CHAPTER VIII

WHICH TELLS OF THE MIGHT OF HULKING TOM

THE Renaissance has dawned. The smoky twilight still lingers in the departing shadows of the night of the Middle Ages. But the sun of the Renaissance touches the edge of the world with light.

We shall see the artists striving henceforth to master the forms of nature-first to utter the depth as of things seen in the mirror of the vision, the roundness of things- and the perspective of things that helps to give this illusion of depth-then the life of the day, dress, portraiture, character. They essay landscape and architecture for backgrounds ; and flowers of the field, beasts and birds, and living things. The Scriptures have to share a place with the legends of ancient Greece and Rome, seen and felt in a romantic mood wholly alien to Greece or Rome. The first half of the fourteen-hundreds prepares the way for the Golden Age of the Renaissance.

Petrarch in verse had brought humanism into the thirteen-hundreds. The fourteen-hundreds became more worldly.

MASACCIO
1401 - 1428

Florentine sculpture had its beginnings in LORENZO GHIBERTI (1378-1465), who was twenty-two when 1400 struck. He it was who wrought the bas-reliefs which decorate the famous bronze doors of the Baptistry at Florence, upon which he worked between 1405 and 1452-one of which [78] doors it was that Michelangelo said was worthy to adorn the gates of Paradise. These low-reliefs on the gates of the Baptistry were to have a wide effect on the whole of Florentine art. Some eight years younger than Ghiberti, came DONATELLO (1386-1466), raising his great statues of saints, creating his astounding portraits and low-reliefs, and modelling his exquisite busts of childhood with a sense of character, and a pure reference to nature, that proved his Gothic inspiration. This " naturalism " breathed the breath of life into bronze and marble under his cunning of hand ; and his achievement is very Florence in spirit and ideals-slender, lithe, sinewy, energetic, and quick with expression. In him was an aim the very opposite to the classic ideal of antiquity ; and he gave to modern sculpture its inspiration.

Now, it so chanced that there was born in 1401, one Tommaso di Giovanni di Simone Guidi, who was to become an astounding genius in painting by his nickname of MASACCIO-as we should say, " Hulking Tom "-though his all too short life of twenty-seven years (he died in 1428), and the fact that he wrought his genius in fresco upon the walls, make his mighty art little known outside of Florence.

Masaccio apprenticed himself to his art very early as a pupil to Masolino. This MASOLINO (1384-1435) had been under the Giottesque STARNINA, but had rejected the stiffness and stilted action of the Giottesques for a freer naturalness ; indeed, Masolino's Eve, in the Fall of Man at the Brancacci Chapel in Florence, is said to be the first nude female figure painted from the life in modern art. Masolino, however, was unable to rid himself wholly of the mediæval shyness to state the full significance of the human figure. For Masaccio was reserved that mighty first endeavour.

[79] The naturalism in Hulking Tom, Masaccio, aroused by Masolino, was set ablaze by the example in sculpture of Donatello ; and, in the famed Brancacci Chapel of the Church of the Carmine at Florence, the youthful Masaccio wrought those world-important frescoes that became the virile and far-reaching source of inspiration to the whole of that wonderful Florentine achievement in painting during the fourteen-hundreds. Henceforth the golden dreams of the pietistic illustrators gave way to vigour of handling and unflinching communion with nature. Masaccio was to die in his twenty-seventh year ; but those frescoes of his in the Church of the Carmine at Florence became the school for the astounding achievement of the century. Masaccio, by his forthright vision, by his grasp of form, by his mastery of the human figure, and his sense of depth and volume of the pictured thing, thrust forward the artistry of painting, as revealed to Giotto, in as large a stride as had marked the advance of Giotto out of the formality of Byzantinism. In the full dawning, therefore, of the Renaissance of painting in Italy, stands out the burly figure of Masaccio. In Masaccio the sun of the Renaissance has arisen.

Suddenly Masaccio left Florence for Rome, whilst at work upon the frescoes of the Brancacci Chapel, and he went to his death, for he passed away at Rome in 1428, but in his twenty-seventh year.

That so young a man should, in the short span of his years, have achieved a master-work of such astounding power as The Expulsion from Paradise at the Brancacci Chapel of the Church of the Carmine in Florence is one of the wonders of genius. The superb modelling of the nude Adam and Eve, the sense of flesh and life, the reality of the movement, the dramatic rightness and force of [80] gesture and expression, the glowing and mysterious effect of atmosphere, thrust the art of painting forward as by a miracle. The intensity of the sensed thing, the grip of the emotional significance of art, are equalled by the mature skill of hand to utter these subtle significances. Here is no formal illustration of an incident ; but a dramatic transmission into our senses of the tragic intensity of a prodigious art. Through the skilfully created figures, by their action, movement, gesture, and atmosphere, wrought with rare power and cunning of hand, is brought into our sensing the spiritual significance of the greatness of the fall of man. Masaccio, scarce out of his youth, reveals himself a supreme master, gifted with the power to state grandeur and dignity by his arrangements, by his superb draughtmanship and modelling of form, by his consummate selection in gesture, gifted with the skill to do these things in paint as though he were a sculptor of colour, and impelled to his art by a sublime sense of drama. In him is prophecy of the grandeur of Leonardo da Vinci, of the awful sublimity of Michelangelo ; into his hands has been delivered the sceptre that is to make Florence, this city of the lily, the queen of the Italian Renaissance. He took from Giotto the art that had begun to decline through the Giottesques, and he increased its tragic intensity and vigour and truthfulness, and handed it to Italy-a sublime heritage that was to bring to full flower the sombre splendour of Tuscan art. Before his burly figure all insipidity fled ; and in the presence of his majestic genius, at grips with the realities and intensities of life, fragile pietism and the narrow convent ideals were swept away as though they departed into nunneries.

IV
PAOLO UCCELLO
1397 - 1475
TUSCAN SCHOOL
"THE ROUT OF SAN ROMANO " _{Footnote: It has long ago been shown by Mr. H. P. Home that this picture does not represent the Battle of Sant' Egidio.}
(NATIONAL GALLERY)
Niccolo da Tolentino, the leader of the Florentine forces, is represented on horseback directing the attack on the Sienese. He wears a rich damask headdress, his helmet being carried by his armour-bearer. These are the only two persons whose heads are bare.
The second and third of this series of battle pictures are in the Uffizi Gallery at Florence and in the Louvre.
Painted in tempera on wood. 6 ft. h. x 10 ft. 5 in. w. (1.829 x 3.174).br>


[81]

CHAPTER IX

WHICH IS CHIEFLY CONCERNED WITH PERSPECTIVE

DOMENICO VENEZIANO
1400? - 1461

MASACCIO, short as was his life, revealed his art to two painters-whose names are linked together in a murder invented by the tongue of Vasari-DOMENICO VENEZIANO and ANDREA DAL CASTAGNO.

Domenico di Bartolommeo, better known as DOMENICO VENEZIANO, the Venetian, born about 1400 and dying in 1461, had learnt his craft in Venice, where he had received the secret of painting in oils. Thence he went southwards over the mountains into Tuscany, and was working at Perugia in 1438, on the edge of forty, when Cosimo de' Medici called him to Florence. Here he at once came under the thrall of Masaccio's Brancacci frescoes, which were a revelation to him, and caused a marked development in his artistry. Of his few known works, the most famous are the fresco of John the Baptist and St. Francis in S. Croce at Florence, a Madonna and Saints in the Uffizi, and the signed fresco of the Madonna and Child Enthroned, painted in a niche at the Canto de' Carnesecchi in Florence, but which has been removed on to canvas, and belongs to the National Gallery in London.

UCCELLO
1397 - 1475

Domenico Veneziano in turn strongly influenced Paolo di Dono, better known as UCCELLO, his contemporary. [82] Paolo Uccello - nicknamed " Paul of the Birds," from his fondness for them - is famous as being the first Florentine painter who set himself to the conquest of foreshortening and perspective. Indeed, his art teems with the sense of his challenge to the difficulties of this scientific side of the craftsmanship of art. His battle-pieces, of which the Rout of San Romano in tempera on wood at the National Gallery in London, is so fine an example both in its Venetian sense of colour, in its movement, and its scientific exultation in linear perspective and foreshortening, gave him also the scope for his delight in animal forms, even though his science be too insistent. The second of this series of battle-pictures of S. Romano by Uccello is at the Uffizi in Florence, and the third is at the Louvre. Uccello's admiration for the art of Giotto - in his grave sixty years before Uccello was born - is marked throughout his work ; but he advanced his style under the influence of his contemporary, Domenico Veneziano ; and his personal friendship for Donatello and the architect Brunelleschi was not without results on his keen and scientific brain. His sense of colour proved him wise in choosing painting as his chief activity in the arts. But, whilst Donatello influenced Masaccio, and Masaccio and Donatello affected the art of Domenico Veneziano, Uccello does not seem to have been directly greatly influenced by Masaccio himself.