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ARTISTS
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Early Medieval
Late Medieval-Northern
Late Medieval-Italian
Florence
Early Medieval
There is perhaps no
more vivid illustration of the tremendous impact of Christianity upon
the culture of classic antiquity than the contrast between the painting
of the first millennium A.D. and that which preceded it. Not that this
contrast is immediately apparent, since for many years Christian artists
borrowed freely the forms and techniques of their pagan predecessors and
contemporaries and were content to shape them to new meanings by the use
of purely symbolic devices. But the shift from the fundamental materialism
of the ancient world to the basic spiritualism of the Christian could
not but be reflected in the art of the period. Quite early the dogmatic
value of painting was recognized as a means of- instructing the illiterate,
and to this purpose it was put in the wall frescoes and apse mosaics in
the churches of early Christian Italy and the Byzantine Near East. But
transcending in importance even this vital function was the success of
the artists in imparting, through the splendor of immaterial color in
forms so stylized as to be almost supernatural in effect, a sense of the
ultimate reality of a spiritual rather than a worldly essence. To such
an effect as this, the simplification of form and pattern imposed almost
inevitably by a medium of such inflexibility as mosaic was an asset rather
than a liability. The same thing is true of the stained-glass windows
developed later in the Middle Ages-during the 12th and 13th centuries-to
meet the differing architectonic requirements of Gothic architecture by
means of which, to quote a magnificent figure of Charles Rufus Morey's,
"the light of day became the Light Divine" within the lofty
vaults of the cathedral. As characteristically medieval as the stained-glass
window is manuscript illumination, the illustrations wrought in brilliant
colors and precious gold by which the words written at the cost of hours
of tedious labor were transformed, to continue Morey's figure, "into
the Word of God." These handwritten book pictures are one of the
most precious legacies of the Middle Ages, for in them more clearly than
any other form of painting was the continuity and development of the art
maintained.
Late Medieval-Northern
It was from the manuscript
tradition of the Middle Ages that one of the great pictorial styles of
the 15th century developed, the style of Flanders. The van Eyck brothers,
Hubert (d. 1426) and Jan (active by 1422 and died in 1441), and Rogier
van der Weyden (1399?-1464) are the principal figures in it, and around
them are grouped many others of considerable individuality if not their
equals in creative inspiration, such as Hans Memling (Memlinc; 1430?-1495)
and Petrus Christus (1415?-?1473). Though the Flemish 15th century tradition
is often characterized as a renaissance, it is more accurately regarded
as a humanization of medieval beliefs. In it theological abstraction is
replaced by a new feeling for the significance of individual experience.
Thus in the altarpiece by the van Eycks which adorns -the Cathedral of
St. Bavon (Bavo) in Ghent and is known as the Adoration of the Mystic
Lamb (1432), the figures of Biblical and church history symbolizing mankind
appear in a landscape, of trees and hills and distant towns; and that
landscape, rendered in the minute technique of the manuscript illuminator,
is the embodiment of the concept of salvation. Similarly, in the Arnolfini
Portrait (1434) in the National Gallery in London, painted by Jan van
Eyck alone, the pictorial effect of vibrant space in the interior connotes
the presence of all-pervading Deity at the wedding ceremony. With Rogier
van der Weyden, it is not so much the significance of objective existence
as of emotional experience that is the dominant concept. In the Descent
from the Cross (1434) in the Escorial, Madrid, or the diptych of the Crucifixion
(c.1455) in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, it is a profoundly human feeling
that invests the strong colors and vigorous drawing with meaning. In the
latter part of the 15th century, The Nativity (c.1476), ascribed to Hugo
van der Goes (1440?-1482), reflects the ever broadening scope of interpretive
interest in Flanders by means of the Eyckian objectiveness with which
the adoring shepherds are rendered; combined with something of Rogier's
sensitiveness to emotional values. At the same time, the waning vitality
of- Christian idealism is implicit in the preoccupation with evil that
char-' acterizes the painting of Hieronymus (Jerome) Bosch (1450?-1516).
The grotesque and repulsive fantasies of his various versions of the Temptation
of St. Anthony or the Hay Wain are the spiritual progeny of the gargoyles
on Gothic buildings, but in dominating the world they people, instead
of being accessory to a positive and constructive concept, they objectify
the growing pessimism of their age.
In France too the
stirring of a new spirit is clearly visible in the painting of the 15th
century. It is evident, as it was in Flanders, in the increasing popularity
of easel or panel painting over the illuminated miniature that had been
so popular in the Middle Ages. The portrait of Charles VII (c.1450) by
Jean Fouquet (c.1420c.1480) is like the work of the van Eycks in that
it was executed by a man trained to illustrate manuscripts but with a
truly Gallic quality of characterization. Some of the outstanding French
paintings of this period were executed by artists whose names are not
recorded. The Aix Annunciation (c.l440) and the Avignon Pieta (c.1465)
are two of these. The former was painted by a master under the influence
of the van Eyck tradition and also familiar with the style of painting
of certain German masters of the Rhine Valley, but the mysterious life
of the church interior that is the setting of the incident is spiritually
allied to that of the great Gothic cathedrals. The sharply individualized
characterization and powerfully rhythmic linear and color patterns of
the Avignon Pieta are features of a compositional pattern of the greatest
subtlety and expressive force, combined with the utmost sincerity of religious
feeling; it is one of the greatest achievements of the period which witnessed
the decline of that medieval faith which here produced one of its most
telling and impressive pictorial symbols.
Late Medieval-Italian
South of the Alps
the humanization of thought which is reflected in the Flemish art of the
van Eycks and Rogier van der Weyden had begun even earlier. In Italy,
where the classic tradition of humanism had never entirely succumbed to
the theological abstraction of the Middle Ages, St. Francis of Assissi
had preached in the early part of the 13th century an ideal of faith based
on the love of God for man, rather than fear and the threat of eternal
damnation for sin. The paintings of the Sienese masters, Duccio di Buoninsegna
(1255 ?-?1319), the Lorenzetti brothers-Pietro (c.1280-?1348) and Ambrogio
(c.1300-?1348) and Simone Martini (1283?-1344), and the Florentines Giovanni
Cimabue (c.1240-c.1302) and Giotto de Boudone (1276?-?1337) show a comparable
revaluation of traditional concepts in the light of the new feeling. With
a background in the moribund Byzantine style of flat forms and intricate
decorative patterns of gold and color, painting in these Italian centers
becomes in the early 14th century an expressive art of great distinction.
Duccio's Maesta or
Madonna in Majesty, painted between 1308 and 1318 for the high altar of
the cathedral at Siena, is on the front a stately assembly of forms executed
in bright colors and with much gold, still two-dimensional in effect but
drawn with a line that curves and falls in patterns of notable charm.
On the reverse side, the life of Christ is portrayed in a series of panels
replete with shrewdly observed anecdotal details in settings that are
significant in their suggestion of the artist's awareness of pictorial
space as an expressive element. This is even more apparent in the paintings
of the Lorenzetti, while Simone Martini reveals in his Sant' Ansano Annunciation
(1333) in the Uffizi Gallery a style in which the hieratic formalism of
the Byzantine manner is softened into a Gothic flow of line of the highest
decorative value combined with a color scheme of infinite and sophisticated
nuance. It is the gay and courtly world of chivalric knights and their
ladies that is created in the paintings of these Sienese masters.
Florence
In Florence the primacy
of Cimabue in painting during his lifetime-mentioned by his contemporary
Dante-can be explained by the tragic intensity with which he galvanized
the Byzantine formulas in which he had been trained, as in the frescoed
Crucifixion in the north transept of the upper church at San Francesco
of Assisi. But, as the great writer continues, his name was superseded
in fame by that of his supposed pupil and follower Giotto, for whom expressive
style was not a matter of graceful line, decorative color, or even the
austere formalism of his master. In truly classic fashion Giotto realized
the necessity of making his forms visually convincing if the emotions
by which they were impelled or the ideas which they embodied were to carry
conviction; and in making the beings who people his frescoes of the life
of Christ in the Arena Chapel at Padua (1305) or the story of St. Francis
in the Upper Church of San Francesco, at Assisi (1296) solid and three-dimensional
in effect, he established himself as one of the great humanistic painters.
Background and setting interested him very little; a tree is the symbol
of landscape in his unforgettable Sermon of St. Francis to the Birds,
while two towers and a connecting arch suffice to place Meeting of Joachim
and Anna at the Beautiful Gate in an adequate environment in the Padua
series. For Giotto realized that a form of convincing bulk will create
its own space in which to exist, and held to the classic axiom that the
realities of space and environment are accessory to the dominant one of
form. This he creates primarily in terms of line-bounding contours that
define and model figures in which it is easy to find evidence of an elementary
knowledge of anatomy but whose motivation is carried on a level of psychological
observation and distinction that can hardly be surpassed in any comparable
works by other artists. The result is form that is expressive, since it
is the convincing embodiment of recognizable and understandable experience.
It is this, together with the rhythmic composition of individual panels
and of entire ensembles-notably the Arena Chapel series-that makes the
painting of Giotto what it is, not the brilliant but static tableaux of
the Sienese but a drama that moves with pulsing life to its inevitable
end.
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