The Old Masters and Their Pictures | Page 2

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CHAPTER I.
EARLY ITALIAN ART--GIOTTO, 1276-1337--ANDREA PISANO.
1280-1345--ORCAGNA, 1315-1376 GHIBERTI,
1381-1455--MASACCIO, 1402-1428 OR 1429--FRA ANGELICO,
1387-1455.
A pencil and paper, a box of colours, and a scrap-book, form so often a
child's favourite toys that one might expect that a very large portion of
men and women would prove painters. But, as we grow in years and
knowledge, the discrepancy between nature and our attempts to copy
nature, strike us more and more, until we turn in dissatisfaction and

disgust from the vain effort.
There was only one old woman in an Esquimaux tribe who could be
called forward to draw with a stick on the sand a sufficiently graphic
likeness of the Erebus and the Terror. It is only a few groups of men
belonging to different countries, throughout the centuries, who have
been able to give us paintings to which we turn in wonder and
admiration, and say that these are in their degree fair exponents of
nature. The old painter's half-haughty, half-humble protest was true--it
is 'God Almighty,' who in raising here and there men above their
fellows, 'makes painters.'
But let us be thankful that the old propensity to delight in a facsimile,
or in an idealized version of nature, survives in the very common
satisfaction and joy--whether cultivated or uncultivated--- derived from
looking at pictures, thinking over their details, striving to understand
the meaning of the painters, and proceeding farther to consider the lives
and times which throw light on works of genius. Music itself is not
more universally and gladly listened and responded to, than pictures are
looked at and remembered.
Thus I have no fear of failing to interest you, my readers, in my subject
if I can only treat it sympathetically,--enter at a humble distance into
the spirit of the painters and of their paintings, and place before you
some of the paintings by reverent and loving word-painting such as
others have achieved, and such as I may strive to attain to, that you may
be in a sort early familiar with these paintings, before you see them in
engravings and photographs, and on canvas and in fresco, as I trust you
may be privileged to see many of them, when you may hail them not
only for what they are, the glories of art, but for what they have been to
you in thoughts of beauty and high desires.
Of the old Greek paintings, of which there are left isolated specimens
dug up in Herculaneum and Pompeii, I cannot afford to say anything,
and of the more modern Greek art which was spread over Europe after
the fall of Constantinople I need on Europe the birth-place of painting
as of other arts, that Greek painting which illustrated early Christianity,
was painting in its decline and decay, borrowing not only superstitious

conventionalities, but barbaric attributes of gilding and blazoning to
hide its infirmity and poverty. Virgins of the same weak and
meaningless type, between attenuated saints or angels, and doll-like
child-Christs in the one invariable attitude holding up two fingers of a
baby hand to bless the spectator and worshippers, were for ever
repeated. In a similar manner the instances of rude or meagre
contemporary paintings with which the early Christians adorned their
places of worship and the sepulchres of their dead in the basilicas and
catacombs of Rome, are very curious and interesting for their antiquity
and their associations, and as illustrations of faith; but they present no
intrinsic beauty or worth. They are not only clumsy and childish
designs ill executed, but they are rendered unintelligible to all save the
initiated in such hieroglyphics, by offering an elaborate ground-work of
type, antitype, and symbol, on which the artist probably spent a large
part of his strength. Lambs and lilies, serpents, vines, fishes, dolphins,
phoenixes, cocks, anchors, and javelins played nearly as conspicuous a
part in this art as did the dead believer, or his or her patron saint, who
might have been supposed to form the principal figure in the picture.
Italian art existed in these small beginnings, in the gorgeous but
quaintly formal or fantastic devices of illuminated missals, and in the
stiff spasmodic efforts of here and there an artist spirit such as the old
Florentine Cimabue's, when a great man heralded a great epoch. But
first I should like to mention the means by which art then worked.
Painting on board and on plastered walls, the second styled painting in
fresco, preceded painting on canvas. Colours were mixed with water or
with size, egg, or fig-juice--the latter practices termed tempera (in
English in distemper) before oil was used to mix colours. But painters
did not confine themselves then to painting with pencil or brush, else
they might have attained technical excellence sooner. It has been