The Birth Of Modern Painting

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

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In the expression of feeling, the most famous follower of Fra Angelico was Fra Filippo Lippi, but if unable to attain the etheral spirituality of Angelico his art was full of humanity and delicacy. His Madonnas belong to Florence rather than to heaven and reveal the painter’s fine feeling for feminine beauty more obviously than his piety. He was a genial painter, and in his comfortable satisfaction with the things of this life he shared with Angelico a love of flowers. ‘No one draws such lilies or such daisies as Lippi,’ wrote Ruskin. ‘Botticelli beat him afterwards in roses, but never in lilies.’

Lippi’s geniality is very evident in his ‘Annunciation’. The figures are human, the scene is homely, characteristics generally suggestive of the Dutch painters of a much later generation.

Fra Angelico and Fra Lippi stand for the imaginative development that followed the death of Giotto. In the other direction, the first great advance in the rendering of physical nature is found in the painting of Paolo Uccello, who first introduced perspective into pictures. Uccello was far more interested in the technical problems of foreshortening and perspective than in anything else. Uccello represents the scientific spirit in the air of the Florence of Cosmo de Medici, where not only artists, but mathematicians, anatomists, and great scholars were congregated. Among his achievements must be reckoned the recommencement of profane painting by his invention of the battle picture, a subject in which he had no predecessor and no successor till a century later. His early battle piece, the ‘Sant Egidio’, amuses us by the rocking horse appearance of the horses. In his absorption with technique, Uccello was indifferent then to realistic accuracy. Truths of color did not interest him—he painted horses red. The third dimension in space, which Giotto could only suggest experimentally and symbolically, was conquered by Uccello, who clearly separated the planes in which his figures move and have their being. Roses, oranges, and hedges were drawn with botanical precision, and no pains were spared to draw branches and even leaves in correct perspective. The splendid realism to which Uccello ultimately attained is best represented by the intensely alive animal and its rider. Uccello’s equestrian portrait of the English mercenary John Hawkwood in the cathedral of Florence is a milestone in the history of art.

The Birth Of Modern Painting (continued)