Book: The Old Masters and Their Pictures

S >> Sarah Tytler >> The Old Masters and Their Pictures




It is known that Giotto, together with his friend Dante, died before
this--Giotto's last great work--was finally constructed by Giotto's
pupil, Taddeo Gaddi, and that therefore neither of the friends could
have really looked on 'Giotto's Tower,' though Italian Ciceroni point
out, and strangers love to contemplate, the very stone on which 'Grim
Dante' sat and gazed with admiration in the calm light of evening on the
enduring memorial of the painter.

Giotto died in the year 1336 or 1337, his biographer adds, 'no less a
good Christian than an excellent painter,' and in token of his faith he
painted one crucifixion in which he introduced his own figure 'kneeling
in an attitude of deep devotion and contrition at the foot of the
Cross.' The good taste of such an act has been questioned, so has been
the practice which painted the Virgin Mother now as a brown Italian, now
as a red and white Fleming, and again as a flaxen-haired German or as a
swarthy Spaniard, and draped her and all the minor figures in the
grandest drama the world ever saw--as well as the characters in older
Scripture histories, in the Florentine, Venetian, and Antwerp fashions
of the day. The defence of the practice is, that the Bible is for
universal time, that its Virgin Mother, its apostles and saints, were
types of other mothers and of other heroes running down the stream of
history; that even the one central and holy figure, if He may be
represented at all, as the Divine brother of all humanity, may be clad
not inaptly in the garments of all. It appears to me that there is
reason in this answer, and that viewed in its light the criticism which
constantly demands historic fidelity is both carping and narrow. I do
not mean, however, to underrate historic accuracy in itself, or to
depreciate that longing for completeness in every particular, which
drives our modern painters to the East to study patiently for months the
aspects of nature under its Oriental climate, with its peculiar people
and animals, its ancient costumes and architecture.

Giotto was buried with suitable honours by a city which, like the rest
of the nation, has magnified its painters amongst its great men, in the
church of Santa Maria del Fiore, where his master Cimabue had been
buried. Lorenzo de' Medici afterwards placed over Giotto's tomb his
effigy in marble.

In chronicling ancient art I must here diverge a little. I have already
mentioned how closely painting was in the beginning allied with working
in metals as well as with sculpture and architecture. It is thus
necessary to write of a magnificent work in metal, the study and
admiration of generations of painters, begun in the life of Giotto, and
completed in two divisions, extending over a period of nearly a hundred
years. We shall proceed to deal with the first division, and recur to
the second a little later.

The old Italian cities. They were then the great merchant cities of the
world, more or less republican in their constitution. They stood to the
citizens, who rarely left their walls, at once as peculiar possessions
and as native countries rather than as cities alone, while they excited
all the patriotism, pride, and love that were elsewhere expended on a
whole country--which after all was held as belonging largely to its king
and nobles. The old Italian merchant guilds, and wealthy merchants as
individuals, vied with each other in signalizing their good citizenship
by presenting--as gifts identified with their names--to their cities,
those palace buildings, chapels, paintings, gates, which are the delight
of the world to this day. It was a merchant guild which thought happily
of giving to Florence the bronze gates to the baptistery of San Giovanni
or St John the Baptist, attached to the Cathedral. After some
competition the gates were intrusted to Andrea Pisano, one of a great
group of painters, sculptors, and architects linked together and named,
as so often happened in Italy, for their place of birth, Pisa. Andrea
executed a series of beautiful reliefs from the life of John the
Baptist, which were cast in 1330, gilt, and placed in the centre
door-way. I shall leave the rest of the gates, still more exquisitely
wrought, till their proper time, only observing that the Pisani group of
carvers and founders are supposed to have attained their extraordinary
superiority in skill and grace, even over such a painter as Giotto, in
consequence of one of them, Nicola Pisano, having given his attention to
the study of some ancient Greek sarcophagi preserved at Pisa.

Passing for a while from the gates of St John of Florence, we come back
to painting and a painter, and with them to another monument--in itself
very noble and curious in its mouldering age, of the old Italians' love
to their cities. Andrea Orcagna, otherwise known as Andrea di Cione, one
of a brotherhood of painters, was born in Florence about 1315. His
greatest works are in the Campo Santa of Pisa.

This wonderful 'holy field' is a grand legacy, so far as dilapidation,
alas, will let it be, of the old painters. Originally a place of burial,
though no longer used as such, it is enclosed by high walls and an
arcade, something like the cloisters of a cathedral or college running
round, and having on the north and east sides chapels where masses for
the dead were celebrated. The space in the centre was filled with earth
brought from the Holy Land by the merchant ships of Pisa. It is covered
with turf, having tall cypress-trees at the corners, and a little cross
in the centre. The arcade is pierced with sixty-two windows, and
contains on its marble pavement hundreds of monuments--among them the
Greek sarcophagi studied by Nicola Pisano. But the great distinction of
the Campo Santa (of which there are many photographs) are the walls
opposite the windows of the arcade painted with Scriptural subjects by
artists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, for the decoration of
the walls was continued at intervals, during two hundred years. The
havoc wrought by time and damp has been terrible; not only are the
pictures faded and discoloured, but of the earliest only mutilated
fragments, 'here an arm and there a head,' remain. Giotto's
illustrations of the book of Job have thus perished. Still Orcagna's
work has partially escaped, and left us indications of what it was in
his and its youth, when Michael Angelo and Raphael did not disdain to
borrow from it in design and arrangement. Dean Alford has thus described
Orcagna's mournful, thoughtful 'Triumph of Death:'

'The picture is one of crowded action, and contains very many
personages. The action may be supposed to begin in the lower corner on
the right hand. There we see what appears to be a wedding-party seated
in festivity under a grove of orange-trees laden with fruit. Over two of
them a pair entertaining them with merry strains. But close to them on
the left comes swooping down on bats' wings, and armed with the
inevitable scythe, the genius of Death. Her wild hair streams in the
wind, her bosom is invulnerable, being closed in a trellised armour of
steel. Beneath her, on the ground, are a heap of corpses, shown by their
attire to be the great and wealthy of the world. Three winged figures,
two fiends and one angel, are drawing souls, in the form of children,
out of the mouths of three of these corpses. Above, the air is full of
flying spirits, angels and demons: the former beautiful and saintly, the
latter hideous and bestial. Some are dragging, or bearing upwards, human
souls: others are on their way to fetch them from the heaps of dead:
others, again, are flying about apparently without aim. Further yet to
the left, a company of wretched ones, lame and in rags, are invoking
Death with outstretched arms to come to their relief; but she sweeps by
and heeds them not.

'Dividing one half of the picture from the other, is a high range of
rocks, terminating in a fiery mountain, into which the demons are
casting the unhappy souls which they have carried off. Beyond that seems
to be a repetition of the same lesson respecting Death in another form.
A party of knights and dames are issuing on horseback from a mountain
pass. In the left hand of the picture there lie in their path three
corpses in coffins, with coronets on their heads. One is newly dead; on
the second, decay has begun its work; the third is reduced to a
grinning skeleton. The impression produced on the gay party by the sight
is very various. Some look on carelessly; one holds his nose in disgust;
one, a lady jewelled and crowned, leans her head on her hand in solemn
thought. Above, on a rising ground, an aged monk (it is said, Saint
Macarius) is holding a scroll, and pointing out to passengers the moral
of the sight which meets them. The path winds up a hill crowned with a
church, and by its side at various points are hermits sitting in calm
security, or following peaceful occupations. One of them is milking a
doe; another is reading; a third is calmly contemplating from a distance
the valley of Death. About them are various animals and birds. The idea
evidently intended to be conveyed is that deliverance from the fear of
death is to be found not in gaiety and dissipation, but in contemplation
and communion with God.

'Such is the wonderful fresco, and the execution is as wonderful as the
conception. Belonging as the painter did to a rude and early period of
art, he yet had the power of endowing his figures with both majesty and
tenderness of expression.'

The Last Judgment is no less solemn and sad, with hope tempering its
sadness. Mrs Jameson's note of it is: 'Above, in the centre, Christ and
the Virgin are throned in separate glories. He turns to the left,
towards the condemned, while he uncovers the wound in his side, and
raises his right arm with a menacing gesture, his countenance full of
majestic wrath. The Virgin, on the right of her Son, is the picture of
heavenly mercy, and, as if terrified at the words of eternal
condemnation, she turns away. On either side are ranged the Prophets of
the Old Testament, the Apostles and other saints, severe, solemn,
dignified figures. Angels, holding the instruments of the Passion, hover
over Christ and the Virgin; under them is a group of archangels. The
archangel Michael stands in the midst holding a scroll in each hand;
immediately before him another archangel, supposed to represent Raphael,
the guardian angel of humanity, cowers down, shuddering, while two
others sound the awful trumpets of doom. Lower down is the earth where
men are seen rising from their graves; armed angels direct them to the
right and left. Here is seen King Solomon, who, whilst he rises, seems
doubtful to which side he should turn; here a hypocritical monk, whom an
angel draws back by the hair from the host of the youth in a gay and
rich costume, whom another angel leads away to Paradise. There is
wonderful and even terrible power of expression in some of the heads;
and it is said that among them are many portraits of contemporaries, but
unfortunately no circumstantial traditions as to particular figures have
reached us.'

One of Orcagna's altar-pieces, that of 'the coronation of the Virgin,'
containing upwards of a hundred figures, and with the colouring still
rich, is in our National Gallery. As an architect, Orcagna designed the
famous Loggia de' Lanzi of the grand ducal palace at Florence.

Now I must take you back to the bronze gates of the Baptistery in their
triumphant completion nearly a hundred years after the first gate was
executed by Andrea Pisano. I should have liked, but for our limits, to
tell in full the legend of the election of Lorenzo Ghiberti, the
step-son of a goldsmith, and skilled in chasing and enamelling, to
design the second gate; when yet a lad of twenty-three, how he and two
other young men, one of them still younger than Ghiberti, were declared
the most promising competitors in the trial for the work; how the last
two voluntarily withdrew from the contest, magnanimously proclaiming
Lorenzo Ghiberti their superior; how all the three lived to be famous,
the one as a founder in metal, the others as an architect and a
sculptor, and remained sworn brothers in art till death.

Lorenzo Ghiberti has left us an expression of the feeling with which he
set about his task, an expression so suggestive that, even had we no
other indication, it is enough to stamp the true and tender nature of
the man. He prepared for his achievement 'with infinite diligence and
love'--the words deserve to be pondered over. He took at least
twenty-two years to his work, receiving for it eleven hundred florins.
He chose his subjects from the life and death of the Lord, working them
out in twenty panels, ten on each side of the folding doors, and below
these were eight panels containing full-length figures of the four
evangelists and four doctors of the Latin Church, with a complete border
of fruit and foliage, having heads of prophets and sibyls interspersed.
So entire was the satisfaction the superb gate gave, that Lorenzo was
not merely loaded with praise, he received a commission to design and
cast a third and central gate which should surpass the others, that were
thenceforth to be the side entrances.

For his second gate Lorenzo Ghiberti repaired to the Old Testament for
subjects, beginning with the creation and ending with the meeting of
Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, and represented them in ten compartments
enclosed in a rich border of fruit and foliage, with twenty-four
full-length figures of the Hebrew heroes and prophets, clearly and
delicately designed and finished, occupying corresponding niches. This
crowning gate engaged the founder upwards of eighteen years--forty-nine
years are given as the term of the work of both the gates.

The single defect which is found in those marvellous gates--left to us
as a testimony of what the life-long devotion of genius could
produce--is that they abound floridly both in ornament and action, in
place of being severely simple and restrained according to the classical
standard.

Michael Angelo called these gates 'worthy to be the gates of Paradise,'
and they are still one of the glories of Florence. Casts of the gates
are to be found in the School for Art at Kensington, and at the Crystal
Palace.

A young village boy learned to draw and model from Ghiberti's gates. He
in his turn was to create in the Brancacci Chapel of the Church of the
Carmine at Florence a school of painters scarcely less renowned and
powerful in its effects than that produced by the works in the Campo
Santa. You will find the Italian painters not unfrequently known by
nicknames, quite as often by their father's trades as by their father's
surnames, and still oftener by the town which was their place of birth
or nurture. This Tom village birth-place, was commonly called Masaccio,
short for Tomasaccio, 'hulking Tom,' as I have heard it translated, on
account of his indifferent, slovenly habits. I think there is a
tradition that he entered a studio in Florence as a colour boy, and
electrified the painter and his scholars, by _brownie_ like freaks of
painting at their unfinished work, in their absence, better than any of
his masters, and by the dexterity with which he perpetrated the frolic
of putting the facsimile of a fly on one of the faces on the easels. His
end was a tragic conclusion to such light comedy. At the age of
twenty-six, he quitted Florence for Rome so suddenly that he left his
finest frescoes unfinished. It was said that he was summoned thither by
the Pope. At Rome, where little or nothing of Masaccio's life is known,
he died shortly afterwards, not without a suspicion of his having been
poisoned.

A curious anecdote exists of the identification of the time when he
forsook Florence to meet his death in Rome. Just as we have read, that
the period of the death of Massinger the dramatist has been settled by
an entry in an old parish register, 'died, Philip Massinger a stranger,'
so there has been found some quaint equivalent to a modern tax-paper
which had been delivered at the dwelling of Masaccio when the word
'gone' was written down.

There is a further tradition--not very probable under the
circumstances--that Masaccio is buried, without name or stone, under the
Brancacci Chapel. Be that as it may, he very early rose to eminence,
surpassing all his predecessors in drawing and colouring, and he
combined with those acquirements such animation and variety of
expression in his characters, that it was said of him 'he painted souls
as well as bodies,' while his invention was not less bold and fresh.

It is difficult to indicate Masaccio's pictures because some of them
have been repainted and destroyed. As to those in the Brancacci Chapel
from the life of St Peter, (with the exception of two,) considerable
confusion has arisen as to which are Masaccio's, and which belong to
his scholar Filippino Lippi. The fresco which Masaccio left unfinished,
that of the Apostles Peter and Paul raising a dead youth (from
traditional history), was finished by Lippi. In the fresco of Peter
baptizing the converts, generally attributed to Masaccio, there is a lad
who has thrown off his garments, and stands shivering with cold, whose
figure, according to authority, formed an epoch in art. Lionardo da
Vinci, Michael Angelo, Andrea del Sarto, Fra Bartolommeo, all studied
their art in this chapel. Raphael borrowed the grand figure of St Paul
preaching at Athens in one of the cartoons, from one of Masaccio's or
Filippo Lippi's frescoes. Masaccio's excellence as an artist, reached at
an immature age, is very remarkable.

I have come to the last and probably the best appreciated among modems
of the early Italian painters. Fra Angelico da Fiesole, the gentle
devout monk whom Italians called '_Il Beato_,' the Blessed, and who
probably did receive the distinction of beatification, a distinction
only second in the Roman Catholic Church to that of canonization. He was
born at the lovely little mountain-town of Fiesole near Florence, 1387,
and his worldly name, which he bore only till his twenty-first year, was
Guido Petri de Mugello. In his youth, with his gift already recognized,
so that he might well have won ease and honour in the world, he entered
the Dominican Convent of St Mark, Florence, for what he deemed the good
and peace of his soul. He seldom afterwards left it, and that only as
directed by his convent superior, or summoned by the Pope. He was a man
devoid of personal ambition, pure, humble, and meek. When offered the
Archbishopric of Florence as a tribute to his sanctity, he declined it
on account of his unworthiness for the office. He would not work for
money, and only painted at the command of his prior. He began his
painting with fasting and work, he steadfastly refused to make any
alteration in the originals. It is said that he was found dead at his
easel with a completed picture before him. It is not wonderful, that
from such a man should come one side of the perfection of that idealism
which Giotto had begun. Fra Angelico's angels, saints, Saviour, and
Virgin are more divinely calm, pure, sweet, endowed with a more exulting
saintliness, a more immortal youth and joy, and a more utter
self-abnegation and sympathetic tenderness than are to be found in the
saints and the angels, the Saviour and the Virgin of other painters.
Neither is it surprising that Fra Angelico's defects, besides that of
the bad drawing which shows more in his large than in his small
pictures, are those of a want of human knowledge, power, and freedom.
His wicked--even his more earthly-souled characters, are weak and faulty
in action. What should the reverent and guileless dreamer know, unless
indeed by inspiration of the rude conflicts, the fire and fury of human
passions intensified in the malice and anguish of devils? But Fra
Angelico's singular successes far transcend his failures. In addition to
the sublime serenity and positive radiance of expression which he could
impart to his heads, his notions of grouping and draping were full of
grace, sometimes of splendour and magnificence. In harmony with his
happy temperament and fortunes, he was fond of gay yet delicate colours
'like spring flowers,' and used a profusion of gold ornaments which do
not seem out of keeping in his pictures. The most of Fra Angelico's
pictures are in Florence--the best in his own old convent of St Mark,
where he lovingly adorned not only chapter-hall and court, but the cells
of his brother friars. A crucifix with adoring saints worshipping their
crucified Saviour is regarded as his masterpiece in St Mark's. A famous
coronation of the Virgin, which Fra Angelico painted for a church in his
native town, and which is now in the Louvre, Paris, is thus described by
Mrs Jameson: 'It represents a throne under a rich Gothic canopy, to
which there is an ascent of nine steps; on the highest kneels the
Virgin, veiled, her hands crossed on her bosom. She is clothed in a red
tunic, a blue robe over it, and a royal mantle with a rich border
flowing down behind. The features are most delicately lovely, and the
expression of the face full of humility and adoration. Christ, seated on
the throne, bends forward, and is in the act of placing the crown on her
head; on each side are twelve angels, who are playing a heavenly concert
with guitars, tambourines, trumpets, viols, and other musical
instruments; lower than these, on each side, are forty holy personages
of the Old and New Testament; and at the foot of the throne kneel
several saints, male and female, among them St Catherine with her wheel,
St Agnes with her lamb, and St Cecilia crowned with flowers. Beneath the
principal picture there is a row of seven small ones, forming a border,
and representing various incidents in the life of St Dominic.'




CHAPTER II.

EARLY FLEMISH ART--THE VAN EYCKS, 1366-1442--MABUSE, MATSYS, 1460-1530
OR 31.


In the Low Countries painting had very much the same history that it had
in Italy, but the dates are later, and there may be a longer interval
given to each stage of development. Religious painting, profuse in
symbolism, with masses of details elaborately worked in, meets us in the
first place. This style of painting reached its culmination, in which it
included (as it did not include in its representation in the Italian
pictures) many and varied excellencies, among them the establishment of
painting in oil in the pictures of the Flemish family of painters--the
Van Eycks.

Before going into the little that is known of the family history of the
Van Eycks, I should like to call attention to the numerous painter
families in the middle ages. What a union, and repose, and happy
sympathy of art-life it indicates, which we appear to restlessness and
separate interests of modern life. The Van Eycks consisted of no less
than four members of a family, three brothers, Hubert, John, and
Lambert, and one sister, Margaret, devoted, like her brothers, to her
art. There is a suggestion that they belonged to a small village of
Limburg called Eyck, and repaired to Bruges in order to pursue their
art. Hubert was thirty years older than John, and it is said that he was
a serious-minded man as well as an ardent painter, and belonged to the
religious fraternity of our Lady of Ghent. He died in 1426. John, though
of so much consideration in his profession as to be believed to be 'the
Flemish Painter' sent by Duke Philip the Good of Flanders and Burgundy
with a mission to Portugal to solicit the hand of a princess in
marriage, is reported to have died very poor in 1449, and has the
suspicion attached to him of having been a lover of pleasure and a
spendthrift. Of Lambert, the third brother, almost nothing is known;
indeed, the fact of his existence has only lately come to light.
Margaret lived and died unmarried, and belonged, like her brother
Hubert, to the religious society of our Lady of Ghent. She died about
1432.

The invention of painting in oil, for which the Van Eycks are commonly
known, was not literally that of mixing colours with oil, which was
occasionally done before their day. It was the combining oil with resin,
so as to produce at once a good varnish, and avoid the necessity of
drying pictures in the sun, a bright thought, which may stand in the
same rank with the construction, by James Watt, of that valve which
rendered practicable the application of steam to machinery. The thought,
occasioned by the cracking of a picture in tempera exposed to the sun,
is due to Hubert Van Eyck.

The great picture of the Van Eycks, which was worked at for a number of
years by both Hubert and John, and, as some reckon, touched by the whole
family, is the 'Adoration of the Lamb,' at St Bavon's, Ghent. I should
like to give a faint idea of this extraordinary picture, which was
painted for a burgomaster of Ghent and his wife in order to adorn their
mortuary chapel in the cathedral. It was an altar piece on separate
panels, now broken up and dispersed, only a portion of it being retained
in Ghent.

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