, Florence, seems to
me completely designed by Giotto, and the logical next step after the
Franciscan allegories, though there can be little actual painting by the
master on the panel, and his personal contribution may have been limited
to a small working drawing. Indeed the only one of the later panels
which seems to show throughout his actual handiwork is the lovely
Dormition of the Virgin at Berlin, Frontispiece, which was painted for
the Church of Ognissanti.

At about this period I think we may set the several crucifixes in
Florentine churches, without inquiring too narrowly whether they are by
the master or by scholars. Giotto has developed a singularly noble type.
The Christ is no longer contorted in agony as in the crucifixes by
Cimabue. He is dead, with his head quietly sunk on the powerful breast,
and the body relaxed. The conception is humanistic. One feels chiefly
the pity of stretching that glorious thing that is a man’s body on a
cross. Probably the earliest of these crucifixes is that at Santa Maria
Novella, while the finest is at San Felice. About 1320 we may set the
dismembered _ancona_, painted for Cardinal Gaetano Stefaneschi, which
originally stood on the high altar of St. Peter’s, Rome. The tarnished
fragments which you may still see in the sacristy, are more splendid in
color than any other tempera painting whatsoever. Probably only the
central panels, Christ and St. Peter enthroned, are from Giotto’s hand,
the side panels representing the martyrdom of Peter and Paul may well be
both designed and executed by the accomplished assistant who carried out
the allegories at Assisi.

  FIG. 19. Giotto. Naming of St. John the Baptist.—_Peruzzi Chapel,
    Santa Croce._
]

So far we have seen Giotto a wanderer. Assisi, Rome, Padua, Rimini,
delighted to do him honor, but apparently Florence had claimed few works
from his hand. We have record of frescoes in the Badia which may have
been early works. It was the decoration of Arnolfo’s great Franciscan
church of Santa Croce that finally recalled Giotto and evoked his most
accomplished work. He completed in the transepts of Santa Croce four
chapels and as many altar-pieces. The frescoes were white-washed in the
16th century, and the panels broken up and lost. But in the last century
the white-wash was scraped off from two of the chapels, and there we may
see, so far as defacement and repainting permit, the masterpieces of the
early Florentine school. We may reasonably guess the date of this work
to be somewhere about 1320, Giotto being nearly sixty.

In the chapel maintained by that noble family, the Peruzzi, Giotto
spread on the side walls three stories from the life of St. John the
Baptist, and as many more from that of St. John the Evangelist. The
figures are superb, magisterial in pose; the draperies grand and ample
after the classical fashion. Upon bulk and relief there is less
insistence than at Padua. Giotto has passed the experimental stage as
regards form, is less strenuous and more at his ease. Nothing is more
stately in the chapel than the presentation of the infant Baptist to his
father, who is temporarily stricken with dumbness, Figure 19. Simeon
gravely writes the name John; Elizabeth with her adoring group of
attendants carefully offers the vivacious child to his father’s gaze.
The gestures are slow, definite, determined. The group beautifully fills
the square space without crowding it. The composition, unlike the widely
spaced Paduan designs, is drawn together into a mass.

  FIG. 20. Giotto. Resuscitation of Drusiana by St. John.—_Peruzzi
    Chapel, Santa Croce._
]

Upon the Feast of Herod with Salome modestly dancing John Ruskin[11] has
expended just eulogies in the petulant yet important little book
“Mornings in Florence.” What is notable in the scene is its general
decorum and the pathetic indecision of the weak King.

But the most accomplished design as such is the miracle of the
Resuscitation of Drusiana by St. John the Evangelist, Figure 20. Even
the inscenation before a fine Romanesque city is adequately, if very
simply, realized. The gesture of the apostle is of majestic power, the
contrast of the massive, upright, columnar forms of the elders, with the
sharply bent forms of Drusiana, her mourners and bier bearers, is
admirably invented, and the drastic portraiture of a cripple at the left
adds a tang of reality while in no wise detracting from the dignity of
the scene. We have a work in the grand style, massively conceived,
warmly felt, wrought into an elaborate and satisfying symmetry. The
Ascension of St. John has an even graver and more ample rhythm. The
Golden Age of Raphael and Titian will have little to add to this except
the minor graces.

In the adjoining chapel of the Bardi family, Giotto, a little later, I
believe, painted six stories of St. Francis, and four figures of the
great Franciscan saints, St. Louis of France, St. Louis of Toulouse, St.
Clare, and St. Elizabeth of Hungary. Over the entrance arch he set an
animated picture of St. Francis receiving the stigmata, the wounds of
the Saviour. Nearly thirty years earlier he had done this subject for
the Church at Assisi, and in an altar-piece which has passed from Pisa
to the Louvre. By comparing the rigid, angular figures of the earlier
composition and their ill-adjusted accessories, with this easy and
beautifully balanced arrangement, you may see how far Giotto had gone in
the direction of grace, and you will not fail also to note how much more
tragic the earlier and less calculated work is.

For the first time, in the Bardi chapel, Giotto conceives the decoration
of the side walls as a whole. From the pointed lunettes above, through
the three compositions on each wall, there is an architectural axis,
sometimes arbitrarily imposed, about which the figures are symmetrically
distributed. Often the scene is a screen with projecting wings as in the
St. Francis before the Sultan of Morocco, or a similar fore-court, as in
the Mourning for St. Francis. It will be well to compare the story of
St. Francis renouncing his father, Figure 21, with the same subject at
Assisi. You will recall that St. Francis, when rebuked by his father for
a rash and impulsive act of charity, stripped off his clothes, then
threw them at his father’s feet, and took refuge under the robe of the
Bishop of Assisi. In the earlier version the architectural background
splits the composition in two, adding to its intensity perhaps, but
displeasing to the eye. Here in the late version a fine building seen in
perspective both unifies the two groups and serves as apex for the
decorative axis of the entire side wall.

  FIG. 21. Giotto. St. Francis renounces his Father. Compare FIG.
    9.—_Bardi Chapel, Santa Croce._
]

More remarkable still is the contrast between St. Francis Braving the
Fire Ordeal before the Soldan, Figure 22, as depicted at Assisi and
Florence. We have to do not merely with an immense advance in decorative
composition, the accessories at Assisi being trivial and fantastic; not
merely with progress towards a gracious symmetry and more massive and
impressive form, but also with a complete change of moral point of view.
At Assisi the Soldan is an ogre exacting a cruel test. The Moslem
priests are a cowardly pack of magicians ignobly slinking away, St.
Francis a grim fanatic. At Florence the Soldan is a noble and humane
gentleman, amazed at an unreasonable ordeal forced upon his wise men.
The Moslem doctors are splendid scholars grudgingly shrinking from an
unfair test, St. Francis an alert little enthusiast half gloating over
the confusion he has thrown into the enemy camp. With a by no means
orthodox feeling, old Giotto, humanistic Giotto, almost seems to take,
or at least to see, the pagans’ side of it. He who had written a manly
poem against the excesses and hypocrisies of the Franciscan ideal of
poverty, is now capable of criticizing the more extravagant propagandism
of the saint himself.

It is a criticism that admits all tenderness and sympathy, as may be
seen in the famous fresco representing the Mourning over the body of St.
Francis while his soul is translated to heaven, Figure 23. Again John
Ruskin is your best interpreter to this picture, which after all only
needs to be seen. It combines all the qualities for which Giotto had
striven—warmth, vivacity, ingenuity, unexpectedness in the narrative
details; massiveness and dignity of the individual forms; and a
decorative symmetry at once monumental, formal, and delightfully varied.

  FIG. 22. Giotto. St. Francis before the Soldan. Compare Fig.
    11.—_Bardi Chapel, Santa Croce._
]

  FIG. 23. Giotto. Death of St. Francis.—_Bardi Chapel, Santa Croce._
]

With this noble and deeply felt composition we virtually take leave of
Giotto. For though he lived for many years yet, the works of his old age
have largely perished. In the chapel at Assisi dedicated to St. Mary
Magdalen are fine frescoes in which he surely had a leading part. From
1330 to 1333 he worked at Naples for King Robert of Anjou. Nothing
remains from this visit except certain shrewd jests which the painter
exchanged with the King. In 1334 Florence recalled him, and made him
_capomaestro_ of the Cathedral. Giotto designed the flower-like tower
which rises lightly beside the temple of Our Lady of the Flower,
invented and perhaps cut in marble certain reliefs on the base
representing the crafts of men, but did not live to see the loveliest of
bell towers finished. The task was completed by his pupil and artistic
executor, Taddeo Gaddi. In the last years Giotto conceived vast
compositions of a religious and political sort for the public buildings
of the Commune. There were allegories of a strong and weak state, in the
Bargello, the prison-fortress of the Captain of the People. These great
symbolical designs are a kind of missing link between Giotto and the
panoramic painters who followed him. We may find an echo of this lost
work in the Civic Allegories in the Palazzo Pubblico of Siena. These
were doing at the moment of Giotto’s death by a Sienese painter,
Ambrogio Lorenzetti, who had studied the great Florentine master
devoutly. Nothing of Giotto’s latest phase is left save a few figures in
the battered frescoes in the Bargello which contain the idealized
portrait of youthful Dante, Figure 24, and the gracious Dormition of the
Virgin at Berlin, Frontispiece.

  FIG. 24. Giotto. Dante, tracing from the ruined fresco in the
    Bargello.
]

Just before Giotto died, the tyrant of Milan borrowed him from Florence.
Giotto soon returned, to die early in the year 1337, being seventy years
old. Almost single-handed he had made Italian painting. He had lent life
and warmth to the cold and academic reform of the Roman painters. He had
expressed a maximum of feeling, without sacrifice of dignity. He had
worked out beautiful and impressive forms of composition wherein
symmetry and contrast met harmoniously. He had mastered the expression
of mass on a plane surface with a certainty and energy no artist before
had even imagined, and that few since have equalled. He had forecast and
led the way in every manner of realistic figure painting.

Florence, when true to herself, could only repeat Giotto in one phase or
another of his activity. In her casual and sprightly mood, she carries
on the method of Giotto’s stories of St. Francis at Assisi, in mystical
reflection and symbolism she must build on the allegories over St.
Francis’ tomb and on the lost political frescoes; in her mood of
strenuous search for reality she can but repeat the Paduan chapter of
Giotto’s strivings, in rare moments of vision and fulfilment she will
merely begin where the Santa Croce frescoes of Giotto ended.

However Giotto be ranked, and personally I see no greater artist on the
rolls of history, his is indisputably the greatest single achievement;
for no other artist who accomplished so much began with so little. It
was no exaggeration that made Lorenzo Ghiberti regard the advent of
Giotto as the coming to life of an art that had been buried for
centuries. It is indeed the measured classicism of Giotto’s art that
constitutes its greatness—its sweet and lucid reasonableness, its rugged
yet disciplined strength. Seneca or Marcus Aurelius would have
understood it perfectly, as Giotto himself, for his mellow wisdom and
wit, would have been a welcome visitor at Horace’s Sabine farm. In his
broad and flexible insight, his love of mankind, his clear perceptions
of aims and ready acceptance of limitations, in his pathos without
exaggeration, in his constructive skill without ostentation, in his
simplicity without bareness, he is the authentic and indispensable link
between the beauty of Greece and Rome and that of the Italian Golden
Age. To know him is to know almost everything that is needful about
older European painting, not to know him is to lack the very rudiments
of an artistic education.

Giotto left many followers,[12] not one of whom at all understood his
greatness. Like his friend Dante, he was distantly admired, but really
loved only in bits. As perceptive a person as the artist biographer
Vasari lavishes praise upon Giotto for his more trivial inventions—the
Christ Child struggling out of the arms of the High Priest, for example.
So Giotto’s followers picked unintelligently from his great
accomplishment, choosing what the master himself would least have
valued—his simple contours without his significant mass, his variety and
vivacity without his warmth and restraint. On their own account they
added complication. The sparse economy of Giotto’s best work could never
have appealed to Florence at large. Something richer and gayer was
wanted, more like Florentine life itself as it became after the general
loosening up of manners and morals following the plague of 1348. Its
chronicler, the author of the “Decameron,” fairly represents the new
spirit. The best of the younger painters have indeed something of
Boccaccio’s mentality—his light touch, his charm, his panoramic
richness, his fluid and undisciplined grace. Thus arises what I may call
the panoramic style of fresco painting—superficial, full of episodes and
accessories, still religious in theme, but mundane in spirit, often
cleverly conceived, and very superficially felt. These artists had
grasped neither the meaning of Giotto’s drawing nor the beauty of his
decorative formulas, they saw only his variety and energy. Meanwhile a
great Sienese painter, Ambrogio Lorenzetti, a profound admirer of
Giotto, had worked out a nobly spectacular form of painting in which the
stage setting was elaborate and realistic. He painted much in Florence
about 1334 and his novelties allured the new men. So we find fresco
painting tending in a scenic direction, and panel painting following the
same course more conservatively—not merely in Florence and Siena, but
throughout Northern Italy as well.

  FIG. 25. Giotto’s Assistant at Assisi. Flight into Egypt. Compare
    Figure 14.—_Lower Church, Assisi._
]

  FIG. 26. Taddeo Gaddi. St. Joachim Meets St. Anna. Compare FIG.
    13_a_.—_Baroncelli Chapel, Santa Croce._
]

Many of Giotto’s immediate pupils are mere names to us. Maso, whom the
sculptor commentator Ghiberti praised for his sweetness, Stefano whom he
dubbed the “ape of nature,” Puccio Capanna—their work must be at Assisi,
but criticism has not succeeded in clearly disengaging it. The nameless
master who executed the Franciscan allegories at Assisi and designed the
stories of Christ’s youthful days, in the adjoining right transept, is
the most accomplished and individual follower of Giotto. He works for
grace, pathos, sumptuousness, and decorative breadth. He is a Giotto
with the angles rubbed down. By comparing Giotto’s Flight of the Holy
Family to Egypt, with the later version at Assisi, Figure 25, we may
grasp the difference between master and scholar. Giotto is brusque,
harsh, noble; the flight through a rocky defile gives a sense of urgency
and peril; the composition carries forward like the ram of a battleship.
In the version at Assisi the flight has become an attractive family
excursion through a romantic valley; the mood is gentle, charming,
unspecific. A moment in an epic has been attenuated into an idyl. This
master never fails to express a dreamy sort of poetry, and in such
compositions as the Massacre of the Innocents, and the Calvary, he
commands a genuine pathos. He is exactly what Giotto might have been,
had he skipped the strenuous Paduan phase, and become a decorator
without the preliminary discipline of the draughtsman. There are reasons
for thinking that this work was done by a shop assistant of Giotto’s,
who for many years directed the decoration of the Lower Church at Assisi
in Giotto’s stead. Some of the work in the Childhood of Christ, I
believe, may be as late as 1330 to 1335.

Taddeo Gaddi is a more definite and less pleasing personality. He was
Giotto’s godson and his assistant for twenty-four years, presumably from
1313 to 1337, as well as his artistic executor. Whether in panel or
fresco, he was an admirable craftsman; in tempera, a fine colorist. His
panels are widely scattered, some ten being in the United States; his
frescoes, all that we need to note, are in Santa Croce. In the
Baroncelli Chapel, just after Giotto’s death, Taddeo finished these
frescoes of the early life of the Virgin, repeating themes which Giotto
had used both in Padua and elsewhere in Santa Croce itself. His way of
competing with Giotto is to stir and add and mix things up. Compare the
meeting of Anna and Joachim at the Beautiful Gate in the two masters;
Giotto at Padua is grave, noble, heartfelt; how he discriminates between
the masculine clutch of the old husband and the tender embrace of the
wife—how drastic the conception is, but also how clear and stately. Poor
Taddeo on the other hand brings the sacred pair together with the bounce
of a modern dance, Figure 26. He brings no brains to bear, and almost no
feelings, just a sprightly and wholly casual inventiveness. Certain
delightful little panels with stories of Christ and St. Francis which he
did in Giotto’s shop for the doors of the sacristy wardrobes of Santa
Croce remind us of the pity that he ever ceased to be an interpreter of
a greater man’s designs. In the fresco of Job’s trials, in the Campo
Santo, Pisa, he seems nearly a great artist. Conceivably he worked on
designs of his late master. At least he had a certain critical sense,
for at an artist’s reunion at San Miniato, about 1360, he told Andrea
Orcagna and the rest of the company that painting had constantly
declined since Giotto and was declining every day. He transmitted, his
sound craftsmanship to a son, Agnolo, who decorated the Choir of Santa
Croce with the legends of the Cross. He carried down the panoramic style
to the end of the 14th century, practicing it with more taste than his
father, achieving a grace without much inwardness or force.

A later contemporary of Giotto’s, Buonamico Buffalmacco,[13] seems to
have inherited something of Giotto’s power, but the identification of
his work is very uncertain, and he lives for us chiefly as an egregious
wag in the pages of the Italian story writers.

  FIG. 27. Giottino. Deposition—_Uffizi._
]

From another contemporary and possibly a scholar of Giotto, Bernardo
Daddi, we have many panel pictures and a few frescoes at Santa Croce. He
is an admirable craftsman, and a sincere illustrator, within his
limitations, applying very competently to panel painting something of
the panoramic realism of Ambrogio Lorenzetti. A prolific artist, his
exquisitely finished little panels are quite common. In America are good
examples in the New York Historical Society, in the Platt Collection,
Englewood, and a more monumental piece in the Johnson Collection,
Philadelphia. He lived well beyond the middle of the century.

Giottino, who possibly is to be identified with Giotto’s pupil Maso, is
a more delicate spirit with unusual resources of pathos. His best work
is an altar-piece of the Deposition, Figure 27, painted about 1360 for
the Church of San Remigio at Florence and now in the Uffizi. A
preference for isolated figures and for vertical lines is noteworthy, as
is the wistfulness of the attendant donors. Similar qualities of
delicate precision as of dispersion are in the frescoes in Santa Croce
which represent the Miracles of Pope Sylvester. The note is feminine and
rather Sienese than genuinely Florentine.

  FIG. 28. Andrea Orcagna. Christ conferring authority upon St. Peter
    and St. Thomas Aquinas.—_Strozzi Chapel, Santa Maria Novella._
]

Outside of Giotto’s _bottega_ arose the rare continuers of his
tradition. Such an artist flourished about the middle of the century in
the person of Andrea di Cione, better known by his nickname of Orcagna.
He was more of a sculptor and architect than a painter, a man of dignity
and force, a poet and thinker. Although not a pupil of Giotto, he
studied that master’s work admiringly, and sought to reproduce its
massiveness. Its brusqueness he largely rejected. Instead of sketching
the draperies summarily, he drew the folds carefully after the model; he
liked to treat the panel and wall as a whole, where Giotto had accepted
the tradition of subdivision; he gave to his faces a greater sweetness
and he occasionally attempted foreshortenings and impetuosities of
gesture that Giotto would have avoided. Unluckily Orcagna’s most
important frescoes have perished. We may grasp his nobility in the
altar-piece which he finished and dated in 1357, Figure 28, for the
chapel of the Strozzi family at Santa Maria Novella. The formality of
the composition is noteworthy, as is the stately sweetness of the
Madonna. The subject is Christ delegating his Power and Wisdom
respectively to St. Peter and to St. Thomas Aquinas.

In the same chapel the figure of Christ leaning forward over a cloud and
making the sublime gesture that decrees the end of the world and the
Judgment Day, Figure 29, is probably designed by Orcagna, as are the
larger figures below. We have here one of the freest and grandest
conceptions of the period. The lovely garden-like heaven and the quaint
and ingenious hell on the side walls are by Orcagna’s brother, Nardo di
Cione. The mood is less grave than Orcagna’s, variety counts for more.
The heads of the saints are of a most delicate beauty. Nardo has many of
the qualities of the panoramic painters without their heedlessness. He
represents a compromise between the severity of Giotto and the
diffuseness of his own day. He worked indefatigably until 1366, and his
younger brother, Jacopo, and his imitator, Mariotto, continued the
manner almost into the new century.

Orcagna was perhaps more versatile than critics have supposed. Recently
discovered fragments of frescoes in Santa Croce, Figure 30, show a
drastic power that no other Florentine possessed. The theme is miserable
folk in time of pestilence crying out to Death to end their sorrows. The
entire fresco would have shown Death passing them by and poising the
scythe for prosperous and happy folk beyond. The whole scene exists in
the famous frescoes of the Pisan Campo Santo which, while traditionally
ascribed to Orcagna, are unquestionably of Sienese inspiration. They
will occupy us later. Orcagna’s solitary position in Florence reminds us
that artistic succession is rarely from master to pupil, but from great
soul to great soul across intervening mediocrity.

  FIG. 30. Andrea Orcagna. They call Death in Vain. Fragment from ruined
    fresco of the Triumph of Death.—_Santa Croce._
]

  FIG. 29. Andrea Orcagna. Upper part of Fresco of Last
    Judgment.—_Strozzi Chapel, Santa Maria Novella._
]

Giorgio Vasari regarded Gherardo Starnina (active before 1400) as an
important link between Giotto and the Renaissance, and if Professor
Suida is right in ascribing the frescoes of the legend of St. Nicholas
in the Castellani Chapel, Santa Croce, to Starnina, Vasari was quite
right. About this mysterious pupil of Antonio Veneziano who worked in
Spain, we really know almost nothing. But the St. Nicholas frescoes have
a grimness and gravity which points back to Giotto and withal a careful
fusion of light and shade which anticipates Masolino and Masaccio.
Meanwhile Giotto’s own great compositions in still undiminished splendor
and impressiveness stood ready to give lessons to the eye and mind that
could read them aright. Before such later panoramists as Niccolò di
Pietro Gerini, Mariotto di Nardo, and Spinello Aretino were gone, that
eye was already busy, in the person of a rugged little boy of San
Giovanni in Valdarno. He may have already been called Masaccio for his
untidiness. He was to rebuild on Giotto and create the grand style of
the Renaissance.

A mere catalogue of those painters who pursued the panoramic method with
ability can hardly be expected. One and all they followed the Sienese
narrative style. Prominent would be certain incomers from other cities,
Giovanni da Milano, Antonio Veneziano, and Spinello Aretino. These are
typical decorators of the last quarter of the 14th century.

  FIG. 31. Andrea Bonaiuti, The Navicella, fresco, closely imitated from
    Giotto’s Mosaic at St. Peter’s, Rome.—_Spanish Chapel._
]

We do better to fix our attention upon the most remarkable example of
the Florentine panoramic style, the decoration of the Spanish Chapel,
the chapter house attached to the Dominican Church of Santa Maria
Novella.[14] The work was begun by Andrea Bonaiuti in the year 1365, as
we know from a recently discovered document. As decoration it is
delightful, if rather superficially so. The artist treats his spaces as
wholes, declining to cut them up into oblongs after the earlier fashion.
He covers his great surfaces with ease and taste, has a knack at
illustration, and a fine sense of color. The great Calvary over the
triumphal arch imposes from its very vastness; the triangles of the
cross vault, including a spirited transcript of Giotto’s Navicella,
Figure 31, are composed with clarity and skill; the famous composition
of the Dominican theologian, St. Thomas Aquinas, enthroned above the
Liberal Arts and Sciences, and their representatives in history,
combines an almost Byzantine formality and grandeur with prettiness and
ingenuity in details. But the method is better shown in the decoration
opposite, which represents the dual earthly powers, the Pope and the
Emperor, enthroned equally, and supported by the representatives of the
spiritual orders and secular estates, Figure 32. The group which
symbolizes the right government of society, according to mediæval ideas,
is set before a church which quite faithfully shows what the Cathedral
of Florence was then intended to be. High up in the arch is the goal of
all earthly endeavor—Heaven with Christ enthroned amid the angels; an
altar with a lamb before Him, symbolizing His sacrifice; His Mother
kneeling as intercessor for mankind. The Gate of Heaven with St. Peter
in attendance, is naïvely set above the church on a sort of aerial raft.
Below is a novel realistic touch, the villa-studded sky line of hills
which encloses Florence. The real guide to St. Peter’s presence is
always a Dominican monk, usually St. Dominic himself is intended—the
founder and militant evangelist of the order, as St. Thomas Aquinas was
its systematic theologian. In the lower range of the picture, St.
Dominic confutes the heretics, who tear their wicked books in despair.
Above he vainly beseeches careless gentlefolk at dalliance in an orange
grove; still higher, he leads the truly penitent to Heaven’s gate. At
the foot the Domini Canes (a bad pun for Dominicans) are vigilant. The
moral of the fresco is, happy the world which trusts its worldly and
religious business to the Emperor and the Pope, and its personal
religious problems to the Dominicans. It is a kind of glorified poster
for the order.

In its sprightliness, variety, complication and facile charm, it is a
fine example of the panoramic style. It lacks every quality of
seriousness whether as a composition or in the drawing of the figures.
But its fairy tale profuseness and ease have made it ever since it was
painted, one of the most popular decorations in Italy. Its success shows
the kind of taste with which the few disciplined artists of the
fourteenth century had to contend. Such obstacles have ever been the
fate of the artist who cares enough for his art to practice it
austerely.

  FIG. 32. Andrea Bonaiuti. Dominican Allegory of Church and State.
    Fresco.—_Spanish Chapel._
]

Work of the facile and superficial character of the Spanish Chapel
Florence produced in abundance for two generations after Giotto’s death.
His faithful but dull disciple, Taddeo Gaddi, as we have seen, gloomily
foresaw the downfall of the art of painting. But as in a great
personality the recreations and even dissipations seldom permanently
eclipse the greater purpose, so Florence was big enough to indulge for a
time her weaker side. Had Taddeo Gaddi been more intelligent, or even
more hopeful, he would have seen that new masters must arise, and that
there would soon be pictures in Florence at which Giotto come back to
earth would gaze with that humility with which he had once viewed the
marble gods of Rome, with that understanding sympathy which he had borne
to all his fellow mortals.

                      ILLUSTRATIONS FOR CHAPTER I

               ON THE DIGNITY AND WEALTH OF OLD FLORENCE

Giovanni Villani, _Historie_, XII, 4, regrets the passing of decorum
with the advent of the French and the Duke of Athens in 1342, but wealth
increased.

“Formerly the clothing and costumes [of the Florentines] was the most
beautiful, noble and distinguished of any nation, in the manner of the
togaed Romans.” Evidently the look of things favored the art of a
Giotto.

In book XI, ch. 91–93, Villani gives remarkable and quite modern
statistics which I paraphrase and quote, in part from the Giunta
edition, Venice, 1559. The time is about 1340.

“We found by diligence that in these times there were in Florence 25,000
men fit to bear arms, from 15 to 70 years old, among whom there were
1506 nobles.... There were then in Florence 65 fully equipped knights,
though before the middle class which now rules was organized, there were
more than 250 knights.... There was estimated to be 90,000 ... men,
women and children in the city. There is supposed to be generally in the
city 1,500 foreigners, travellers, and soldiers not counting in the
population the clergy, monks, and nuns.... In the outlying districts are
supposed to be 80,000 people. We have found from the rector who baptizes
the children (since for every male who was baptized in San Giovanni—in
order to have the count—was dropped a black bean, and for every female a
white) that for every year in these times there were from 5,800 to
6,000, the males generally exceeding by 300 to 500 a year.

“We find that the boys and girls at [primary] school were from 8,000 to
10,000. The boys who study the abacus (calculation) and arabic numbers,
in six schools, from 1,000 to 1,200. And those who are learning [Latin]
grammar and logic, in four great schools, from 550 to 600.

“The churches, which were then in Florence and in the suburbs, counting
the abbeys, and monastic churches, we find to be 110, of which 57,
parish churches ... 5 abbeys and two priories with 80 monks, 24 convents
of nuns, with more than 500 women, 10 friaries with more than 700
friars, 30 hospitals with more than 1000 beds to lodge the poor and
infirm, and from 250 to 300 chaplain priests.

“The shops of the cloth makers (_arte della lana_) were 200 and more,
and they made from 70,000 to 80,000 bolts, at a value of more than
1,200,000 gold florins, although fully a third part staid in the city
for the workers, without gain for the cloth handlers, and the workers
are more than 30,000 persons....

“The warehouses of the art of the _Calimala_, for the French and
transalpine cloth, were 20, which brought in per year more than 10,000
bolts of a value of 300,000 gold florins, all of which was sold in
Florence....

Banks of money changers 80.... Shops of bootmakers ... 300. The college
of judges, from 80 to 100. And notaries from 600 up, doctors of physic
and surgery 60, and druggists’ shops 100....

“The greater part of the well-to-do, rich, and noble citizens with their
families, staid in the country for four months, and some, more, a
year.”...

“Other dignities and magnificences of our city of Florence I should not
fail to bring to memory, for information of such as shall come after us.
It was, within, well built with many beautiful palaces and houses, and
in these times they were continually demolishing, thus bettering the
building by making it more comfortable and rich, bringing in from
outside the examples for every sort of betterment and beauty. Churches,
cathedrals, friaries of every rule, monasteries, magnificent and rich.
Furthermore, there was no citizen who did not have a country place,
great or small, which was not richly built, indeed far greater buildings
than in the city; and every citizen sinned by inordinate spending,
whence they were thought crazy. But it was so magnificent a thing to
see, that a foreigner, not used to coming in, believed, because of the
rich structures for three miles about, that it was all one city after
the manner of Rome, not to mention the rich palaces, towers, court
yards, terraced gardens, still further from the city, which in any other
country would have been called the rural districts. In short one would
have thought that within six miles of the city were more rich and noble
inhabitants, than, taking them together, two Florences could have
produced. And let this suffice for telling of the facts of Florence.”

                  GIOTTO’S VIEW OF FRANCISCAN POVERTY

Giotto’s humanistic detachment from the Franciscan doctrine of voluntary
poverty is well illustrated in his poem which is quoted in part from
Dante Gabriel Rosetti’s translation. The original is in G. Milanesis’
edition of Vasari, _Le Vite_, Vol. I, Florence 1878, pp. 426–8.

              “Many there are, praisers of Poverty;
              The which as man’s best state is register’d
                When by free choice preferr’d,
              With strict observance, having nothing here.
              For this they find certain authority
              Wrought of an over-nice interpreting.
                Now as concerns such thing,
              A hard extreme to me it doth appear,
                Which to commend I fear,
              For seldom are extremes without some vice,
                Let every edifice,
              Of work or word, secure foundation find;
                Against the potent wind,
              And all things perilous, so well prepared—
              That it needs no correction afterward.”

          A CONTRACT WITH ORCAGNA FOR THE ALTAR-PIECE OF 1357

Tommaso di Rossello Strozzi left a rough note of the terms of the
contract for the altar-piece of his chapel. Doubtless the actual
contract was much fuller. The minute is published by Filippo Baldinucci,
_Opere_, Milano 1811, Vol IV. p. 397.

“Herewith is to be written [on my part] and Andrea called Orcagna that I
Tommaso di Rossello aforesaid have given to paint for the altar-piece
which is made for the altar of [the chapel] in Santa Maria Novella, of a
breadth of five braccia, 1 sol. [over 10 feet] there or thereabouts. The
aforesaid Andrea is to paint in fine and splendid colors; and gold,
silver and everything else are truly to be used in the entire panel and
pinnacles, that is [gold] leaf. Only in the side columns may silver be
used.... And [with] as many figures as [directed] by me Tommaso it shall
be completed. And the said panel to be entirely painted by his own hand.

“[1] 354 in twenty months....

“Should it come about that the aforesaid Andrea should not give it to us
completed and painted.”

“He should pay me for every additional week that he works at the
painting as it shall seem right to the judgment of the here named
arbitrators.”...

“Should it come to more than the aforesaid price, we will take the
judgment of Carlo, Paolo and Fra Jacopo.”

Such is approximately the sense of this very difficult and quite
grammarless annotation of Tommaso Strozzi. The arbitrators must have had
occasion to act, for the panel is dated 1357, two years after the
promised time.

  FIG. 33. Ambrogio Lorenzetti. Madonna of San Francesco.
]

                               CHAPTER II
             SIENA AND THE CONTINUING OF THE MEDIÆVAL STYLE

  On the Romantic instability of Siena—Fidelity to Byzantine
      Ideals—Guido, Coppo, the Master of the Altar-front of St.
      Peter—Duccio and his great Majesty of the Madonna—His twofold
      tendency: to elaborated staged narrative; to sparse and exquisite
      decoration—Simone Martini and the Idealistic chivalric style—The
      Brothers Lorenzetti and the popular panoramic style—Second half of
      the Fourteenth Century—The Fifteenth Century: Sassetta and
      Giovanni de Paolo—Matteo, Benvenuto and Neroccio—The Renaissance
      and the downfall of the School, Francesco di Giorgio, Sodoma.

As you enter Siena by the wide Camollia gate you will read in Latin
“Siena opens her Heart still wider to thee”:—_Cor magis tibi Sena
pandit._ Thus Siena avows herself the city of the heart. Where Florence
studied and calculated, she mused and dreamed; where Florence was solid,
she was volatile. For unrewarding idealisms she had a kind of genius.
Long after the other Italian communes had seen it was worst possible
business to support the emperor, Siena was faithful to that lost cause.
Every few years she changed her form of government, and seldom for the
better. Merrymaking and pageantry were universal in old Italy, but Siena
alone had a Spendthrift Club (_Brigata Spendereccia_) devoted to
continual pleasure, and a poet, Folgore da San Gemignano, to celebrate
its gaieties. Siena was ardent in inconstant fashion. Early in the 14th
century was found a nude marble Venus so beautiful that it was set up in
the great square and thronged with admirers. Then the war with Florence
went badly, and at a few words from a pious fanatic, the citizenry
smashed up the image and secretly buried the bits on Florentine soil to
bring bad luck to the foe. Naturally no bad luck ensued to Florence, but
Siena had enjoyed two delightful emotional crises. You will see why
Siena never could produce a realistic art, any more than Ireland has
produced one. Her eye was not on the object but on her own state of
mind. Thus Florence will produce historians, scientists, and
politicians, while Siena will produce saints and miracles.

Amid this romantic inconstancy, the continuing thread was the cult of
the Blessed Virgin. No other city thought so delicately of her, and no
other art has represented her so ideally. Had she not saved the city? In
1259 the Florentine Guelfs and their allies marched with overwhelming
force to the very gates of Siena. Ruin was imminent and despair abroad,
when by a common impulse the populace marched penitently to the
Cathedral and before the rude picture of the Queen of Heaven solemnly
committed the city into her hands. In ecstacy of renewed faith the
inferior army of Siena fell upon the invaders at Montaperti and utterly
routed them. In gratitude Siena remained the city of the Virgin. When in
1310 the painter Duccio replaced the rude effigy of the Madonna of
Victory with one of the finest Madonnas known to art, Fig. 37, the whole
city suspended business and escorted the picture from the studio to the
Cathedral with hymns and litanies in honor of their divine patroness.

Nowhere else has painting paid such homage to the Virgin Mary. In other
cities it was enough to represent her enthroned with a handful of angels
or saints in attendance. The Sienese painters multiplied the celestial
escort until it became a heavenly court over which the Mother of God
presides in sweet majesty. Siena also grasped at the then not quite
orthodox subject of the Assumption of the Virgin into Heaven. You see
her slender form rising amid a glory of angels more than a hundred years
before the theme was common elsewhere.

These brief hints will tell of the temper of Siena. You will not expect
such a city to be like Florence, interested in facts and charmed by the
human spectacle. She will be rather engrossed with the beauty of old
legends and in rare forward-looking moments concerned with her own
devout imaginings. She will not wish the saints to be like the people
one knows, but like denizens of some divine, far-off fairyland. Her
painting will not be humanistic but of an unworldly idealism.

  FIG. 34. Guido of Siena. Madonna.—_Uffizi._
]

Such being the temper of Siena, her artists, unlike those of Florence,
had no quarrel with the Byzantine style. Its splendid irreality only
needed to be made flexible and gracious. Siena has really no new ideas
to express, merely feelings more tender and exquisite. Her pictorial
reforms are reverent and gradual, backward-looking, mediæval. Her art
from 1300 to 1500, as lovely within its narrow limits as the closed
garden of the Virgin, has the great interest of teaching us what
capacities for growth lay in the mediæval tradition itself—what painting
in Italy would have been had Siena exercised her temporary might after
Montaperti and razed Florence five years before Giotto was born.

  FIG. 35. Sienese about 1275. Altar-front of St. Peter.—_Siena._
]

A little earlier than the year 1225, when Florence called in strangers
to adorn the Baptistery with mosaics in the Greek style, Guido of Siena
signed and dated 1221 the most famous of his madonnas. Unhappily the
enthroned Virgin of the Palazzo Pubblico was repainted some fifty years
later, a fact which has led many critics unnecessarily to doubt the
date.[15] But from half a dozen other pictures by Guido we may learn
that he was a diligent and rather heavy-handed imitator of the current
Greek formulas, Figure 34. At the battle of Montaperti the Sienese
captured an excellent Florentine painter, Coppo di Marcovaldo, and in
1261 he painted the admirable madonna which is still in the church of
the Servi. It shows a sensitive use of the Byzantine conventions. There
is pensiveness and almost shyness in the face and posture of the Virgin,
and loving intentness in that of the Child. Their relation is to each
other and not as in earlier madonnas to the devout public. These
intimate qualities have been ascribed, I think wrongly, to restoration.
But they appear even more emphatically in the entirely unrestored
Madonna, Figure 3, in the collection of Mr. Otto Kahn, which I think may
be a Coppo[16], and is in any case of similar date and feeling.

The same process of sweetening the old style while accepting it, is
shown in the famous altar-piece of St. Peter in the Academy at Siena,
Figure 35. The gaunt figure of the Saint is completely traditional, the
little stories of the Annunciation and Nativity at the side show a new
vivacity and a new grace. Siena met the innovating painter more than
half way, for the indignant citizens soon marred with their knives the
crucifiers of the head of the Christian Church. The date of the panel
will not be far from 1275, and already the painter of genius who was to
create the sweet, new style was learning his trade.

  FIG. 36. Duccio Purcellai Madonna.—_Santa Maria Novella, Florence._
]

Of Duccio di Buoninsegna, the father of the Sienese school, and
everything considered its greatest master, we have numerous records,[17]
and by no means all to his credit. He must have had the artistic
temperament in a degree then unusual. The court records show half a
dozen fines against him, and he was not scrupulous about paying his
debts. One forgets these foibles before those Madonnas which are a
consummate expression of taste and those narratives which are a triumph
of tact and ingenuity. Duccio’s mind does not grasp the harsher and more
heroic emotions, but within the realm of the tender and pathetic he is
supreme. His elegance appears in his first important work, the famous
Rucellai Madonna, Figure 36, in Santa Maria Novella at Florence, which
tradition erroneously ascribes to Cimabue. It is presumably the great
panel which Duccio contracted to paint in 1285.[18] He was probably
young and unconsidered, for he took all the risks, agreeing that the
picture might be rejected at the will of the patrons. The Society of
Saint Mary the Virgin would have been foolish indeed to reject the most
gracious Madonna the world had then seen. Characteristic of Duccio are
the swaying curves of the contours and especially of the draperies, the
thin, delicately folded robes of the Child and the attendant angels and
the sensitively drawn bare feet. Working in Florence and doubtless
impressed by Cimabue, Duccio has retained in this early work a certain
austerity which gives way in his later work to a more feminine
sweetness. For that very reason the Rucellai Madonna is perhaps the
greatest Madonna of the century, since without loss of the stately
Byzantine qualities, she gains the new attributes of grace. It was no
wonder that when the name of Duccio had faded out of the Florentine
memory, Florence ascribed this noble Madonna to the venerated founder of
her native school, Cimabue. Recent criticism has righted the unconscious
wrong thus done to Siena.

  FIG. 37. Duccio. Madonna in Majesty.—_Opera del Duomo, Siena._
]

To mature his style Duccio needed only to intensify the qualities of
sweetness and grace which are evident already in the Rucellai Madonna.
The stages of his growth are represented in minor works at Siena and in
British and Roman collections. But his fame, for the layman, is
associated with the magnificent altar-piece which he executed for the
Cathedral of Siena, and only the special student need look beyond it. On
the 9th of October, 1309, Duccio contracted with the trustees of the
Cathedral to do a great altar-piece wholly with his own hands, at the
rate of sixteen soldi a day and expenses. He promised to take no other
work during the painting. It was finished in June of 1311 and carried in
solemn procession from the bottega outside the Porta a Stalloreggi to
the Cathedral. A chronicler describes the cortege “parading about the
Campo, as is usual, all the bells pealing a glory in devotion for so
noble a picture as this is.... And all that day they kept praying with
many alms which were given to poor folk, praying to God and His Mother,
who is our advocate, that she defend us in her infinite mercy from every
adversity and every ill, and save us from the hands of traitors and foes
of Siena.” Most characteristic of the febrile patriotism of Siena is
this constant dread of the traitor.

About a year before this ceremony the trustees enlarged the scheme for
the picture, making an additional contract for thirty-eight stories to
be paid at the rate of two florins and a half each. These were put on
the back of the altar-piece, covering very fully the life of Christ and
that of the Virgin. Thus the front of the altar-piece represents the
decorative and monumental ideals of Sienese painting while the back
exemplifies its feeling for narrative. Everything that Sienese painting
was to be is already in germ in this marvellous work.

In depicting the Virgin “in Majesty,” Figure 37, Duccio has magnified
the theme. Earlier pictures show only a handful of angels in attendance.
Here we have a cloud of celestial witnesses, the four patrons of Siena
kneeling in the foreground, at the sides charming alternation of grim,
bearded evangelists, orientally soft girl martyrs, and youthful
archangels. Seven years earlier Cimabue had conceived a similar great
Majesty for the Church of Santa Chiara at Pisa.[19] Doubtless Duccio had
seen it, and, though it is lost to us, we may assume, that the Sienese
artist outdid his prototype both in sweetness and splendor.

In many ways Duccio’s Majesty is highly traditional. It shows the
Byzantine horror of voids, is a little crowded. But this defect would be
less apparent if it were raised on its historiated base (_predella_)
with its original pinnacles above. Everything derives from Byzantine
exemplars, reverently improved in a realistic direction. Duccio has
dared to paint the Christ as a laddie; and not as a little old man; he
has shown the soft forms of His body through light draperies; he has
kept the austerity of the Byzantine apostles but has attenuated their
harshness; he has worked the insipid female masks of the older art into
forms of a positive and dreamy grace. One feels the tender mood of the
work in the Latin jingle at the foot of the throne, typical of dozens of
similar dedications in Siena:

                        Mater Sancta Dei
                        Sis caussa Senis requei
                        Sis Duccio vita
                        Te quia pinxit ita

which I may rudely paraphrase:

                 Holy Mother of God: grant Siena rest,
                 Grant life to Duccio,—he did his best.

All the sensibility of the City of the Virgin is in these prattling
rhymes with which they loved to hallow and offer great pictures.

  FIG. 38. Duccio. Entry into Jerusalem; Christ Washing the Apostles’
    Feet; Last Supper. From the back of the great Madonna.—_Opera del
    Duomo, Siena._
]

If the front of this panel shows only moderate innovations, the case is
not so for the back. The two score stories from the Bible or early
Christian legend, in the distribution of the figures follow faithfully
the standard Italo-Byzantine compositions. Where Duccio steps in is in
bettering the forms, giving grace to the draperies, and animation to the
gestures—above all in providing contemporary architectural accessories,
and coping with the problem of space. He also carries to their ultimate
refinement certain decorative formulas which the Byzantine painters had
glimpsed but not fully realized. Thus two quite opposed tendencies pass
into Sienese painting from Duccio;—a rather small preoccupation with
accessories and the problem of space, and a pure æstheticism concerned
with finesses of decorative arrangement—in short, the prose and the
poetry of Sienese painting.

Sienese narrative painting tends to be scrupulous about details and
inscenation, quite as a good story-teller naturally provides incidents
that make for plausibility. We may see how Duccio’s mind works in the
familiar theme of Christ entering Jerusalem, Figure 38. Duccio sets the
spectator in a garden with an open gate, thus throwing the scene back a
little. Above the procession and the rejoicing throng rises a city wall,
and still higher against the sky bristle Gothic towers and spires. Thus
the theme gains picturesqueness and variety. One forgets that there is
hardly space for the welcoming throng before the gate, and that the
donkey’s four feet are on a level although he is going up hill. These
little maladjustments show that while Duccio took infinite pains in
inventing the setting, he borrowed the figure groups bodily from earlier
Byzantine compositions in which the setting was simpler. In this
piecing-together process he turns some pretty sharp corners, but he
never sacrifices clarity and expressiveness.

In the scene where the maid servant catches the Galilean burr in Peter’s
voice, Figure 39, and asks if he be not a follower of Jesus, we find
Duccio’s method quite at its best. Nothing could be better than the
sudden turn of the girl with one foot on the steps. Fine, too, is the
concentration of the crowd on the exciting problem of gossip.
Well-observed, their actions as they warm their feet and hands at the
fire. Vivid, too, the impulsive gesture of Peter as he denies the
charge. The place, a court yard with a staircase leading right into the
picture above, which represents the court room where Jesus is being
questioned, is most elaborately planned. One looks back through a portal
into farther spaces. All this was so new and interesting that I presume
the Sienese have never noticed to this day that the seated group would
never fit in the space assigned to it and that the positions of the
figures are ambiguous. The picture does admirably its work of telling a
story spiritedly, and that is enough.

  FIG. 39. Duccio. Peter denies Christ.—_Opera del Duomo, Siena._
]

Duccio’s Calvary, Figure 41, is remarkable for breadth, spectacular
effectiveness, and a measured pathos. As usual he multiplies actors and
incidents while keeping the orderliness of the arrangement. The
slightness of all the forms, their little weight and uncertain balance
are apparent. And there is, on the same principle of taste, a similar
attenuation of emotion. Where Giotto at Padua gave stark tragedy, Duccio
offers a gentle flutter of restrained grief.

  FIG. 40. Duccio. The Marys at the Tomb.—_Opera del Duomo._
]

Such is the average of these narratives, clear, picturesque,
circumstantial, infused with a generalized and never very intense
emotion. There are some, mostly composed with few figures, which reveal
a great fastidiousness of arrangement. In such a composition as the
Marys at the Tomb, Figure 40, Duccio reveals himself as pure æsthete, as
consummate master of linear composition. The motive is essentially
insignificant, merely that the Marys shrunk at the sight of the angel at
the tomb, but out of that motive of withdrawal is wrought through the
little panel a lovely rhythm to which everything contributes—the rise of
the cliffs and their crinkly edges, the contrasting angles of the tomb
and its impossibly tilted lid, the reciprocal curve of the angel. We
grasp in the picture a general truth which reaches far beyond Duccio and
Siena, that a too conscious struggle for style precludes any complete
expression of emotional significance. For this picture is as trivial as
a narrative as it is exquisite as a decoration.

  FIG. 41. Duccio. Calvary.—_Opera del Duomo._
]

Duccio, who disappears from our sight about the year 1318, fixed once
for all the character of the Sienese school. In narrative it was to
adopt the placid and tender tone of legend, most unlike the urgent and
dramatic mood of Giotto. The Sienese artist was too reverent to raise
the question how did this happen, and how did the persons feel; he asked
rather “How do we feel about it as believers?” The beauty of the work,
then, is not that of outer reality but of revery and meditation. It
never has the tang and variety of good Florentine narrative painting,
but within its lovingly modulated monotony, Sienese narrative painting
is supremely charming.

  FIG. 42. Simone Martini. Madonna in Majesty. Fresco.—_Palazzo
    Pubblico, Siena._
]

Duccio also started in Siena a somewhat worried and petty concern with
accessories, architecture, complications of perspective. He inaugurated
a tradition of material splendor in gilding, tooling, delicate
graduation of color which remained the glory of Sienese painting for
nearly two centuries. So far as we know he painted only in tempera on
panel, and the Sienese generally were to triumph in this feminine form
of work rather than in the masculine methods of fresco. Finally Duccio
took over from Byzantine art and perfected certain finesses of highly
simplified and abstract composition, a pure æstheticism distinctly
Sienese and wholly alien to the warm humanism of Florence. You will find
this austerely lovely style at its best in Simone Martini, and surviving
as late as Sassetta and the middle of the fifteenth century.

After Duccio, Sienese painting divides itself into two tendencies, one
aristocratic, chivalric and æsthetic, deriving from his decorative
manner; the other popular, narrative and realistic, deriving from his
minutely staged scenes on the back of the great altar-piece. Of the
aristocratic style Simone Martini is the greatest exemplar, of the
popular style, the brothers Lorenzetti.

Simone Martini was born in 1283 or thereabouts. We first meet him as an
artist in the great frescoed Majesty of the Virgin, Figure 42, completed
in 1315 for the Palazzo Pubblico, Siena. The arrangement is like that of
Duccio’s Majesty, finished only five years earlier, and the facial types
are generally those of Duccio. But the great fresco gains clarity and
impressiveness from the added space, from the picturesque motive of a
canopy, from the isolation and elevation of the Madonna above her
escort, and from the rich Gothic forms of the throne, which are a
novelty in painting. While most of the faces show the orientalism of
Duccio, the Madonna has the level-browed, intent character of Gothic
art, and the Child is realistic. Gothic again is the graceful border
with its fine medallions, and the bright colors of the whole. It is the
most splendid enthroned Virgin in the world, and she is conceived
chivalrically as a sort of tournament queen with her paladins upholding
a canopy, and angel pages on their knees offering roses and lilies.

To the Sienese this was a political picture, as a rhymed inscription in
Italian shows. The saintly patrons of Siena address the Virgin:

               “Angelic flowers, roses and lilies
               With which the heavenly meadow is adorned,
               Delight me less than do good counsels.
               But sometimes I see such as verily
               Despise me and my city betray,
               And gain praise the more for evil words,
               With such as merit condemnation.”

The Virgin answers the saints patrons somewhat evasively:

                 “Fix my delights in your minds,
                 So that I shall, as ye wish,
                 Fulfil your honorable requests.
                 But if the powerful molest the weak,
                 Oppressing whether with shame or harm—
                 Let not your prayers be made for these
                 Nor for whomsoever betrays my city.”

  FIG. 43. Simone Martini. St. Martin Knighted.—_Lower Church, Assisi._
]

In Simone’s work this great Majesty is an exception. He preferred
generally to work on a more restricted scale, to burn the lamp of
æsthetic sacrifice. I can merely allude to the great idealized portrait
of St. Louis of Toulouse, in S. Lorenzo, Naples. It was painted for King
Robert of Anjou, whose kneeling figure appears in the picture, sometime
after 1317. The thing is resplendent in gold and azure, adorned by
curiously twisted Gothic borders; in sentiment it is impassive as a
Buddhist painting.

  FIG. 44. Simone Martini and Lippo Memmi. The Annunciation.—_Uffizi._
]

About the year 1325,[20] we may surmise, Simone was called to Assisi to
fresco the Chapel of St. Martin in the Lower Church. He set upon the
walls so many fairy tales, tender and sprightly in sentiment, provided
with the few essential accessories that a rapid story-teller would need.
What more charming than the boy Martin praying while they bind on him
the equipment of a knight, Figure 43, and musicians sound a fanfare!
What more gallant than the lad setting out on crusade against the
Teutons who lurk in a cleft of the background! This gracious childlike
quality, quite akin to the tender phase of Duccio, is exceptional in
Simone, who habitually is the strenuous decorator.

His sparse and austere methods appear clearly in the commemorative
fresco of Guidoriccio, hired general of Siena, and conqueror of
Sassoforte. It is in the Palazzo Pubblico and duly dated 1328. Nothing
is realistic but the horse and rider. They are isolated, hold alone a
field made up of pure symbols for camps, and fortresses and craggy
hill-tops, yet the martial effect is unmistakable and the composition
most quaintly impressive.

The quintessence of Simone’s later art is in the famous Annunciation of
the Uffizi, Figure 44. In order to justify the most nervously exquisite
of linear arrangements he has chosen the least significant moment of the
event. His Virgin is merely a sullen princess resenting an intrusion;
the Gabriel, an etherialized courtier pleading a cause with apologies.
But the contrast of the advancing and shrinking motives gave Simone
precisely what he wanted. He builds up areas richly colored or brocaded,
bounded by sharp curves, relieved by flutters and spirals of flying
drapery, and accentuated by such details as the olive twigs and the lily
which have the crisp incisiveness of finest metal work. As a triumph of
pure decoration Gothic painting has nothing better to show than this
lovely panel which was finished in 1333 for the chapel of Sant’ Ansano
at Siena. It has little quality of heart in it, and no reverence save
that of consummate workmanship.

Great honors awaited Simone. He was called to the exiled papal court at
Avignon in 1339, met Petrarch, painted Petrarch’s Laura and is lauded in
one of the poet’s sonnets. Of Simone’s work at Avignon we have only a
few small panels scattered between Antwerp, Paris, Liverpool, and
Berlin. The compositions, most of which belonged to a composite
altar-piece depicting Christ’s passion, waver between his old simple
style and a crowded and animated mood reminiscent of Duccio, and
influenced by the Lorenzetti. Simone is unable to resist the universal
tendency towards diffuse narrative, and in so far as he yields to it, he
is less than himself. Christ Bearing His Cross, in the Louvre,
exemplifies the extravagance and morbidness of this latest manner,
Figure 45. His strength lies in sacrifice and abstraction, his real
affinities are the contemporary Buddhist painters of China and Japan,
though of course he knew nothing of them. He died in 1344, leaving
behind him a tradition of fastidious artistry which was potent in Siena
for over a century.

  FIG. 45. Simone Martini. Christ bearing His Cross.—_Louvre._
]

As late as 1450, Lorenzo Ghiberti informs us in his “Commentaries,”[21]
the Sienese regarded Simone Martini as their greatest painter. He
differed from them, preferring, himself, Ambrogio Lorenzetti. This was
an eminently Florentine choice, Ambrogio’s warmth, concreteness, and
elaboration were on the whole Florentine. He worked for several years at
Florence, must have known Giotto, certainly studied him with discerning
admiration. With his elder brother, Pietro, Ambrogio Lorenzetti gave to
Duccio’s tradition of detailed narrative painting its perfected form.
They were great fresco painters, and most characteristic as such. In
panel painting they are less original, but they bring into this highly
conventional art a great ardor and curiosity. They represent the popular
average of Siena as Simone Martini represented its aristocratic
minority.

  FIG. 46. Pietro Lorenzetti. Madonna with Saints, 1320.—_Pieve,
    Arezzo._
]

We first meet Pietro Lorenzetti as an artist in the altar-back at the
Pieve, Arezzo,[22] Figure 46, which was finished in 1320. It is an
_ancona_, or compartmented piece and the most splendid that has come
down in Romanesque form. The figures are of two sorts. The Madonna is of
intent Gothic type, and the fine motive of holding off the Christchild
at elbow length in order to see him better is borrowed from Giovanni
Pisano, who in turn took it from French Gothic sculpture. So are the
forms above in the Annunciation new and graceful, while the little boxed
room with its plastic column is also novel. The Assumption of the
Madonna in the highest pinnacle is probably the earliest occurrence of
this famous Sienese theme in painting. But all the figures of saints in
the three orders of the side panels are taken almost without change from
Duccio’s great altar-piece. It would be interesting to trace Pietro’s
emancipation through a dozen panels. No one better combined dignity with
grace, and feeling, and splendor. His work in fresco is fragmentary and
confused with that of his younger brother. We are certain of nothing
except a fragment of a deeply felt Calvary in the Church of St.
Francesco, at Siena. Many critics ascribe to him the agitated and wildly
picturesque frescoes of the Passion in the left transept of the Lower
Church at Assisi.[23] But this, I think, is a mistake. Pietro is never
in his certain works so lively and indecorous and casual. We have to do
with an artist influenced by Duccio working about 1330, Pietro himself
may appear as the Stigmatization, Figure 47, and one or two of the other
simpler compositions. The other frescoes are chiefly interesting as
showing the dangers of the panoramic method of Siena. Take the Last
Supper, Figure 48. The theme is simply lost in the fantastic richness of
the accessories. It is hard to find Christ or Judas, for the eye seeks
the radiating rafters or the scullery where cats lurk and eager
scullions wipe the dishes.

  FIG. 47. Pietro Lorenzetti, or Follower. St. Francis receiving the
    Stigmata. Fresco.—_Lower Church, Assisi._
]

  FIG. 48. School of Pietro Lorenzetti. The Last Supper. Fresco.—_Lower
    Church, Assisi._
]

In the Birth of the Virgin, dated 1342, Figure 49, Pietro spoils a
carefully studied and well-felt picture by elaboration of the setting.
The frame is conceived as the plastic front of a Gothic room within and
behind which, spaces are multiplied confusingly. Here the pedantic
preoccupation with the problem of space offends the eye and destroys the
unity of what in a simpler setting would be a monumental composition. It
illustrates the dangers of that smaller realism which from Duccio down
afflicted the more progressive painters of Siena. Such a picture enables
us to appreciate the tact and thoughtfulness with which Ambrogio
Lorenzetti approached his narrative themes.

  FIG. 49. Pietro Lorenzetti. Birth of the Virgin.—_Opera del Duomo,
    Siena._
]

Ambrogio Lorenzetti was born about the beginning of the century. In 1331
and later he painted remarkable frescoes for the Church of St. Francis.
These if complete would afford the most interesting comparisons with
Giotto at Florence, but the two that remain are among the best narrative
paintings of the time. What will first strike the observer in the story
of St. Louis of Toulouse renouncing his throne as he takes the
Franciscan vow, Figure 50, is the variety and orderliness of the
emotions. The devotion of the saint is well offset by the intense,
melancholy curiosity of his brother Robert, who becomes king through the
sacrifice. The audience is divided into admiring Franciscans and idly
marveling courtiers, the whole well dominated by the kindly and reverend
figure of the Pope. Remarkable is the methodical division of the spaces.
A slender column establishes the picture plane and sets the figures
back. A sort of desk in a hollow square defines and isolates the
monastic group, while the courtiers have their appropriate location in a
third plane of alcoves. Florence has next to nothing of this sort at
this period, and it may be noted that this careful division of spaces is
not matter of display and curiosity as in Duccio, but is logical and
effective as regards the persons of the narrative.

  FIG. 50. Ambrogio Lorenzetti. Prince Louis of Toulouse receives the
    Franciscan Vow.—_San Francesco, Siena._
]

Of similar significance, but more dramatic and picturesque, is the
martyrdom of the Franciscan missionaries before the Sultan of Morocco.
The elaborated spaces make for clarity, the entirely professional and
impersonal cruelty of the Moorish tyrant and his bodyguard is splendidly
caught and effectively contrasted with the courageous submission of the
martyrs. Lorenzo Ghiberti praises the energy and character of this work,
and the observer of today feels as deeply its romantic appeal. All the
figures are set on receding platforms, the problem of space is solved
along lines of intelligent literalism.[24]

  FIG. 51. Ambrogio Lorenzetti. Madonna in Majesty.—_Massa Marittima._
]

It would be a pleasure to dwell on the Madonnas of Ambrogio. The tragic
Madonna of S. Francesco, Figure 33, the Madonna with St. Dorothy and St.
Lucy, in the Siena Academy, the Virgin in Mr. Dan Fellowes Platt’s
collection are among the best. No other early Italian so combined
nobility with motherly warmth. His splendor and sweet dignity may best
be felt in the Majesty of the Virgin, Figure 51, in the little town of
Massa Marittima. The central motive, Mary and the Child embracing, is
almost Ambrogio’s invention. He rings the changes on it in lovely
modulations, while always retaining monumentality. This picture is as
stately as Duccio’s Majesty, and as resplendent as Simone Martini’s,
while having qualities of ardor and fancifulness all its own. The
fairy-like Virtues on the steps of the Madonna’s throne especially show
the rich vein of pure fantasy which accompanied Ambrogio’s robustness.
The picture may be dated about 1336 or later.

Previous to its painting Ambrogio had passed some years at Florence,
where he must have studied and known Giotto, and where he himself
influenced powerfully the beginnings of the new panoramic style.
Whatever frescoes he himself did there have perished, and the only
memorials of his visit are certain delightful little panels telling with
vivacity and utmost circumstantiality the legends of St. Nicholas. At
Florence he must have analyzed Giotto’s great political frescoes, now
lost, which depicted in symbols good and bad government. These were
surely the inspiration for the political symbols and illustrations which
Ambrogio, in the year 1337 and later, painted in the great hall of the
Palazzo Pubblico at Siena.

The most famous is the Allegory of the State. The Commune sits
enthroned, above in the air are the theological virtues—Faith, Hope and
Charity; seated at the side are the four secular virtues—Prudence,
Temperance, Justice, and Fortitude—and with them two additional
personifications useful to a state—Magnanimity and Peace. The graceful
relaxed figure of Peace, Figure 52, with her filmy drapery is famous.
Below the platform on which the Commune sits with attendant virtues, are
the grim, disciplined forms of men-at-arms and a throng of magistrates
and citizenry. At the left are symbolized Concord and Justice as the
supporters of a well-ruled state. Here the symbolism is childishly
obvious. Concord holds her smoothing plane. From her hand go strings
which bind in fellowship a group of citizens below and lead above to the
figure of Justice. Still higher is Wisdom. Justice deals punishment with
one hand and grants aid with the other; the Middle Ages never admitted
that Justice was merely punitive. The figures of Justice and Concord are
superb,—Ambrogio’s Madonna type on a heroic scale.

As a pictorial representation of the finest mediæval ideas of
statecraft, this fresco is of incomparable interest. As a decoration it
is hardly successful. The theme has hampered the artist, the handling of
the figures in several scales with the largest above, produces confusion
and topheaviness. Beautiful in the parts, it is disappointing in the
whole.

Far better merely as decoration is the companion fresco which represents
the Effects of Good Government, Figure 53. We have a peaceful city, the
entrancing spectacle of Siena as she was about the year 1339. Girls are
dancing a carol in the foreground with the quaintest dignity, mounted
merchants are passing, and if the picture were better preserved, we
should see the mechanics—or “artists” as they still call themselves in
Italy—working cheerily in their shops. In its richness without
confusion, this is the very triumph of the panoramic realism which
Ambrogio made popular throughout Italy.

There are many more frescoes in this series, mostly by imitators of
Ambrogio. The Sienese region is full of works by him or by his faithful
followers. His panel pictures are in many galleries of Europe and
America. They all confirm the record of Ghiberti that Ambrogio had the
habits of a nobleman—a great sympathy, a fine scrupulousness, a real
magnanimity. Certain contemporaries seem greater, Giotto surely, Simone
Martini perhaps, but no Italian painter until Raphael himself reveals so
complete and harmonious a development. We find no trace of the brothers
Lorenzetti after 1348. Presumably they perished in the great plague of
that year.

  FIG. 52. Ambrogio Lorenzetti. Peace, from the Fresco of Good
    Government.—_Palazzo Pubblico, Siena._
]

  FIG. 54. Luca Tommé. The Assumption of the Virgin.—_Jarves Coll., New
    Haven, Conn._
]

  FIG. 53. Ambrogio Lorenzetti. Results of Good Government—The Peaceful
    City. Fresco.—_Palazzo Pubblico, Siena._
]

For a century after the plague year, 1348, the painters of Siena
imitated either the narrative realism of Ambrogio or the decorative
sparseness of Simone Martini. It is customary to align them as of one
camp or the other. We may indeed say that such painters as Lippo Memmi,
Andrea Vanni, and Naddo Ceccarelli faithfully echo Simone, while such a
master as the influential Bartolo di Fredi, who is traceable as late as
1388, seems completely Lorenzettian. But most of the painters follow
freely both tendencies, employing Simone’s formulas in altar-pieces with
few figures, and Ambrogio’s in narrative. Such eclecticism produced
abundantly works of charm, for delicate sentiment and ornate
workmanship, but rather few works of originality. Perhaps because of
willingly accepted limitations, the average is higher than that of
Florence. Throughout Italy it was a more popular style than the
Florentine. It dominated the coast region from Naples to Valencia,
penetrated into Umbria and the Adriatic marshes, and even got a
temporary foothold in Florence itself. It fitted in better with mediæval
ideals than the art of Giotto and Orcagna, which implied classical
antiquity and anticipated the humanism of the Renaissance. On the whole
Sienese art runs down after the Lorenzetti died, losing the robustness
which Ambrogio had learned of Giotto, but its decline is gentle and
interrupted by beneficent reactions towards its established glories. We
may pass rapidly, and chiefly considering types, the fifty-odd years
between the Lorenzetti and the new century.

Luca Tommé is credited with an exquisite little Assumption, Figure 54,
in the Jarves Collection at Yale University. The picture, though it may
be as late as 1370, repeats loyally the formulas which Pietro Lorenzetti
invented nearly fifty years earlier. Perhaps Bartolo di Fredi, a rather
superficial and over-fecund artist, best represents the average
condition as the fourteenth century closed. In such a panel as the
Adoration of the Magi, in the Siena Academy, Figure 55, we see the
familiar theme for the first time expanded in a Lorenzettian sense. It
becomes a pageant, probably under the influence of contemporary mystery
plays. It is best conceived in the little scenes in the background; the
facial types and the simplified setting on the whole recall Simone
Martini. In other narrative pictures Bartolo vies with Ambrogio
Lorenzetti in complication of planes and architecture. On the whole he
is a rather faint echo, but his note while thin is also true.

  FIG. 55. Bartolo di Fredi. Adoration of the Magi.—_Siena._
]

  FIG. 56. Barna. The Transfiguration.—_Collegiata, S. Gemignano._
]

The declining century produced only one robust painter in Siena, the
mysterious Barna whose damaged frescoes of the Passion we see in the
Collegiate Church of San Gemignano. The forms are those of Simone
Martini, the compositions even more sparse than his, denuded of all
accessories, and powerfully impressive for this reason. The mood is
brusque and tragic, with nothing of Sienese sweetness. Barna seems a
kind of provincial Giotto misplaced and unrealized in the Sienese