[61]

THE PAINTERS OF CENTRAL ITALY

[63]

CHAPTER V

WHEREIN WE SEE THE RENAISSANCE FLIT THROUGH SIENA

LEGEND long gave to Florence the first Italian painter of genius. Some Byzantine painters, so 'twas vowed, had been called to Florence about 1260, and set aflame the genius of CIMABUE, who created the Italian art ; and he, wandering amongst the hills about Florence, found a shepherd lad, GIOTTO, scratching the forms of sheep upon a rock, and straightway brought him to his house and taught him the ways and craft and mysteries of an artist. Part of these pretty tales is fabled romance. Cimabue was a worker in mosaic, working in the manner of the Byzantines to make pictures by setting small cubes of coloured stones together into a mortared surface of walls and pavements. And if, as Dante bears witness, he painted pictures, none have come down to us. At any rate, if they exist, the Rucellai Madonna is not one of them.

THE SCHOOL OF SIENA

Early Sienese painting brought forth the first Italian genius. 'Tis true, the first real painter of genius in Florence was GIOTTO ; but he was not the first genius of painting in Italy. We must go a little farther back, if not greatly farther afield, to neighbouring Siena, the southern rival city to Florence ; and seek in Siena for Italy's beginnings in the art of painting and for her first genius in Duccio. For, whilst Duccio's feet are still [64] firm set on Byzantine ground, his head is raised into the Renaissance.

DUCCIO

It will be remembered that the famed altar-piece of the Rucellai Madonna at S. Maria Novella in Florence was said to have aroused the enthusiasm of the city, but so far from its being the work of Cimabue, it is undoubtedly the work of the Sienese painter, Duccio di Buoninsegna, of the next generation, and but some ten years older than Giotto. This work had a large influence on Florentine painting, and a very considerable influence on the art of the younger man Giotto.

Duccio di Buoninsegna, who lived from about 1255 to 1319, who at any rate was working from about 1280 to his death in 1319, not only was the first master of the Sienese school, but its supreme painter ; and in age the " father of modern painting," since both in Florence as well as his native Siena his influence was very great. He had undoubtedly studied and been trained in the Byzantine tradition of painting. But, fettered as he was, by Byzantinism, he was the first Italian to create the picture as a whole, to make figures into pictorial groups - and he did these things with something of grandeur in style, and a certain breadth of handling as regards his use of line and draughtsmanship. Duccio, it may be said, was the first painter to step from the painted illuminations of the Dark Ages, and to employ painting to larger and fuller ends. He put from him the gilt Byzantine backgrounds, and painted in their place architecture and landscape. He made his figures human ; and rid figure and apparel of their Byzantine rigidity.

II
SIMONE MARTINI 1283 - 1344
SIENESE SCHOOL
"CHRIST BEARING HIS CROSS"
(Jesus-Christ marchant au Calvaire)
(LOUVRE)
Christ, preceded by the executioner, soldiers, and two children, is bearing His Cross to Calvary, He is attended by a large crowd, in which may be recognised the Virgin Mary, in blue robes, supported by St. John ; St. Mary Magdalene in red, with her long hair falling over her shoulders, raises her hands in grief.
Painted in tempera on panel. 10 in. x 4 in. (0.25 x 0.10).