The biographies in this series[1] are intended to help in the preservation of the memories of those great artists, who, leaving to the world the legacies of their genius, have not all died, but live to this hour in the far-reaching influence their works exert. That such men lived, worked, and perished, is almost the sum of knowledge that most of us can boast of with regard to them; we here try to add the simple story of their lives, and perhaps a few touches of description as to the friends they loved, the country they lived in, and the times in which they worked; so that, perhaps, they may become in some measure to us, not only wielders of the chisel and the brush, but men like ourselves, with moments of frailty as well as exaltation, with lives more or less difficult through fading ambitions and frequent failure, but nevertheless bound to us by the tie of a common humanity, and claiming our sympathy and love, not only for the beauty they have left us, but because they also carried the burden, and fought the fight that we are fighting to-day. If it be true, as George Eliot tells us, that the aspect of affairs for the race, is largely altered by the influence of "those who have lived faithfully hidden lives, and rest in unvisited tombs," it is none the less true, that there is some danger in regarding those whose achievements are of historic magnitude, as if they belonged to a separate order of humanity, and were removed alike from its every-day joys and sorrows; and we shall gain a knowledge by no means to be despised, if we once bring fairly home to our consciousness the fact that the seeds of greatness flourish in no other soil than that which we all possess; that the divine light of genius glorifies natures that are subject to the like joys, sorrows, and passions as our own, nay, that even, "like the fierce light that beats upon a throne," it often reveals faults of which the weakest of us might well be ashamed, as well as virtues of which we are all capable. It is not by elevating the great to a passionless region of undisturbed supremacy of life and action, that we show them our truest reverence, or learn from them our most worthy lesson, but by seeing them as they were in sober truth. If we would knit into firmer unison the varying struggles, failures, and triumphs of our great brotherhood, we must learn to look upon genius, not as some cold, unapproachable excellence that finds its work in alien spheres of imagination and action, but rather as a keener insight into the truths of thought and feeling, with its relations to the everyday aspects of life, no less than to its most exalted phases.

It will not be wasted time to the busy dwellers in the England of the nineteenth century, to be led back in spirit to those old Italian days when as yet civilisation dozed upon the stream of time, when the Arno and the Tiber ran their course unspanned by other bridges than those grey stone ones that remain to this day, when under the shadows of the Umbrian mountains, the rushes of Thrasymene wavered not with the rush of the locomotive, but the sighing of the breezes, and on the hills of Assisi the brethren of St. Francis chanted their earliest anthems, and took their first solemn vows of poverty and obedience. It will not be wasted time, if a thrill of kindly sympathy can be raised within us for that old life without whose struggles our fuller knowledge could never have existed, when the world was plainly divided into soldiers and scholars, rulers and ruled, men of action and men of thought, when the good was encrusted with no uncertainties, and the evil mitigated by no doubts, and all the lives of men were poured along a deeper and narrower channel than now. Though we should not regret, we should still remember kindly those times and all that they wrought for us, and the lessons that they teach, though our lives be cast in a far different mould.

It is not possible now for a new regenerator of art to cause a new departure for art by plain reference to natural fact, as did the subject of this book six hundred years ago; but how long has it been impossible? For little more than twenty years! Strange as it may seem to many of our readers, a large portion of the very best art of the present day is based upon principles which were derived from the works of Giotto and his immediate successors, and such men as Millais, Holman Hunt, Rossetti, and Burne Jones, would never have painted as they have done,[2] had it not been for the Umbrian shepherd boy, whose story we are about to tell. The quality which they found in Giotto's work, of simple unswerving truth to the facts of nature and life, this it is which lies at the root of all their work, this it is which they sought to find in vain in the pictures of later artists, however superior such might be, and were, in beauty of form and refinement of colouring. Forced and eccentric as the work of the modern pre-Raphaelites at first seemed, it was indubitably based upon a sound principle—the principle of painting what they saw, and consequently what they believed in, rather than what they might have seen. They took up the theory that nature was essentially beautiful and, carrying it a step further than was usual, drew the conclusion that if they were absolutely faithful to nature, their work could not be ugly.[3]

It is hardly too much to say that this principle has gone far to effect as great a change in modern art as the practice of Giotto effected in that of six hundred years ago. Even those artists who have been most antagonistic to the pre-Raphaelite movement, as it is called, have had their practice modified by it; and though they have continued to uphold the necessity for following rules of art, conventionally graceful arrangement of line, and contrasts of light and shade as the chief elements of pictorial beauty, have still been forced by their antagonists into bringing their works more into accordance with natural fact.

Upon this point, however, this is not the place to dwell; it is sufficient to bear in mind that the influence of Giotto, of which we have spoken, is one which is even now modifying our art, and that therefore it will be no small help to the right understanding of present pictures and picture theories, to understand clearly what reform it was that Giotto introduced into Italian painting, and how it comes about that after so long an interval of time his work has come to form a sort of rallying point for young English artists of our own day.

There is still another reason for dwelling upon the work of this old pre-Raphaelite painter; which is, that there is one considerable section of the English art-world who unite in declaring the essential and necessary superiority of the Venetian and Florentine painting, say of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and in speaking in despairing terms of the hopeless ugliness of modern civilisation. I often wonder whether those worthy elders, had they lived in the times of Giotto, would not have referred in terms of despairing eulogy to the old Roman mosaics of the fifth and sixth centuries, and contrasted their beauty with the innovating tendency of the shepherd painter, who actually inserted portraits of living people into his sacred pictures, and vulgarised the most holy subjects by the insertion of personages who looked actually glad, or surprised, or sorry, just as they might have done in actual life!

But it surely is not the case that art alone, of all the great influences of the world, reached its apogee in the Middle Ages, and that nothing henceforth remains for it but stagnation or decline. Can we believe that progress will go on in all else, and that art alone is doomed to stand still for ever, like a sort of Lot's wife, looking backward to Venice and Florence, as she to Sodom? Such cannot be the belief of those who hold that progress is not the result of an accidental conjunction of fortunate circumstances, but rather that of an universal law of nature, which ordains that we move for ever forward, though the steps of our advance are rarely perceptible. It is possible that all the older forms of art must die—as they seem to be dying now, of inanition—ere the fuller art be born, but nevertheless the fuller art must come in its season, and whatever be its distinguishing characteristic, this at least is certain, that it will be more in unison with the facts of nature and life, as we now know them, than a reflection of the faded beauties of ancient story. So that we are justified in looking with special interest upon the works of the man who first asserted the principle of the broad relation of art to life, and painted legends of the Madonna, or whatever were his subjects, not in the ancient symbolical manner, but as incidents that happened in the work-a-day world, and were witnessed by spectators, such as might have really existed, some of whom were curious, some scornful, and some indifferent.

Whatever changes art may undergo in the future, our debt will be none the less to those who have made it such as we know it now, to those early workers who struggled against difficulties and solved them for us, and whose imperfections formed the groundwork of our fuller knowledge. And chief of these, as the first who introduced a rational and verifiable manner of painting, is Giotto Bondone, the pupil of Cimabue, who not only cast on one side the arbitrary forms of representation handed down from the Byzantine artists, but, as we have said, introduced into his pictures the element of natural life, and carrying his reform into the very heart of his subject, adopted for his characters not only appropriate action and natural positions, but made the whole picture tell a story of human life, instead of making it a composition of more or less graceful lines and variegated colours.

This will be treated of in subsequent portions of this essay, it is sufficient to say here that painters were not slow to follow the example thus set, nor the public to appreciate the change. It was so sudden and of such marked importance, the advantages gained were so great, that the new method of painting, completely vanquished the traditional one, even in the artist's own lifetime; and with the whole weight of tradition, and with the Church's dislike to innovation to contend with, it succeeded in permanently establishing itself in public favour.

From the time of Giotto's early manhood to the death of Titian, the history of painting is mainly the history of the principles which the former artist taught his pupils and exemplified in his works.

Even in landscape painting, which was hardly if at all practised in his time, the advance made by Giotto was remarkable, as he substituted for the ordinary conventional background, scenes in which nature was represented faithfully, though with many shortcomings of perspective and errors of proportion such as were inevitable in a first attempt. However, for two hundred years afterwards the advance in landscape was very slight,[4] and in some respects his designs of leaves and foliage, especially some of those in the sculptures on the Campanile at Florence, are still worthy of our admiration for their fidelity, no less than for their beauty.

And lastly, to conclude this introductory chapter, it may be worth while to attempt to answer the question of what analogy we can find between the work of Giotto and that of the present day, and what lessons we can derive from the former. Now that we have had our road cleared of the many difficulties that beset the old Italian artist, have we any left that he can teach us how to master, and if so, what are they?

The answer is a very simple one. In his time art was suffering its restriction to a certain class of subjects, the religious; and a certain way of representing those subjects, the conventional. This restriction had engendered a purely formal and unemotional art, and an almost total suppression in pictures of the elements of fancy and the realisation of natural fact. In the present day, as in the thirteenth century, art suffers from restrictions, the difference being, that instead of being imposed from without, they are imposed from within, or in other words, they are developments from her own practice. The effect of the great advance in art made in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries has been to make modern artists look at nature in a particular way, i.e., in the manner in which the painters of that day originated; and instead of aiming at beauty through truth to nature and life, they rather aim at it through an imitation of the works of Raphael and Titian. The perfection of technique reached by those masters and their contemporaries, has raised the admiration of all later painters to such a degree that they have exalted the methods of this Renaissance painting into a religion, and seek to find in the laws of chiaroscuro, composition, balance, and harmony of colour, which they can deduce from the pictures of that period, the source of the inspiration that renders those works immortal. Thus art is still in service, in service to itself; it has but burst one set of fetters that it might "gather the links of the broken chain to fasten them proudly round her." No longer bound by superstition and formalism; she is bound by bonds of her own making, and falls down, like Narcissus of old, in worship of her own fair face. Indeed the present error is really a deeper one than that which Giotto vanquished, for throughout all the degradation of art in the early centuries of the Christian era, there was one principle which had been clung fast to, and that was, that pictures should represent things worthy to be represented; it is true that the range was narrowed and its treatment governed by rule, but it may be doubted whether this was not preferable to our present indifference of what it is that is painted, or whether anything should be painted at all.

For it must be noticed that many modern writers on art seem to hold, and artists to exemplify, the principle, that one subject is as good as another; in fact, that the treatment is everything, the meaning of the work wholly subsidiary. Art no longer exists to depict worthily worthy things, but rather like an Æsthetic Blondin balances itself solemnly on a tight-rope of its own construction, seeming to pride itself upon its removal from the vulgar crowd, and moves onward with abstracted gaze, heedless of the oft repeated cries of "Come down."

Yet now, as in the older centuries, men sorrow and hope, succeed and fail, and woman's beauty is as fair, and her heart as tender, as under the Italian sunshine six hundred years ago; there may be at the present hour in the cottages of England, as then mid the hills of Vespignano, peasants' children in whom the inspiration of art is struggling for utterance, needing but the chance that Cimabue gave to Giotto, to give to mankind new lessons of beauty and truth. In a word, now as then, the subjects of art and its power are the same as they have ever been, and men have not ceased to be the same because the fashion of their dress is changed, and they no longer display their emotions with the frank egotism of the Middle Ages. And, as has been said, the history of Giotto is the history of the man who first in painting gave expression to all the diverse emotions of men, who refused to believe that traditional arrangements of line, and profuseness of colouring, could be efficient substitutes for the vital facts of nature and life; who taught that painting is but one of the means by which man speaks to man, and that therefore the words it says are as important, perhaps more so, as the way in which they are said. So I repeat the history of this old pre-Raphaelite is doubly important to us at this day, not only as the founder of the great schools of Italian painting, but as the energetic reformer in whose works our artists may find an exhortation to cast away formulas for facts, and rely for the beauty and attractiveness of their pictures, more upon their correspondence with nature, than their subservience to artistic tradition.