The Old Masters and Their Pictures | Page 6

for ages strike, with its greatness multitudes of widely
different degrees of cultivation whose intellectual capacity is as far
apart as their critical faculty. I mean the matchless Campanile or
bell-tower 'towering over the Dome of Brunelleschi' at Florence,
formed of coloured marbles--for which Giotto framed the designs, and
even executed with his own hands the models for the sculpture. With
this lovely sight Dean Alford's description is more in keeping than the
prosaic saying of Charles V., that 'the Campanile ought to be kept
under glass.' Dean Alford's enthusiasm thus expresses itself:
'A mass of varied light written on the cloudless sky of unfathomed blue;

varied but blended, as never in any other building that we had seen; the
warm yellow of the lighter marbles separated but not disunited by the
ever-recurring bands of dark; or glowing into red where the kisses of
the sun had been hottest; or fading again into white where the shadows
mostly haunted, or where the renovating hand had been waging conflict
with decay.'
It is known that Giotto, together with his friend Dante, died before
this--Giotto's last great work--was finally constructed by Giotto's pupil,
Taddeo Gaddi, and that therefore neither of the friends could have
really looked on 'Giotto's Tower,' though Italian Ciceroni point out, and
strangers love to contemplate, the very stone on which 'Grim Dante' sat
and gazed with admiration in the calm light of evening on the enduring
memorial of the painter.
Giotto died in the year 1336 or 1337, his biographer adds, 'no less a
good Christian than an excellent painter,' and in token of his faith he
painted one crucifixion in which he introduced his own figure 'kneeling
in an attitude of deep devotion and contrition at the foot of the Cross.'
The good taste of such an act has been questioned, so has been the
practice which painted the Virgin Mother now as a brown Italian, now
as a red and white Fleming, and again as a flaxen-haired German or as
a swarthy Spaniard, and draped her and all the minor figures in the
grandest drama the world ever saw--as well as the characters in older
Scripture histories, in the Florentine, Venetian, and Antwerp fashions
of the day. The defence of the practice is, that the Bible is for universal
time, that its Virgin Mother, its apostles and saints, were types of other
mothers and of other heroes running down the stream of history; that
even the one central and holy figure, if He may be represented at all, as
the Divine brother of all humanity, may be clad not inaptly in the
garments of all. It appears to me that there is reason in this answer, and
that viewed in its light the criticism which constantly demands historic
fidelity is both carping and narrow. I do not mean, however, to
underrate historic accuracy in itself, or to depreciate that longing for
completeness in every particular, which drives our modern painters to
the East to study patiently for months the aspects of nature under its
Oriental climate, with its peculiar people and animals, its ancient

costumes and architecture.
Giotto was buried with suitable honours by a city which, like the rest of
the nation, has magnified its painters amongst its great men, in the
church of Santa Maria del Fiore, where his master Cimabue had been
buried. Lorenzo de' Medici afterwards placed over Giotto's tomb his
effigy in marble.
In chronicling ancient art I must here diverge a little. I have already
mentioned how closely painting was in the beginning allied with
working in metals as well as with sculpture and architecture. It is thus
necessary to write of a magnificent work in metal, the study and
admiration of generations of painters, begun in the life of Giotto, and
completed in two divisions, extending over a period of nearly a
hundred years. We shall proceed to deal with the first division, and
recur to the second a little later.
The old Italian cities. They were then the great merchant cities of the
world, more or less republican in their constitution. They stood to the
citizens, who rarely left their walls, at once as peculiar possessions and
as native countries rather than as cities alone, while they excited all the
patriotism, pride, and love that were elsewhere expended on a whole
country--which after all was held as belonging largely to its king and
nobles. The old Italian merchant guilds, and wealthy merchants as
individuals, vied with each other in signalizing their good citizenship
by presenting--as gifts identified with their names--to their cities, those
palace buildings, chapels, paintings, gates, which are the delight of the
world to this day. It was a merchant guild which thought happily of
giving to Florence the bronze gates to the baptistery of San Giovanni or