MARGARITONE

1216 - 1293

Magaritone, painter, sculptor, and architect, shows in his Madonna and Child, with scenes from the Lives of the Saints, no hint of the new spirit of the coming art of the Renaissance. The Virgin is a swarthy Roman-Greek, the Child-Christ a manikin-all is formal convention- the infant, like all else, must not commit the sin of being like nature. The decoration is a pattern-like scheme- the Virgin and Child in an almond-shape, with four small pictures on each side, as though taken from a Byzantine " miniature " ; over all is the manner of Byzantium, or, as [25] the Italians called it, Alla Greca. The thing is scarce a work of art at all, but rather sumptuous craftsmanship-the artist essays to state little that he has sensed through his own vision. Yet Margaritone was one of the most distinguished of Tuscan painters of his age, and one of the earliest painters of Italy.

CIMABUE
1240? - 1302

Of a generation later than Margaritone, but working within Margaritone's years, in Florence hard by to the south-west, was Giovanni Cenni de' Pepi, more famous as CIMABUE. Born about 1240, and dying in 1302, Cimabue was for long acclaimed ' the father of modern painting ' ; and a famous altar-piece, said to have been painted by this Florentine, and known as the Rucellai Madonna, at S. Maria Novella in Florence, was long held to have been borne in procession through Florence amidst public rejoicing ; but research has proved that, so far from this altar-piece being by Cimabue, it was painted by a painter of Siena, one Duccio, and that Cimabue worked in mosaic in the Byzantine manner, no painting by his brush being known. However that may be, Cimabue, alas, neither painted the Rucellai Madonna nor was it carried in public procession, as we shall see. The pretty story is due to the gossip of Vasari in later years, the Florentine historian of the lives of the Italian painters, who but filched another city's credit and another painter's glory to bring fame to his own Florence. The legend of Cimabue's altar-piece rests solely on the witness of Vasari, who filched the incident from the undoubted and fully recorded incident of the rival city of Siena. Yet it is with some regret that one parts from the pretty old legend of that Rucellai Madonna, set [26] up amidst public rejoicing in the dark transept of S. Maria Novella, hard by the garden where the youths and maidens met on that Tuesday morning in the year of the Plague, sitting round about Boccaccio to hearken to tales that should keep their minds from the death that stalked the streets of the stricken city without. But the city's records contain no hint of the gift, or painting, or public procession ; and the city's records are very full. No such important event could have passed by unrecorded.

Dante writes of Cimabue as a painter, 'tis true ; but his phrase rather points to the fact that Cimabue's artistry was as purely Byzantine as that of Magaritone. " Cimabue," says Dante, " thought to hold the field in painting, but to-day Giotto is hailed by the public." A new art had arisen-Cimabue's style, once in the fashion, had departed -a new style had taken its place.

Cimabue, the last of the great Byzantine painters, seems, however, to have been the master of Giotto, the first great Florentine painter of the Renaissance ; but the gulf between these two generations of master and pupil yawns wide indeed.

So far, the Byzantine painters had only seen flat-they only attempted to set figures on the flat surface of the wall as flat decorations, with height and breadth but without depth. The New Art, about to come into Italy, was to see the figure as a rounded thing-was to try and make the flat painted surface yield the illusion of depth, as of things seen in a flat mirror.

But even as Margaritone wrought in tempera, upon the linen fixed to a panel, his swarthy Roman-Greek Virgin with her Child, and signed upon it, " Margaritone of Arezzo made me," the fairy Prince of Gothic Art had stepped [27] across the Alps of the North, and, passing by him, kissed the Princess of Italian realism as she lay in her long sleep ; and she awoke to find herself a new creature, a-thrill with a strange wonder, for the virtue of the North had gone out to her, and her blood tingled with the spirit of northern romance. For the feet of the Prince had trodden the green fields and woodlands of France ; his apparel was fragrant of the fresh winds that blew across the face of the world ; his eyes had seen the blue heavens and had mirrored the grey clouds, and gazed upon the hills and waters of the Rhine. In his ears was the music of the voices of men and women ; and his arms had held children that were mere babes. He had walked amidst adventures, and to him the hot-house languor of the East was but a sultry weariness of days. He had faced life, and gloried in the pursuit of it. And he had seen that God's heaven was blue as lapis-lazuli, and that the miles of air were between, bathing the world in wondrous radiance and casting an indefinable glamour over all things ; that the heavens were not made of cubes of gilt glass or stones set into rigid patterns, but were aerial, and filled with the living breath of nature. Thus, redolent of life, the North stooped and kissed Italy upon the mouth ; and she arose, with a long-drawn sigh, and burst into song-and that song pedantic men call the Renaissance, that had better been called the Awakening.