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And as it was painted both on the back part and on the front, the said high-altar being isolated right round, on the said back part there had been made by Duccio with much diligence all the principal stories of the New Testament, with very beautiful little figures.

In this century Andrea Tan, Guido da Siena, and other devoted souls were involved in the final struggles of Mediaeval Art, and at its close Cimabue and Duccio da Siena the two masters whose Madonnas were borne in solemn procession through the streets of Florence and Siena, mid music and the pealing of bells had given the new impulse to painting which brought them immortal fame.

Also, in the history of art the summit of one movement seems always to spring erect from the trough of its predecessor. The upward stroke is vertical, the downward an inclined plane. For instance, from Duccio to Giotto is a step up, sharp and shallow. From Giotto to Lionardo is a long and, at times, almost imperceptible fall.

Manufacture and commerce reappeared: the artizans and merchants formed into communities; the communities grew into towns, the towns into cities; in the city arose the cathedral; the Lombard or Byzantine mouldings and traceries of the cathedral gave birth to figure-sculpture; its mosaics gave birth to painting; every forward movement of the civilization unfolded as it were a new form or detail of the art, until, when mediæval civilization was reaching its moment of consolidation, when the cathedrals of Lucca and Pisa stood completed, when Niccolò and Giovanni Pisano had sculptured their pulpits and sepulchres; painting, in the hands of Cimabue and Duccio, of Giotto and of Guido da Siena, freed itself from the tradition of the mosaicists as sculpture had freed itself from the practice of the stone-masons, and stood forth an independent and organic art.

They say in Siena that Duccio, in the year 1348, gave the design for the chapel that is in the square, against the wall of the Palazzo Principale; and it is read that there lived in his times a sculptor and architect of passing good talent from the same country, named Moccio, who made many works throughout all Tuscany, and particularly one in the Church of S. Domenico in Arezzo, namely, a tomb of marble for one of the Cerchi, which tomb acts as support and ornament for the organ of the said church; and although it may appear to some that it is not a very excellent work, yet, if it is considered that he made it while still a youth, in the year 1356, it cannot but seem passing good.

It was not until a century after the death of Cimabue and Duccio that the real development of the Venetian School was manifested, so that when things did begin to move the conditions were not the same, and the results accordingly were something substantially different.

There was no Giotto, no Duccio even, in Umbria. Painting for its own sake, or for the sake of beauty or life, never seems to have taken root in that mystical soil; it is ever with a message of the Church that she comes to us, very simply and sweetly for the most part, it is true, but except in the work of Piero della Francesca, who was not really an Umbrian at all, and in that of his pupil Melozzo da Forli, the work of the school is sentimental and illustrative, passionately beautiful for a moment with Gentile da Fabriano; clairvoyant almost in the best work of Perugino; most beloved, though maybe not most lovely, in the marvellous work of Raphael, who, Umbrian though he be, is really a Roman painter, full of the thoughts of a world he had made his own.

Cimabue and Duccio are the last great exponents in the West of the greater tradition the tradition that held the essential everything and the accidental nothing. For with Duccio, at any rate, the sense of form was as much traditional as vital: and the great Cimabue is fin de siècle. They say that Cimabue died in 1302; Duccio about fifteen years later. For Giotto could be intentionally second-rate.

Vasari, while exaggerating the skill of Michelangelo in making his David out of a block mangled by another sculptor, expresses no surprise at his having chopped the marble himself; indeed, the anecdote itself affords evidence of the commonness of such a practice, since Agostino di Duccio would not have spoilt the block if he had not cut into it rashly without previous comparison with a model.

So they went again and again to the Accademia delle Belle Arti and studied those quaint, half-Byzantine works, full of pathetic grace, by Guido da Siena, by Duccio, Simone Martini, Lippo Memmi, and the Lorenzetti brothers. Here, too, they found paintings by Il Sodoma, a High Renaissance artist, which pleased them more than all else.