The Old Masters and Their Pictures | Page 3

well
said that the poems of the middle ages were written in stone; so the
earlier painters painted in stone, in that mosaic work which one of them
called--referring to its durability--'painting for eternity;' and in metals.
Many of them were the sons of jewellers or jewellers themselves; they
worked in iron as well as in gold and silver, and they were sculptors
and architects as well as painters; engineers also, so far as engineering
in the construction of roads, bridges, and canals, was known in those

days. The Greek knowledge of anatomy was well-nigh lost, so that
drawing was incorrect and form bad. The idea of showing degrees of
distance, and the management of light and shade, were feebly
developed. Even the fore-shortening of figures was so difficult to the
old Italian painters that they could not carry it into the extremities, and
men and women seem as though standing on the points of their toes.
Landscape-painting did not exist farther than that a rock or a bush, or a
few blue lines, with fishes out of proportion prominently interposed,
indicated, as on the old stage, that a desert, a forest, or a sea, was to
play its part in the story of the picture. So also portrait-painting was not
thought of, unless it occurred in the likeness of a great man belonging
to the time and place of the painter, who was the donor of some picture
to chapel or monastery, or of the painter himself, alike introduced into
sacred groups and scenes; for pictures were uniformly of a religious
character, until a little later, when they merged into allegorical
representations, just as one remembers that miracle plays passed into
moral plays before ordinary human life was reproduced. Until this
period, what we call dramatic expression in making a striking situation,
or even in bringing the look of joy or sorrow, pleasure or pain, into a
face, had hardly been attained.
Perhaps you will ask, what merit had the old paintings of the middle
ages to compensate for so many great disadvantages and incongruities?
Certainly before the time I have reached, they have, with rare
exceptions, little merit, save that fascination of pathos, half-comic,
half-tragic, which belongs to the struggling dawn of all great
endeavours, and especially of all endeavours in art. But just at this
epoch, art, in one man, took a great stride, began, as I shall try to show,
to exert an influence so true, deep, and high that it extends, in the
noblest forms, to the present day, and much more than compensates to
the thoughtful and poetic for a protracted train of technical blunders
and deficiencies.
Giotto, known also as Magister Joctus, was born in 1276 near Florence.
I dare say many have heard one legend of him, and I mean to tell the
legends of the painters, because even when they are most doubtful they
give the most striking indications of the times and the light in which

painters and their paintings were regarded by the world of artists, and
by the world at large; but so far as I have heard this legend of Giotto
has not been disproven. The only objection which can be urged against
it, is that it is found preserved in various countries, of very different
individuals--a crowning objection also to the legend of William Tell.
Giotto was a shepherd boy keeping his father's sheep and amusing
himself by drawing with chalk on a stone the favourites of the flock,
when his drawings attracted the attention of a traveller passing from the
heights into the valley. This traveller was the well-born and
highly-esteemed painter Cimabue, who was so delighted with the little
lad's rough outlines, that getting the consent of Giotto's father, Cimabue
adopted the boy, carried him off to the city of Florence, introduced him
to his studio, and so far as man could supplement the work of God,
made a painter of the youthful genius. I may add here a later legend of
Giotto. Pope Boniface VIII, requested specimens of skill from various
artists with the view to the appointment of a painter to decorate St
Peter's. Giotto, either in impatient disdain, or to show a careless
triumph of skill, with one flourish of his hand, without the aid of
compass, executed a perfect circle in red chalk, and sent the circle as
his contribution to the specimens required by the Pope. The audacious
specimen was accepted as the most conclusive, Giotto was chosen as
the Pope's painter for the occasion, and from the incident arose the
Italian proverb 'round as the o of Giotto.' Giotto was the friend of Dante,
Petrarch, and Boccaccio, especially of Dante, to whom the grandeur of
some of the painter's designs has been vaguely enough attributed. The
poet of the 'Inferno'