The Old Masters and Their Pictures | Page 4

wrote of his friend:
'......... Cimabue thought To lord it over painting's field; and now The
cry is Giotto's, and his name eclipsed.'
Petrarch bequeathed in his will a Madonna by Giotto and mentioned it
as a rare treasure of art. Boccaccio wrote a merry anecdote of his
comrade the painter's wit, in the course of which he referred with
notable plain-speaking to Giotto's 'flat currish' plainness of face.
The impression handed down of Giotto's character is that of an
independent, high-spirited man, full of invention, full of imagination,

and also, by a precious combination, full of shrewdness and common
sense; a man genial, given to repartee, and at the same time not
deficient in the tact which deprives repartee of its sting. While he was
working to King Robert of Naples, the king, who was watching the
painter on a very hot day, said, with a shrug, 'If I were you, Giotto, I
would leave off work and rest myself this fine day, 'And so would I,
sire, if I were you,' replied the wag.
I need scarcely add that Giotto was a man highly esteemed and very
prosperous in his day; one account reports him as the head and the
father of four sons and four daughters. I have purposely written first of
the fame, the reputed character, and the circumstances of Giotto before
I proceed to his work. This great work was, in brief, to breathe into
painting the living soul which had till then--in mediæval times--been
largely absent. Giotto went to Nature for his inspiration, and not
content with the immense innovation of superseding by the actual
representation of men and women in outline, tint, and attitude, the rigid
traditions of his predecessors, he put men's passions in their faces--the
melancholy looked sad, the gay glad. This result, to us so simple, filled
Giotto's lively countrymen, who had seldom seen it, with astonishment
and delight. They cried out as at a marvel when he made the
commonest deed even coarsely lifelike, as in the case of a sailor in a
boat, who turned round with his hand before his face and spat into the
sea; and when he illustrated the deed with the corresponding expression,
as in the thrill of eagerness that perceptibly pervaded the whole figure
of a thirsty man who stooped down to drink. But Giotto was no mere
realist though he was a great realist; he was also in the highest light an
idealist. His sense of harmony and beauty was true and noble; he rose
above the real into 'the things unseen and eternal,' of which the real is
but a rough manifestation. He was the first to paint a crucifixion robbed
of the horrible triumph of physical power, and of the agony which is at
its bidding, and invested with the divinity of awe and love.
Giotto's work did not end with himself; he was the founder of the
earliest worthy school of Italian art, so worthy in this very glorious
idealism, that, as I have already said, the men whose praise is most to
be coveted, have learned to turn back to Giotto and his immediate

successors, and, forgetting and forgiving all their ignorance, crudeness,
quaintness, to dwell never wearied, and extol without measure these
oldest masters' dignity of spirit, the earnestness of their originality, the
solemnity and heedfulness of their labour. It would seem as if skill and
polish, with the amount of attention which they appropriate, with their
elevation of manner over matter, and thence their lowered standard, are
apt to rob from or blur in men these highest qualifications of genius, for
it is true that judges miss even in the Lionardo, Michael Angelo, and
Raphael of a later and much more accomplished generation, and, to a
far greater extent, in the Rubens of another and still later day, the
perfect simplicity, the unalloyed fervour, the purity of tenderness in
Giotto, Orcagna, Fra Angelico, and in their Flemish brethren, the Van
Eycks and Mabuse.
The difference between the two classes of painters in not so wide as
that between the smooth and brilliant epigrammatic poets of Anne's and
the ruggedly rich dramatists of Elizabeth's reign, neither was there the
unmistakable preponderance of such a mighty genius as that of
Shakespeare granted to the first decade, still the distinction was the
same in kind.[1]
I wish you, my readers, to note it in the very commencement, and to
learn, like the thoughtful students of painting, to put aside any
half-childish over-estimate of the absurdity of a blue stroke transfixing
a huge flounder-like fish as a likeness of a sea, (which you have been
accustomed to see translucid, in breakers and foam, in modern marine
pictures,) or your quick sense of the ugliness of straight figures with
long hands, wooden feet,