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The father of Italian painting, Cimabue, following the custom of the Byzantine mosaïcists, whose work he had doubtless studied at Ravenna, drew his figures against a background devoid of distance and perspective and detail; and even in the work of his greater and more natural pupil, Giotto, the element of background remains comparatively insignificant.
In Venice at that time there were two painters by the name of Bellini Gentile and Giovanni, sons of the painter Jacob Bellini, who had brought his boys up in the way they should go. Gian, as the Venetians called the younger brother, was the more noted of the two. Occasionally he made designs for the mosaicists, and this sometimes brought him to the shop where young Titian worked.
The halo with which the Byzantine mosaicists surrounded the faces of their saints, the glory of golden light that gleams about the figure of Christ in heaven in Tintoretto's decorations, the blank bright walls of the Doge's palace undermined by darkling and shadowy arcades, the refrain of a Provençal song, the sharp shadow under the visor of Verrocchio's equestrian statue, the thought-provoking chiaroscuro of Rembrandt's figure paintings these expedients are all designed to attract attention to the essential elements of a whole of many parts.
The father of Italian painting, Cimabue, following the custom of the Byzantine mosaicists, whose work he had doubtless studied at Ravenna, drew his figures against a background devoid of distance and perspective and detail; and even in the work of his greater and more natural pupil, Giotto, the element of background remains comparatively insignificant.
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.
You first enter the rooms of those whose talent distinguishes them as artists, and in whose work all the wonderful neatness and finish and long- suffering toil of the Byzantines are visible, as well as original life and inspiration alike impossible and profane to the elder mosaicists.
The desire which lies at the bottom of it a desire masked as religious symbolism in the old mosaicists and carvers and embroiderers is the desire to paint nice things, in default of painting a fine picture.
In this respect they come rather under the head of realistic than of decorative art. Lorenzo Maitani was a genuine leader of his guild of craftsmen, and superintended the large body of architects who worked at Orvieto, stone masons, mosaicists, bronze founders, painters, and minor workmen. He lived until 1330, and practically devoted his life to Orvieto.
It seemed that to repair all this was a task incapable of fulfilment; it was sheer folly, people said, to conceive the idea of it. Nevertheless, for nearly twenty years now an army of workers has been at the task, sculptors, marble-cutters, mosaicists. Already certain of the sanctuaries, the most venerable of them indeed, have been entirely renovated.
"Oh no!" replied Mrs. Bowen, with the deepest feeling. They quitted the bridge, and turning to the left, moved down the street which with difficulty finds space between the parapet of the river and the shops of the mosaicists and dealers in statuary cramping it on the other hand. "Here's something distinctively Florentine too," said Colville.
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