Early Italian Painting by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783103928
Publisher: Parkstone International
Published: 2014-04-07T16:00:00+00:00

— Let us wander thro’ the fields

Where Cimabue found the shepherd-boy

Tracing his idle fancies on the ground.

Giotto was around twelve or fourteen years old when he was taken into the house of Cimabue. For his instruction in those branches of polite learning necessary to an artist, his protector placed him under the tuition of Brunetto Latini, who was also the pedagogue of Dante. When, at the age of 26, Giotto lost his friend and master, he was already an accomplished man as well as a celebrated painter, and the influence of his large, original mind upon the later works of Cimabue is distinctly traceable.

The first recorded performance of Giotto was a painting on the wall of the Palazzo deli’ Podesta, or council-chamber of Florence, in which the portraits of Dante, Brunetto Latini, Corso Donati, and others were introduced. Vasari speaks of these works as the first successful attempts at portraiture in the history of modern art. They were soon afterwards plastered or whitewashed over during the triumph of the enemies of Dante; for ages, though known to exist, they were lost and buried from sight. The hope of recovering these most interesting portraits had long been entertained and various attempts were made at different times without success. Finally, as late as 1840, they were brought to light by the perseverance and enthusiasm of Bezzi and Kirkup, assisted by a subscription among the English and American residents and visitors then in Florence. On comparing the head of Dante painted when he was about thirty, prosperous and distinguished in his native city, with the later portraits of him as an exile, worn, wasted, and embittered by misfortune, disappointment, and wounded pride, the difference of expression is as touching as the identity being featured is unequivocal.

The attention which Giotto seems to have given to all natural forms and appearances in his childhood showed itself in his earlier pictures; he was the first to whom it occurred to group his personages into something like a situation and to give to their attitudes and features the expression adapted to it. Thus, in a very early picture of the Annunciation, he gave the Virgin a look of fear; in another, painted some time afterwards, of the Presentation in the Temple, he made the infant Christ shrink from the priest and turn to extend his little arms to his mother — the first attempt at that species of grace and naïveté of expression that was later to be carried to perfection by Raphael. These and other works painted in his native city, so astonished his fellow citizens and all who beheld their beauty and novelty, that they seem to have pined for adequate words in which to express the excess of their delight and admiration. They insisted that Giotto’s figures beguiled the senses so completely that they were mistaken for realities; a commonplace praise, never merited except by the most mechanical of painters.

In the church of Santa Croce in Florence, Giotto painted a Coronation of the Virgin

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