HKB
by all who are interested in the history of the human mind" (Giotto and his Works in Padua). Copies of many of his works are in the Arundel Society's Collection.
It was Cimabue who first attempted to represent action as well as contemplation. Giotto went farther, and represented the action of daily life. "Cimabue magnified the Maid; and Florence rejoiced in her Queen. But it was left for Giotto to make the queenship better beloved, in its sweet humiliation." This picture is not by the master himself, but it is characteristic--in its greater naturalness and resemblance to human life--of Giotto's work. Cimabue's picture (565) is felt in a moment to be archaic beside it. Giotto is thus the first painter of domestic life--the "reconciler of the domestic with the monastic ideal, of household wisdom, labour of love, toil upon earth according to the law of Heaven, with revelation in cave or island, with the endurance of desolate and loveless days, with the repose of folded hands that wait Heaven's time." The corresponding development in the direction of greater naturalness which Giotto--himself a country lad brought up amongst the hills and fields--introduced in the art of landscape painting cannot, unfortunately, be illustrated from the National Gallery (see on this point Edinburgh Lectures on Architecture and Painting, ch. iii.). But a third development--the introduction, namely, of portraiture--is well seen in the Heads of St. John and St. Paul (276), a work in which Giotto's influence is very marked. There is no longer a mere adoption of conventional types: these apostles are individual portraits. "Before Cimabue, no beautiful rendering of human form was possible; and the rude or formal types of the Lombard and Byzantine, though they would serve in the tumult of the chase, or as the recognised symbols of creed, could not represent personal and domestic character. Faces with goggling eyes and rigid lips might be endured, with ready help of imagination, for gods, angels, saints, or hunters--or for anybody else in scenes of recognised legend; but would not serve for pleasant portraiture of one's own self, or of the incidents of gentle, actual life. And even Cimabue did not venture to leave the sphere of conventionally reverenced dignity. He still painted--though beautifully--only the Madonna, and the St. Joseph, and the Christ. These he made living--Florence asked no more: and 'Credette Cimabue nella pintura tener lo campo.' But Giotto came from the field; and saw with his simple eyes a lowlier worth. And he painted the Madonna, and St. Joseph, and the Christ,--yes, by all means, if you choose to call them so, but essentially,--Mamma, Papa, and the Baby. And all Italy threw up its cap--'ora ha Giotto il grido' (now Giotto has the cry)." A fourth development which the art of painting owes to Giotto may be well seen in this picture. Notice the pretty passages of colour, as, for instance, in the dresses of the angels. "The Greeks had painted anything anyhow,--gods black, horses red, lips and cheeks white; and when the Etruscan vase expanded into a Cimabue picture, or a Tafi mosaic, still--except that the Madonna was to have a blue dress, and everything else as much gold on it as could be managed--there was very little advance in notions of colour. Suddenly Giotto threw aside all the glitter, and all the conventionalism; and declared that he saw the sky blue, the tablecloth white, and angels, when he dreamed of them, rosy. And he simply founded the schools of colour in Italy" (Mornings in Florence, pt. ii.).
Orcagna (Florentine: about 1308-1386).