On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2)

56. It is time for us to pass to the subject which occupies the largest portion of the work–the History

"of Painting, as developed contemporaneously with her sister, Sculpture, and (like her) under the shadow of the Gothic Architecture, by Giotto and his successors throughout Italy, by Mino, Duccio, and their scholars at Siena, by Orcagna and Fra Angelico da Fiesole at Florence, and by the obscure but interesting primitive school of Bologna, during the fourteenth and the early years of the fifteenth century. The period is one, comparatively speaking, of repose and tranquillity,—the storm sleeps and the winds are still, the currents set in one direction, and we may sail from isle to isle over a sunny sea, dallying with the time, secure of a cloudless sky and of the greetings of innocence and love wheresoever the breeze may waft us. There is in truth a holy purity, an innocent naïveté, a childlike grace and simplicity, a freshness, a fearlessness, an utter freedom from affectation, a yearning after all things truthful, lovely and of good report, in the productions of this early time, which invest them with a charm peculiar in its kind, and which few even of the most perfect works of the maturer era can boast of,—and hence the risk and danger of becoming too passionately attached to them, of losing the power of discrimination, of admiring and imitating their defects as well as their beauties, of running into affectation in seeking after simplicity and into exaggeration in our efforts to be in earnest,—in a word, of forgetting that in art as in human nature, it is the balance, harmony, and co-equal development of Sense, Intellect, and Spirit, which constitute perfection."—Vol. ii., pp. 161-163.

57. To the thousand islands, or how many soever they may be, we shall allow ourselves to be wafted with all willingness, but not in Lord Lindsay's three-masted vessel, with its balancing topmasts of Sense, Intellect, and Spirit. We are utterly tired of the triplicity; and we are mistaken if its application here be not as inconsistent as it is arbitrary. Turning back to the introduction, which we have quoted, the reader will find that while Architecture is there taken for the exponent of Sense, Painting is chosen as the peculiar expression of Spirit. "The painting of Christendom is that of an immortal spirit conversing with its God." But in a note to the first chapter of the second volume, he will be surprised to find painting become a "twin of intellect," and architecture suddenly advanced from a type of sense to a type of spirit:—

"Sculpture and Painting, twins of Intellect, rejoice and breathe freest in the pure ether of Architecture, or Spirit, like Castor or Pollux under the breezy heaven of their father Jupiter."—Vol. ii., p. 14.

58. Prepared by this passage to consider painting either as spiritual or intellectual, his patience may pardonably give way on finding in the sixth letter—(what he might, however, have conjectured from the heading of the third period in the chart of the schools)—that the peculiar prerogative of painting—color, is to be considered as a sensual element, and the exponent of sense, in accordance with a new analogy, here for the first time proposed, between spirit, intellect, and sense, and expression, form, and color. Lord Lindsay is peculiarly unfortunate in his adoptions from previous writers. He has taken this division of art from Fuseli and Reynolds, without perceiving that in those writers it is one of convenience merely, and, even so considered, is as injudicious as illogical. In what does expression consist but in form and color? It is one of the ends which these accomplish, and may be itself an attribute of both. Color may be expressive or inexpressive, like music; form expressive or inexpressive, like words; but expression by itself cannot exist; so that to divide painting into color, form, and expression, is precisely as rational as to divide music into notes, words, and expression. Color may be pensive, severe, exciting, appalling, gay, glowing, or sensual; in all these modes it is expressive: form may be tender or abrupt, mean or majestic, attractive or overwhelming, discomfortable or delightsome; in all these modes, and many more, it is expressive; and if Lord Lindsay's analogy be in anywise applicable to either form or color, we should have color sensual (Correggio), color intellectual (Tintoret), color spiritual (Angelico)—form sensual (French sculpture), form intellectual (Phidias), form spiritual (Michael Angelo). Above all, our author should have been careful how he attached the epithet "sensual" to the element of color—not only on account of the glaring inconsistency with his own previous assertion of the spirituality of painting—(since it is certainly not merely by being flat instead of solid, representative instead of actual, that painting is—if it be—more spiritual than sculpture); but also, because this idea of sensuality in color has had much share in rendering abortive the efforts of the modern German religious painters, inducing their abandonment of its consecrating, kindling, purifying power.

59. Lord Lindsay says, in a passage which we shall presently quote, that the most sensual as well as the most religious painters have always loved the brightest colors. Not so; no painters ever were more sensual than the modern French, who are alike insensible to, and incapable of color—depending altogether on morbid gradation, waxy smoothness of surface, and lusciousness of line, the real elements of sensuality wherever it eminently exists. So far from good color being sensual, it saves, glorifies, and guards from all evil: it is with Titian, as with all great masters of flesh-painting, the redeeming and protecting element; and with the religious painters, it is a baptism with fire, an under-song of holy Litanies. Is it in sensuality that the fair flush opens upon the cheek of Francia's chanting angel,8 until we think it comes, and fades, and returns, as his voice and his harping are louder or lower—or that the silver light rises upon wave after wave of his lifted hair; or that the burning of the blood is seen on the unclouded brows of the three angels of the Campo Santo, and of folded fire within their wings; or that the hollow blue of the highest heaven mantles the Madonna with its depth, and falls around her like raiment, as she sits beneath the throne of the Sistine Judgment? Is it in sensuality that the visible world about us is girded with an eternal iris?—is there pollution in the rose and the gentian more than in the rocks that are trusted to their robing?—is the sea-blue a stain upon its water, or the scarlet spring of day upon the mountains less holy than their snow? As well call the sun itself, or the firmament, sensual, as the color which flows from the one, and fills the other.

60. We deprecate this rash assumption, however, with more regard to the forthcoming portion of the history, in which we fear it may seriously diminish the value of the author's account of the school of Venice, than to the part at present executed. This is written in a spirit rather sympathetic than critical, and rightly illustrates the feeling of early art, even where it mistakes, or leaves unanalyzed, the technical modes of its expression. It will be better, perhaps, that we confine our attention to the accounts of the three men who may be considered as sufficient representatives not only of the art of their time, but of all subsequent; Giotto, the first of the great line of dramatists, terminating in Raffaelle; Orcagna, the head of that branch of the contemplative school which leans towards sadness or terror, terminating in Michael Angelo; and Angelico, the head of the contemplatives concerned with the heavenly ideal, around whom may be grouped first Duccio, and the Sienese, who preceded him, and afterwards Pinturiccio, Perugino, and Leonardo da Vinci.

61. The fourth letter opens in the fields of Vespignano. The circumstances of the finding of Giotto by Cimabue are well known. Vasari's anecdote of the fly painted upon the nose of one of Cimabue's figures might, we think, have been spared, or at least not instanced as proof of study from nature "nobly rewarded." Giotto certainly never either attempted or accomplished any small imitation of this kind; the story has all the look of one of the common inventions of the ignorant for the ignorant; nor, if true, would Cimabue's careless mistake of a black spot in the shape of a fly for one of the living annoyances of which there might probably be some dozen or more upon his panel at any moment, have been a matter of much credit to his young pupil. The first point of any real interest is Lord Lindsay's confirmation of Förster's attribution of the Campo Santo Life of Job, till lately esteemed Giotto's, to Francesco da Volterra. Förster's evidence appears incontrovertible; yet there is curious internal evidence, we think, in favor of the designs being Giotto's, if not the execution. The landscape is especially Giottesque, the trees being all boldly massed first with dark brown, within which the leaves are painted separately in light: this very archaic treatment had been much softened and modified by the Giotteschi before the date assigned to these frescoes by Förster. But, what is more singular, the figure of Eliphaz, or the foremost of the three friends, occurs in a tempera picture of Giotto's in the Academy of Florence, the Ascension, among the apostles on the left; while the face of another of the three friends is again repeated in the "Christ disputing with the Doctors" of the small tempera series, also in the Academy; the figure of Satan shows much analogy to that of the Envy of the Arena chapel; and many other portions of the design are evidently either sketches of this very subject by Giotto himself, or dexterous compilations from his works by a loving pupil. Lord Lindsay has not done justice to the upper division—the Satan before God: it is one of the very finest thoughts ever realized by the Giotteschi. The serenity of power in the principal figure is very noble; no expression of wrath, or even of scorn, in the look which commands the evil spirit. The position of the latter, and countenance, are less grotesque and more demoniacal than is usual in paintings of the time; the triple wings expanded—the arms crossed over the breast, and holding each other above the elbow, the claws fixing in the flesh; a serpent buries its head in a cleft in the bosom, and the right hoof is lifted, as if to stamp.

62. We should have been glad if Lord Lindsay had given us some clearer idea of the internal evidence on which he founds his determination of the order or date of the works of Giotto. When no trustworthy records exist, we conceive this task to be of singular difficulty, owing to the differences of execution universally existing between the large and small works of the painter. The portrait of Dante in the chapel of the Podestá is proved by Dante's exile, in 1302, to have been painted before Giotto was six and twenty; yet we remember no head in any of his works which can be compared with it for carefulness of finish and truth of drawing; the crudeness of the material vanquished by dexterous hatching; the color not only pure, but deep—a rare virtue with Giotto; the eye soft and thoughtful, the brow nobly modeled. In the fresco of the Death of the Baptist, in Santa Croce, which we agree with Lord Lindsay in attributing to the same early period, the face of the musician is drawn with great refinement, and considerable power of rounding surfaces—(though in the drapery may be remarked a very singular piece of archaic treatment: it is warm white, with yellow stripes; the dress itself falls in deep folds, but the striped pattern does not follow the foldings—it is drawn across, as if with a straight ruler).

63. But passing from these frescoes, which are nearly the size of life, to those of the Arena chapel at Padua, erected in 1303, decorated in 1306, which are much smaller, we find the execution proportionably less dexterous. Of this famous chapel Lord Lindsay says—

"nowhere (save in the Duomo of Orvieto) is the legendary history of the Virgin told with such minuteness.

"The heart must indeed be cold to the charms of youthful art that can enter this little sanctuary without a glow of delight. From the roof, with its sky of ultramarine, powdered with stars and interspersed with medallions containing the heads of our Saviour, the Virgin and the Apostles, to the mock paneling of the nave, below the windows, the whole is completely covered with frescoes, in excellent preservation, and all more or less painted by Giotto's own hand, except six in the tribune, which however have apparently been executed from his cartoons....

"These frescoes form a most important document in the history of Giotto's mind, exhibiting all his peculiar merits, although in a state as yet of immature development. They are full of fancy and invention; the composition is almost always admirable, although sometimes too studiously symmetrical; the figures are few and characteristic, each speaking for itself, the impersonation of a distinct idea, and most dramatically grouped and contrasted; the attitudes are appropriate, easy, and natural; the action and gesticulation singularly vivid; the expression is excellent, except when impassioned grief induces caricature:—devoted to the study of Nature as he is, Giotto had not yet learnt that it is suppressed feeling which affects one most. The head of our Saviour is beautiful throughout—that of the Virgin not so good—she is modest, but not very graceful or celestial:—it was long before he succeeded in his Virgins—they are much too matronly: among the accessory figures, graceful female forms occasionally appear, foreshadowing those of his later works at Florence and Naples, yet they are always clumsy about the waist and bust, and most of them are under-jawed, which certainly detracts from the sweetness of the female countenance. His delineation of the naked is excellent, as compared with the works of his predecessors, but far unequal to what he attained in his later years,—the drapery, on the contrary, is noble, majestic, and statuesque; the coloring is still pale and weak,—it was long ere he improved in this point; the landscape displays little or no amendment upon the Byzantine; the architecture, that of the fourteenth century, is to the figures that people it in the proportion of dolls' houses to the children that play with them,—an absurdity long unthinkingly acquiesced in, from its occurrence in the classic bas-reliefs from which it had been traditionally derived;—and, finally, the lineal perspective is very fair, and in three of the compositions an excellent effect is produced by the introduction of the same background with varied dramatis personæ, reminding one of Retszch's illustrations of Faust. The animals too are always excellent, full of spirit and character."—Vol. ii., pp. 183-199.

64. This last characteristic is especially to be noticed. It is a touching proof of the influence of early years. Giotto was only ten years old when he was taken from following the sheep. For the rest, as we have above stated, the manipulation of these frescoes is just as far inferior to that of the Podestà chapel as their dimensions are less; and we think it will be found generally that the smaller the work the more rude is Giotto's hand. In this respect he seems to differ from all other masters.

"It is not difficult, gazing on these silent but eloquent walls, to repeople them with the group once, as we know-five hundred years ago—assembled within them,—Giotto intent upon his work, his wife Ciuta admiring his progress, and Dante, with abstracted eye, alternately conversing with his friend and watching the gambols of the children playing on the grass before the door. It is generally affirmed that Dante, during this visit, inspired Giotto with his taste for allegory, and that the Virtues and Vices of the Arena were the first fruits of their intercourse; it is possible, certainly, but I doubt it,—allegory was the universal language of the time, as we have seen in the history of the Pisan school."—Vol. ii., pp. 199, 200.

It ought to have been further mentioned, that the representation of the Virtues and Vices under these Giottesque figures continued long afterwards. We find them copied, for instance, on the capitals of the Ducal Palace at Venice, with an amusing variation on the "Stultitia," who has neither Indian dress nor club, as with Giotto, but is to the Venetians sufficiently distinguished by riding a horse.

65. The notice of the frescoes at Assisi consists of little more than an enumeration of the subjects, accompanied by agreeable translations of the traditions respecting St. Francis, embodied by St. Buonaventura. Nor have we space to follow the author through his examination of Giotto's works at Naples and Avignon. The following account of the erection of the Campanile of Florence is too interesting to be omitted:–

"Giotto was chosen to erect it, on the ground avowedly of the universality of his talents, with the appointment of Capomaestro, or chief architect of the Cathedral and its dependencies, a yearly salary of one hundred gold florins, and the privilege of citizenship, and under the special understanding that he was not to quit Florence. His designs being approved of, the republic passed a decree in the spring of 1334, that 'the Campanile should be built so as to exceed in magnificence, height and excellence of workmanship whatever in that kind had been achieved of old by the Greeks and Romans in the time of their utmost power and greatness—"della loro più florida potenza."' The first stone was laid accordingly, with great pomp, on the 18th of July following, and the work prosecuted with such vigor and with such costliness and utter disregard of expense, that a citizen of Verona, looking on, exclaimed that the republic was taxing her strength too far,—that the united resources of two great monarchs would be insufficient to complete it; a criticism which the Signoria resented by confining him for two months in prison, and afterwards conducting him through the public treasury, to teach him that the Florentines could build their whole city of marble, and not one poor steeple only, were they so inclined.

"Giotto made a model of his proposed structure, on which every stone was marked, and the successive courses painted red and white, according to his design, so as to match with the Cathedral and Baptistery; this model was of course adhered to strictly during the short remnant of his life, and the work was completed in strict conformity to it after his death, with the exception of the spire, which, the taste having changed, was never added. He had intended it to be one hundred braccia, or one hundred and fifty feet high."—Vol. ii., pp. 247-249.

The deficiency of the spire Lord Lindsay does not regret:—

"Let the reader stand before the Campanile, and ask himself whether, with Michael Scott at his elbow, or Aladdin's lamp in his hand, he would supply the deficiency? I think not."—p. 38.

We have more faith in Giotto than our author—and we will reply to his question by two others—whether, looking down upon Florence from the hill of San Miniato, his eye rested oftener and more affectionately on the Campanile of Giotto, or on the simple tower and spire of Santa Maria Novella?—and whether, in the backgrounds of Perugino, he would willingly substitute for the church spires invariably introduced, flat-topped campaniles like the unfinished tower of Florence?

66. Giotto sculptured with his own hand two of the bas-reliefs of this campanile, and probably might have executed them all. But the purposes of his life had been accomplished; he died at Florence on the 8th of January, 1337. The concluding notice of his character and achievement is highly valuable.

67. "Painting indeed stands indebted to Giotto beyond any of her children. His history is a most instructive one. Endowed with the liveliest fancy, and with that facility which so often betrays genius, and achieving in youth a reputation which the age of Methuselah could not have added to, he had yet the discernment to perceive how much still remained to be done, and the resolution to bind himself (as it were) to Nature's chariot wheel, confident that she would erelong emancipate and own him as her son. Calm and unimpassioned, he seems to have commenced his career with a deliberate survey of the difficulties he had to encounter and of his resources for the conflict, and then to have worked upon a system steadily and perseveringly, prophetically sure of victory. His life was indeed one continued triumph,—and no conqueror ever mounted to the Capitol with a step more equal and sedate. We find him, at first, slowly and cautiously endeavoring to infuse new life into the traditional compositions, by substituting the heads, attitudes, and drapery of the actual world for the spectral forms and conventional types of the mosaics and the Byzantine painters,—idealizing them when the personages represented were of higher mark and dignity, but in none ever outstepping truth. Advancing in his career, we find year by year the fruits of continuous unwearied study in a consistent and equable contemporary improvement in all the various minuter though most important departments of his art, in his design, his drapery, his coloring, in the dignity and expression of his men and in the grace of his women—asperities softened down, little graces unexpectedly born and playing about his path, as if to make amends for the deformity of his actual offspring—touches, daily more numerous, of that nature which makes the world akin—and ever and always a keen yet cheerful sympathy with life, a playful humor mingling with his graver lessons, which affects us the more as coming from one who, knowing himself an object personally of disgust and ridicule, could yet satirize with a smile.

"Finally, throughout his works, we are conscious of an earnest, a lofty, a religious aim and purpose, as of one who felt himself a pioneer of civilization in a newly-discovered world, the Adam of a new Eden freshly planted in the earth's wilderness, a mouthpiece of God and a preacher of righteousness to mankind.—And here we must establish a distinction very necessary to be recognized before we can duly appreciate the relative merits of the elder painters in this, the most important point in which we can view their character. Giotto's genius, however universal, was still (as I have repeatedly observed) Dramatic rather than Contemplative,—a tendency in which his scholars and successors almost to a man resembled him. Now, just as in actual life—where, with a few rare exceptions, all men rank under two great categories according as Imagination or Reason predominates in their intellectual character—two individuals may be equally impressed with the truths of Christianity and yet differ essentially in its outward manifestation, the one dwelling in action, the other in contemplation, the one in strife, the other in peace, the one (so to speak) in hate, the other in love, the one struggling with devils, the other communing with angels, yet each serving as a channel of God's mercies to man, each (we may believe) offering Him service equally acceptable in His sight—even so shall we find it in art and with artists; few in whom the Dramatic power predominates will be found to excel in the expression of religious emotions of the more abstract and enthusiastic cast, even although men of indisputably pure and holy character themselves; and vice versâ, few of the more Contemplative but will feel bewildered and at fault, if they descend from their starry region of light into the grosser atmosphere that girdles in this world of action. The works of artists are their minds' mirror; they cannot express what they do not feel; each class dwells apart and seeks its ideal in a distinct sphere of emotion,—their object is different, and their success proportioned to the exclusiveness with which they pursue that object. A few indeed there have been in all ages, monarchs of the mind and types of our Saviour, who have lived a twofold existence of action and contemplation in art, in song, in politics, and in daily life; of these have been Abraham, Moses, David, and Cyrus in the elder world—Alfred, Charlemagne, Dante, and perhaps Shakespeare, in the new,—and in art, Niccola Pisano, Leonardo da Vinci and Michael Angelo. But Giotto, however great as the patriarch of his peculiar tribe, was not of these few, and we ought not therefore to misapprehend him, or be disappointed at finding his Madonnas (for instance) less exquisitely spiritual than the Sienese, or those of Fra Angelico and some later painters, who seem to have dipped their pencils in the rainbow that circles the throne of God,—they are pure and modest, but that is all; on the other hand, where his Contemplative rivals lack utterance, he speaks most feelingly to the heart in his own peculiar language of Dramatic composition—he glances over creation with the eye of love, all the charities of life follow in his steps, and his thoughts are as the breath of the morning. A man of the world, living in it and loving it, yet with a heart that it could not spoil nor wean from its allegiance to God—'non meno buon Cristiano che eccellente pittore,' as Vasari emphatically describes him—his religion breathes of the free air of heaven rather than the cloister, neither enthusiastic nor superstitious, but practical, manly and healthy—and this, although the picturesque biographer of S. Francis!"—Vol. ii., pp. 260-264.