A History of Italian Painting
9781465678461
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
Leonardo da Vinci, from the summit of Florentine art, has written “What should first be judged in seeing if a picture be good is whether the movements are appropriate to the mind of the figure that moves.” And again he has expressed somewhat differently the highest merits of painting as “the creation of relief (projection) where there is none.” For Florence, at least, these notions are authoritative, and they may well serve as text for most that I shall say about Florentine painting. To give significant emotion convincing mass—this was the problem of the Florentine painter from the moment when Giotto about the year 1300 began to find himself, to that day more than two centuries and a half later when Michelangelo died. No Florentine master of a strenuous sort ever failed to perceive this mission, and no unstrenuous artist was ever fully Florentine. This twofold aim—humanistic, in choice and mastery of emotion; scientific, in search for those indications which most vividly express mass where no mass is—this twofold endeavor Florence shared with the only greater city of art, Athens. Thus Florence is to the art of today what Athens was to that of classical antiquity. In these two little communal republics were discovered and worked out to perfection all our ideals of humanistic beauty. Florence saw God, His Divine Son, the Blessed Virgin, and the saints quite as Athens had seen the gods of Olympus, the demi-gods, and the heroes simply as men and women of the noblest physical and moral type. Both agreed in magnifying and idealizing the people one ordinarily sees. For greater beauty, Athens represented them nude or lightly draped; for greater dignity, Florence chose the solemn garb of the Roman forum. Whether pagan or Christian, the guardians of a people’s morality were to be above haste, excitement, or any transient emotion. They were to express intensities of feeling, but a feeling more composed, permanent, and disciplined, than that of every day. Judgment and criticism count for as much in both arts as emotional inspiration. The great Florentine artist is a thinker; he is often poet and scientist, sculptor and architect, besides being a painter. Behind his painting lies always a problem of mind, and as sheer personalities the greatest painters of Siena, Venice, and Lombardy often seem mere nobodies when compared even with the minor Florentines. We should know something about a city that produced personality so generously, and before considering Giotto, the first great painter Florence bred, we shall do well to look at Florence as he saw it about the year 1300, being a man in the thirties.
