CHAPTER VI

OF THE COMING OF ART INTO FLORENCE

To get back to Florence : the Florentines were made of far different stuff from the Sienese. Of the Sienese ecstasies and spiritual exaltation they knew nothing. A sober, sane, and level-headed-indeed calculating-people, they left mysticism to Siena, and prided themselves on knowledge and intellect.

GIOTTO
1266-1337

That GIOTTO was the first Florentine painter of genius there is no question. Some ten years younger than Duccio, whether he were influenced by his Sienese contemporary is not known, but that Rucellai Madonna hotly suggests the likelihood. Whether so or not, the Byzantine influence which Duccio could not wholly rid from himself, Giotto absolutely put from him ; and, by consequence, Giotto, as claimed by the Florentines, may be said to be the first true painter of the Renaissance. Born at Colle, by Florence, in 1266, Giotto di Bondone died in 1337. A shepherd's boy he was, and that his gifts were discovered by Cimabue, and that Cimabue took him into his studio, seem to have been true enough, though the influence is hard to discover. He resisted all Byzantine habits and tricks of style ; his life in the open with the flocks he tended had revealed nature to him as his supreme master, and the moods of the hillsides guided him in his art's utterance. In Giotto we have the first clear note of the new spirit that was being breathed [69] across the land. In the work of his hands is seen that grasp of the figure as a real form, individual and capable of movement-to him was revealed the craft to display the body as being more than a flat decorative surface. Whatsoever his weaknesses of drawing, if his heads be vulgar and his draperies heavy, at least his direct habit of going straight to nature instead of founding his vision upon, and enslaving his hands to, the tricks of thumb of the Byzantine convention, led him to a vigorous and poetic statement and a grip of the essential fact that art is the utterance of life- and his frescoes of the Life of St. Francis at Assisi, as well as the frescoes in the church of Santa Croce at Florence and at Padua, are famous. What he owed to this Cimabue of legend it would indeed be difficult to say; but what is certain is that he was deeply indebted to the Gothic workers, particularly to the Pisan sculptor Giovanni Pisano, a realist steeped in the Gothic spirit of France and the Rhine, who died in 1329.

Now, strange as it may seem, the sculptures known as low-reliefs by Giovanni Pisano affected the new revelation in painting more easily than might at first appear. Painting until the end of the Byzantine years, 1300, had concerned itself with the flat surface decoration alone. The low-reliefs of Pisano's sculpture, and the daily communion with nature, turned Giotto's eyes to the fact that figures and objects in nature have depth, as well as the height and width of the flat surface on which he painted, and the low-reliefs by their play of shadows revealed forms ; and these truths forthwith convinced him that if sculpture in a next-to-flat employment of it could be made to suggest the roundness of the fully sculptured forms, so also could painting on a flat surface be made to suggest depth.

At once he created the endeavour of painters to paint [70] the figure and the objects in nature, instead of merely being flat to the eye, so that they looked as if one could pass the hand round and about them. In fact, he put forth his cunning of craftsmanship to try and paint on the flat wall or panel in such a way as to suggest the depth of things as they are seen in that equally flat surface, a mirror, and so aroused the illusion as if one could touch the forms, and feel out into the deeps of atmosphere about them.

Whatever the influences that trained his skill of hand, Giotto's supreme master was Nature. To nature he turned for the forms and colours wherewith to clothe the works of his imagination and whereby to utter that which he felt.

And now we realise the significance of Dante's oft-quoted couplet, which, whether Dante himself realised its full significance or not, gives just the exact fact that the Middle Ages, and Byzantine Art with them, were flown, and a new and real Art was born.

Giotto struck at once the wide gamut of art which became so marked a feature of the great Florentines. Dowered with a large intellect, and fitted by strength of body for sustained toil, enthusiastic for his art, he ranged through its several realms, filling Italy with the work of his hands, and creating a vigorous standard for those that came after him. From Padua, where he painted the Legend of Mary and the Life of Christ, to Rome, his frescoes adorn near upon every great city. In Florence he designed her beautiful bell-tower, and painted the Stories of St. Francis and St. John in the chapel of S. Croce.

His sound common-sense and genial temper, his wide humour, directed an unwearying energy to astounding achievement, and rid the Florentine genius at its very beginnings from ascetic formalism, taught it to go direct to life for inspiration, and rooted it deep in the dramatic [71] sense. Thus his greatest gift to Florence was the very essence of all art-vitality. At once the Madonna is above all things maternal-she smiles upon her babe. He made art human ; and, in the doing, humanised religion. He saw that action and spacing were vital to the pictured surface ; he painted before his simple faith had been touched by classic doubtings ; he painted for a people who had no books, who, indeed, could not read-who learnt through their vision from pictured things.

Sculptor, painter, and architect-he designed the Campanile in Florence-ranged widely, creating his art in Rome, Padua, Verona, Arezzo, Milan, and elsewhere, as well as in Florence, his influence became supreme throughout the greater part of Italy, and dominated Italian art until about 1400.

THE GIOTTESQUES

On the death of Giotto, his large empire of the arts fell away amongst his brilliant but less gifted followers, known to history as the Giottesques. Of these the GADDI of Florence, GIOTTINO, GIOVANNI DA MILANO, BERNARDO DADDI, ANTONIO VENEZIANO, Puccio CAPANNA, FRANCESCO DA VOLTERRA, BUONAMICO BUFFALMACO, the SPINELLI family, LORENZO MONACO, and the rest, not only show by their names his wide influence, but they carried his message throughout all Italy. They pushed forward his achievement no whit, nor reached to his heights of artistry. TADDEO GADDI, his favourite pupil and godson, is perhaps the best type of a Giottesque.

ORCAGNA
1308 - 1368

The greatest of them all was the richly gifted ANDREA DI CIONE, better known as ORCAGNA, born about 1308, and [72] dying in 1368, goldsmith, sculptor, architect, and painter, who, a pupil of Andrea Pisano, founded his style of painting on Giotto. Orcagna's altarpiece and frescoes of The Last Judgment and Paradise in S. Maria Novella at Florence prove him also to be not without a debt to Ambrogio Lorenzetti of Siena by their Sienese sense of beauty and elegance. For Orcagna would paint Paradise as well as Hell-the beauty of his faces, and his employment of faces in profile, face after face, is very characteristic, giving an effect as of petals of flowers.

However, if Giotto's influence after his death, during the remaining thirteen-hundreds, saw a tendency to break up into a decadence, if brilliant decadence-that is to say that his followers but developed his manner and saw only through his spectacles instead of going to Nature herself -Giotto's influence must not be dismissed with the Giottesques. The Giottesques, spread thoughout Italy, were ingenious illustrators of the Scriptures, men of considerable invention ; but, concentrating their attention on narrative or story, instead of upon life as they saw it, and steeped in the mere tricks of thumb of Giotto, they made no advance upon the art of their master. Nevertheless Giottism, though it looked as though it were to dwindle away in the Giottesques, was to inspire one great artist before it passed away-the monk FRA ANGELICO DA FIESOLE-though in some ways he put back his hand an hundred years into the spirit of Byzantine art, of which Giotto had rid the Italian genius.