The Birth Of Modern Painting

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

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While Giotto was laying the foundations of the art of Florence, another school of painting arose in the quiet hill city of Sienna. Its founder, Duccio di Buoninsegna, is said to have been so much influenced by the Byzantine style that he has been called ‘the last of the great artists of antiquity’, as opposed to Giotto, the ‘father of modern painting’. It is not easy to understand this comment if one looks at Duccio’s pictures, one of the most famous of which—‘The Kiss of Judas’. In spite of their color and their gilding the figures are human and life-like, and the picture reflects human emotion entirely in accord with the spirit of St. Francis. There is so much sweetness and grace in the paintings of Duccio and his fellows that they have been called the first lyric painters of modern art.

Among his younger contemporaries the most gifted was Simone Martini (c.1283-1344), whose work has the pensive devoutness that marks Siennese painting and a gay decorative charm. There is a picture by him at Oxford, and another in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, but perhaps his greatest achievement is the series of frescoes at Avignon. These were once attributed to Giotto, but are now recognized to have been the work of Simone Martini and his school. Among other Siennese artists the brothers Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti are noted for the dramatic vigor in their work.

In the Florentine painting of the fifteenth century, the impulse towards naturalism, first given by Giotto, branched out in two opposite directions. One was psychic, the other physical. The expression of intense and strong emotion, together with action and movement was the aim of one school; another strove after realistic probability and correctness of representation. This second school, pushed on by its love of truth, attacked and vanquished one by one various problems of technique. The approach to a closer representation of the appearance of realities involved three main inquiries: (1) the study of perspective, linear and aerial; (2) the study of anatomy, of nude bodies in repose and action; and (3) the detailed truth of facts in objects animate and inanimate.

The Birth Of Modern Painting (continued)