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While according all due honour, and probably more, to Cimabue as the originator of modern painting, it is to his pupil, GIOTTO, that we are accustomed to look for the first developments of its possibilities. Had Cimabue's successors been as conservative as his instructors, we might still be not very much better off than if he had never lived.
He answered respectfully to about a dozen names which the vagrant fancy of the young painters bestowed upon him: Jan-of-all-work Jan Steen The Flying Dutchman Crimson Lake Madder Lake and Miller's Thumb. But his master called him GIOTTO. He was very happy, but the old home haunted him, and he longed bitterly for some news of his foster-father and the schoolmaster.
They are taking up too much of our attention; and one might sometimes be tempted to think that the only use of great artists, like the only functions of those patriarchs who kept begetting one another, was to produce other great artists: Giotto to produce eventually Masaccio, Masaccio through various generations Michelangelo and Raphael, and Michelangelo and Raphael, through even more, Manet and Degas, who in their turn doubtless dutifully.... Meanwhile why should art have gone on evolving, artists gone on making filiations of schools, if art, if artists, if schools of artists had not answered an imperious, undying wish for the special pleasures which painting can give?
The changes thus made in the Renaissance pillars are always injuries. This virtue is the proper opponent of Avarice; though it does not occur in the systems of Orcagna or Giotto, being included in Charity. It was a leading virtue with Aristotle and the other ancients. SECTION XLIX. Second side. Constancy; not very characteristic.
But Giotto was no mere realist though he was a great realist; he was also in the highest light an idealist. His sense of harmony and beauty was true and noble; he rose above the real into 'the things unseen and eternal, of which the real is but a rough manifestation.
The difference to be accounted for is certainly not larger than that separating, a century before, the frescoes of Giotto from the works of Cimabue and his school. Netherlandish School of the fifteenth century. It would be impossible here to characterize the works of the various masters who followed in the wake of the brothers Van Eyck.
An armed figure holding a halbert; so also in the copy. The figure used by Giotto with the particular intention of representing unjust government, is represented at the gate of an embattled castle in a forest, between rocks, while various deeds of violence are committed at his feet. Spenser's "Adicia" is a furious hag, at last transformed into a tiger. Eighth side.
There is no ruby colour on anybody's nose: there are no black shadows under anybody's chin; there are no Rembrandtesque gradations of gloom, or glitterings of sword-hilt and armour. Is this ignorance, think you, in Giotto, and pure artlessness? He was now a man in middle life, having passed all his days in painting, and professedly, and almost contentiously, painting things as he saw them.
But this last-named and Maurice Denis have arrived at great talent by very different merits. M. Maurice Denis has abandoned Pointillism a few years ago, in favour of returning to a very strange conception which dates back to the Primitives, and even to Giotto.
It is a simple matter to choose in such a book as this the best place in which to tell something of the life-story of, say, Giotto and Brunelleschi and the della Robbias; for at a certain point their genius is found concentrated Donatello's and the della Robbias' in the Bargello and those others at the Duomo and Campanile.
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