The Book of Art for Young People | Page 6

to be appealed to always directly. He was approached with awe; the saints, the Virgin, and the Infant Christ, with love.
We must realise this difference before we can well understand a picture painted in the twelfth, thirteenth, or fourteenth centuries, nor can we look at one without feeling that the artist and the people for whom he painted, so loved the holy personages. They thought about them always, not only at stated times and on Sundays, and never tired of looking at pictures of them and their doings. It is sometimes said that only Catholics can understand medieval art, because they feel towards the saints as the old painters did. But it is possible for any one to realize how in those far-off days the people felt, and it is this that we must try to do. The religious fervour of the Middle Ages was not a sign of great virtue among all the people. Some were far more cruel, savage, and unrestrained than we are to-day. Very wicked men even became powerful dignitaries in the Church. But it was the Church that fostered the impulses of pity and charity in a fierce age, and some of the saints of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, such as St. Francis of Assisi and St. Catharine of Siena, are still held to be among the most beautiful characters the world has ever known.
The churches of the eleventh and twelfth centuries in Florence were lined with marble, and a great picture frequently stood above the altar. It is difficult to realize to-day that the processes which we call oil and water-colour painting were not then invented, and that no shops existed to sell canvases and paints ready for use. The artist painted upon a wooden panel, which he had himself to make, plane flat, and cut to the size he needed. In order to get a surface upon which he could paint, he covered the panel with a thin coating of plaster which it was difficult to lay on absolutely flat. Upon the plaster he drew the outline of the figures he was going to paint, and filled in the background with a thin layer of gold leaf, such as is to-day used for gilding frames. After the background had been put in, it was impossible to correct the outline of the figures, and the labour of preparing the wooden panel and of laying the gold was so great that an artist would naturally not make risky attempts towards something new, lest he should spoil his work. In the Jerusalem Chamber of Westminster Abbey there is a thirteenth-century altar-piece of this kind, and you can see the strips of vellum that were used to cover the joins of the different pieces of wood forming the panel, beneath the layer of plaster, which has now to a great extent peeled off.
The people liked to see their Old Testament stories and the stories from the Life of Christ painted over and over again. They had become fond of the versions of the tales which they had known and seen painted when they were young, and did not wish them changed, so that the range of subjects was not large. The same were repeated, and because of the painter's fear of making mistakes it was natural that the same figures should be repeated too. Thus, whatever the subject pictured, a tradition was formed in each locality for the grouping and general arrangement of the figures, and the most authoritative tradition for such typical groupings was preserved in Constantinople or Byzantium, from which city the 'Byzantine' school of painting takes its name.
Before 1200, Byzantium had been a centre of residence and the civilizing influence of trade for eighteen centuries. It had been the capital of the Roman Empire, and less civilized peoples from the north had never conquered the town, destroying the Greek and Roman traditions, as happened elsewhere in Europe. You have read how the Romans had to withdraw their armies from England to defend Rome against the attacks of the Goths from the north, and then how Britain was settled by Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Danes, who destroyed most of the Roman civilization. A similar though much less complete destruction took place in Italy a little later, when Goths and Lombards, who were remotely akin to the Angles and Saxons, overwhelmed Roman culture. But next to Constantinople, Rome had the best continuous tradition of art, for the fine monuments of the great imperial days still existed in the city. In Byzantium the original Greek population struggled on, and continued to paint, and make mosaics, and erect fine buildings, till the Turks conquered them in 1453. The Byzantines were wealthy and made exquisite objects in gold, precious stones, and ivory. While they were painting better than