(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:
The Art of the Florentine Masters, From Giotto and Angelico to Lippi and Botticelli
Giotto, a Shepherd boy, was drawing pictures of his father’s sheep on a slate, when Cimabue, the great artist of the time, happened to be passing by. Struck by the boy’s talent, Cimabue obtained permission from his father and took the lad with him to Florence as his apprentice. When the artist was commissioned to decorate the church at Assisi, he entrusted his apprentice with painting the scenes from the life of St Francis which were to adorn the walls of the upper church. In these frescoes the young Giotto proved himself, in the words of Ruskin, ‘a daring naturalist in defiance of tradition, idealism, and formalism’. Besides his work at Assisi, Giotto also worked at Rome, and important frescoes by him, notably ‘The Bewailing of St Francis’ and ‘Herod’s Birthday Feast’, are in S. Croce at Florence, but the greatest and most famous of all his undertakings is the series of frescoes which he painted in the Chapel of the Arena at Padua. The date of this enterprise can be fixed with some certainty because it is known that in 1306 Dante was Giotto’s guest at Padua, and the poet is said to have assisted the painter in his choice of subjects. Petrarch was also the friend of Giotto.
It is interesting to compare Cimabue’s ‘Madonna and Child’ and his pupil’s ‘The Bewailing of St Francis.’ To be fair to the elder artist, we must remember what came before. We have only to look at Margaritone’s altarpiece in the National Gallery to see the oppressive type of Byzantine art, destitute of any feeling for beauty or truth to nature. From whom Cimabue received his training we know not—there was no famous painter before him—but we do know he was held in high esteem by his contemporaries. The ‘Madonna’ he painted for S.Maria Novella aroused such enthusiasm that it was carried to the church preceded by trumpeters and followed by a procession of Florentines. But whatever the advance made by Cimabue, Giotto advanced still further.
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If we study Cimabue’s ‘Madonna’ at the National Gallery we find that his figures, though not entirely lifeless as the heavily gilded Byzantine figures, are wooden,formal, and conventional, while Giotto’s figures have individuality and human feeling, and his groups have a new realism and dramatic vigor. Giotto had a more extended range of color than Cimabue; he showed a preference for gayer and lighter schemes, and he gave a more careful imitation of nature than existed in the works of his predecessors. When we hail Giotto as a daring naturalist, we must think of him in relation to the artists who preceded him, and not to those later painters who gradually learnt to give accurate and complete expression to the truths of nature. Yet his Paduan frescoes show, as it has been well said, ‘the highest powers of the Italian mind and hand at the beginning of the fourteenth century.’ Although a shepherd in his youth, it is strange that his drawings of sheep do not appear correct to modern eyes.
As will be seen from his ‘The Bewailing of St.Francis’, his backgrounds, though in a sense true to nature, are not realistic. His buildings and his trees are far too small, being drawn neither in true perspective nor in correct proportion to the human figures. His hills are bare and jagged cliffs, his trees have only a dozen leaves for foliage; but it was an innovation for fields, trees, and animals to appear at all, and no imperfections in their rendering can rob the painter of the glory of having extended the subject matter of his art. Giotto was the first Gothic painter to depict action, to substitute the dramatic human life for eternal repose of the divine. To his contemporaries his realism must have seemed amazing, and we can understand Boccaccio, after looking at earlier Byzantine paintings, writings enthusiastically in the Decamerone:
Giotto was such a genius that there was nothing a Nature which he could not have represented in such a manner that it not only resembled, but seemed to be, the thing itself.
Giotto was not only a painter: he was also an architect. When he returned to Florence in 1334 the city honored him and itself by appointing him Master of the Works of the Cathedral. Two great architectural works were planned and begun by him at Florence, the West Front of the Cathedral and its detached Campanile or bell tower. The latter exists to this day as a monument of his genius, although its author did not live to see its completion. But its lower courses were completed from Giotto’s design, and he was able with his own hand to carve the first course of its sculpted ornaments, illustrating arts and industries, before he died on January 8, 1337.
Giotto was the first of the great Florentine painters. Among his immediate successors was Andrea Orcagna, whose famous ‘The Coronation of the Virgin’ is in the National Gallery. Orcagna was painter, sculptor, architect, and poet. More of a dreamer than his shrewd practical predecessor, Orcagna did not so much develop the realistic side of Giotto as refine and intensify his psychology. He carried on the Giottosque tradition of truth and simplicity, but drama and action appealed to him less powerfully than the expression of emotion and deep religious feeling. In his masterpieces we are arrested not by any movement, but by the variety and intensity of the feelings expressed in the figures. This religious intensity led to a greater formality than is found in Giotto and to a curious suggestion of a return to Byzantine lack of humanity.
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