Giotto would require a whole lecture to himself, were I to attempt an account of what he did at Padua, Florence, Rome, and Naples. His chefs-d’œuvre are said to be in Florence, at the Church of St. Croce. No less than four chapels in this church were decorated by him; but, alas! there is very little left. Time, whitewash, and the restorers, have done their work pretty effectually. Still, the mere outlines of many of the groups show that these works may very well have been the finest that the master ever produced.
I have seen the Arena Chapel at Padua, which is literally covered with Giotto’s frescoes. It is many years since I was there, and very possibly, were I to revisit the chapel, I might form a different opinion, but at the time I was disappointed with the paintings, which appeared to me weak in design and feeble in execution.
When we recollect that Giotto had the customs and prejudices of eight centuries to contend against, no antiques at hand to guide and purify his taste, no great predecessors to imitate, we cannot help paying homage to the genius of the man who produced the St. Francis series of frescoes at Assisi, and numberless other works, both at Florence and elsewhere. I think that the true explanation of his wonderful success is to be found in the old sheep-drawing anecdote. It shows that even as a shepherd boy he felt that nature was the foundation of art. Instead of working by mere routine, like the Byzantine painters, or, like his master Cimabue, endeavoring to improve in the same direction, he went direct to nature both for his compositions, his action, and his drapery.
To us it may appear the simplest thing in the world to make studies from nature for our pictures, but in the time of Giotto such a course would be unusual, and would be placed in the category of happy thoughts.
It may be argued that if he had lived in the tenth or eleventh century instead of the fourteenth, he would never have been allowed by his patrons to attempt such daring innovations. He must have remained in the old beaten track. This is no doubt true enough, and there may have been during the dark ages a dozen embryo Giottos whose genius had been strangled by ecclesiastical leading-strings; but we are none the less indebted to the man who gave the death-blow to the barbarous mechanical craft which for long centuries had usurped the place of art.
Although anxious to do full justice to Giotto as a great art reformer, I must admit that he had some very unpleasant peculiarities which were blindly adopted, and, indeed, exaggerated, by many of his followers. The most repulsive of these peculiarities is the sameness and meanness of his heads. In the only specimen we have of his in the National Gallery this fault is not conspicuous, but it is very noticeable in the pictures of his school. Indeed, the family likeness which pervades all the heads in the large Orcagna is almost ludicrous. In Giottesque heads the eyes are a great deal too close together and never fairly open. The nose is thin and pinched, and the jaws weak and shapeless. The type, in short, is diametrically the opposite of the antique, and is (it must be confessed) a very ignoble one.
The constant recurrence of this mean type is more apparent in his later than in his early works, and it is probable that many of these stereotyped heads were executed by his assistants, but nevertheless Giotto is answerable for them.
Italian sculpture, as well as Italian painting, is greatly indebted to Giotto, for it was he who designed the reliefs for the bronze gates of the baptistery at Florence. These designs were executed in masterly style by Andrea Pisano, and may be looked upon as the starting-point of Italian sculpture. In fact, it is as the father of modern art rather than as a perfect painter that the name of Giotto ought to be held in reverence. Many of his successors of the next century, whom I shall mention in the course of my lectures, approached much nearer to perfection than did Giotto. The composition of their pictures is less archaic, the heads have more individual character and are much better drawn; but we ought always to bear in mind, that had Giotto never lived, we should never have had a Masaccio, a Filippo Lippi, or a Beato Angelico, and probably neither a Leonardo nor a Raffaelle.
Louis Quatorze is reported to have said: “L’etat c’est moi”; and Giotto might with equal truth have declared: “L’art Romanesque c’est moi,” so all-pervading was his influence. Besides the works of his immediate followers, such as Taddeo Gaddi and Orcagna, Italy abounds with Giottesque frescoes, whose authors are unknown, or at least doubtful.
The most important of these nameless works are the large frescoes which cover the walls of the Capella degli Spagnuoli, in Sta. Maria Novella at Florence. When I first saw these frescoes they were ascribed to Taddeo Gaddi and Simone Memmi of Siena; but modern critics have justly, I think, pronounced against this authorship. They appeared to me to be of a later date, but I may have been misled by the disgraceful way in which they have been retouched.
This retouching, or rather repainting, has been the ruin of many of the early frescoes, and it is most extraordinary that in Italy (of all places in the world) such barbarous mangling should ever have been allowed. The real culprits are not the obscure bunglers who did the work, but the ignorant monks or town councillors who employed them.
These Sta. Maria Novella frescoes are very characteristic of the allegorical mania of the Romanesque period. One of them, we are told, is meant to represent the “Wisdom of the Church,” but the allegory is so obscure and the component parts so heterogeneous, that with the best intentions it is all but impossible to understand the painter’s meaning. Why should Grammar have a globe in her hand? and why should Logic have a serpent under her veil? What has Abraham done that he should be associated with arithmetic? and why should John of Damascus (who, for some occult reason, typifies Hope) be mending his pen? If the strange jumble in this fresco is bewildering, what shall we say to the companion fresco which represents “the activity of the Church”? A dozen or more different centres of activity are in full play simultaneously. The faithful are portrayed in one part of the fresco as men and women, and in another part as a flock of sheep. The Dominicanes, or Dominicans, are playfully represented as black and white dogs, who are defending the sheep against wolves. St. Dominic himself is preaching against heretics, who are entreating pardon and burning their books; but it is hopeless to give an idea of the confusion of imagery, of the blending of piety with punning in this extraordinary fresco. If I again refer in the course of my lectures to the Romanesque allegories, it is not that I am fascinated by them, but because they are so numerous and so typical of the period that it is impossible to ignore them.
It would, of course, be unjust to blame the artists for these allegories, or for the numerous “Inferno” pictures. They probably had to execute and make the best of the subjects that were given them. Dante may very likely be answerable for much of the questionable taste of the fourteenth century.
I shall endeavor, in my next lecture, to steer a middle course between the modern blind adoration of the fifteenth century work, and the cynical Philistinism which can discover