Tradition and Innovation: I - The Later Fifteenth Century in Italy - PDF

Here is the transcription of the provided text from the images into a structured markdown format. ## 13 **TRADITION AND INNOVATION: I** The later fifteenth century in Italy The new discoveries which had been made by the artists of Italy and Flanders at the beginning of the fifteenth century crea...

Here is the transcription of the provided text from the images into a structured markdown format. ## 13 **TRADITION AND INNOVATION: I** The later fifteenth century in Italy The new discoveries which had been made by the artists of Italy and Flanders at the beginning of the fifteenth century created a stir all over Europe. Painters and patrons alike were fascinated by the idea that art could not only be used to tell the sacred story in a moving way, but might serve to mirror a fragment of the real world. Perhaps the most immediate result of this great revolution in art was that artists everywhere began to experiment and to search for new and startling effects. This spirit of adventure which took hold of art in the fifteenth century marks the real break with the Middle Ages. There is one effect of this break which we must consider first. Until about 1400, art in different parts of Europe had developed on similar lines. We remember that the style of the Gothic painters and sculptors of that period is known as the International style, page 215, because the aims of the leading masters in France and Italy, in Germany and Burgundy, were all very similar. Of course, national differences had existed all through the Middle Ages we remember the differences between France and Italy during the thirteenth century - but on the whole these were not very important. This applies not to the field of art alone, but also to the world of learning and even to politics. The learned men of the Middle Ages all spoke and wrote Latin and did not much mind whether they taught at the University of Paris, Padua or Oxford. The noblemen of the period shared the ideas of chivalry; their loyalty to their king or their feudal overlord did not imply that they considered themselves the champions of any particular people or nation. All this had gradually changed towards the end of the Middle Ages, when the cities with their burghers and merchants became increasingly more important than the castles of the barons. The merchants spoke their native tongue and stood together against any foreign competitor or intruder. Each city was proud and jealous of its own position and privileges in trade and industry. In the Middle Ages a good master might travel from building site to building site, he might be recommended from one monastery to another, and few would trouble to ask what his nationality was. But as soon as the cities gained in importance, artists, like all artisans and craftsmen, were organized into guilds. These guilds were in many respects similar to our trade unions. It was their task to watch over the rights and privileges of their members and to ensure a safe market for their produce. To be admitted into the guild the artist had to show that he was able to reach certain standards, that he was, in fact, a master of his craft. He was then allowed to open a workshop, to employ apprentices, and to accept commissions for altar-paintings, portraits, painted chests, banners and coats of arms, or any other work of the kind. The guilds and corporations were usually wealthy companies who had a say in the government of the city and who not only helped to make it prosperous, but also did their best to make it beautiful. In Florence and elsewhere the guilds, the goldsmiths, the wool-workers, the armourers and others, devoted part of their finds to the foundation of churches, the building of guild halls and the dedication of altars and chapels. In this respect they did much for art. On the other hand they watched anxiously over the interests of their own members, and therefore made it difficult for any foreign artist to get employment or to settle among them. Only the most famous of artists sometimes managed to break down this resistance and to travel as freely as had been possible at the period when the great cathedrals were being built. All this has a bearing on the history of art, because, thanks to the growth of the cities, the International style was perhaps the last international style Europe has seen - at least until the twentieth century. In the fifteenth century art broke up into a number of different 'schools' nearly every city or small town in Italy, Flanders and Germany had its own 'school of painting'. 'School' is rather a misleading word. In those days there were no art schools where young students attended classes. If a boy decided that he would like to become a painter, his father apprenticed him at an early age to one of the leading masters of the town. He usually lived in, ran errands for the master's family, and had to make himself useful in every possible way. One of his first take might be to grind the colors, or to assist in the preparation of the wooden panels or the canvas which the most wanted to use. Gradually he might be given some minor piece of walk like the painting of a flagstaff. Then, one day when the master was busy, he might ask the apprentice to help with the completion of some unimportant or inconspicuous part of a major work-to paint the background which the master had traced out on the canvas, to finish the costumes of the bystanders in a scene. If he showed talent and knew how to imitate his master's manner to perfections the youth would gradually be given more important tings to do perhaps paint a whole picture from the master's sketch and under his supervision. These Then, were the schools of painting of the fifteenth century. They were indeed excellent schools, and | | | | :------------------ | :---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | **Figure 162** | **Leon Battista Alberti** | | | **Church of S. Andrea, Mantua, c. 1460** | | | A Renaissance church | | | | | *Description:* | *Black and white photo of a church façade, featuring a large archway as the main entrance. The architecture has classical elements like columns and pediments.* | there are many painters now who are wish they had received so thorough a training. The manner in which the masters of a town handed down their skill and experience to the young generation also explains why the 'school of painting' in these towns developed such a clear individuality of its own. One can recognize whether a fifteenth-century picture comes from Florence or Siena, Dijon or Bruges, Cologne or Vienna. To gain a vantage point from which we can survey this immense variety of masters, 'schools' and experiments, we had best return to Florence, where the great revolution in art had begun. It is fascinating to watch how the generation which followed Brunelleschi, Donatello and Masaccio tried to make use of their discoveries and apply them to all the tasks with which they were confronted. That was not always easy. The main tasks which the patrons commissioned had, after all, remained fundamentally unchanged since the earlier period. The new and revolutionary methods sometimes seemed to clash with the traditional commissions. Take the case of architecture: Brunelleschi's idea had been to introduce the forms of classical buildings, the columns, pediments and comices which he had copied from Roman ruins. He had used these forms in his churches. His successors were eager to emulate him in this. Figure 162 shows a church planned by the Florentine architect Leon Battista Alberti (1404-72), who conceived its façade as a gigantic triumphal arch in the Roman manner, page 119, figure 74. But how was this new programme to be applied to an ordinary dwelling-house in a city street? Traditional houses and palaces could not be built in the manner of temples. No private houses had survived from Roman times, and even if they had, needs and customs had changed so much that they might have offered little guidance. The problem, then, was to find a compromise between the traditional house, with walls and windows, and the classical forms which Brunelleschi had taught the architects to use. It was again Alberti who found the | | | | :---------------- | :------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | | **Figure 163** | **Leon Battista Alberti** | | | **Palazzo Rucellai,** | | | **Florence, c. 1460** | | | | | *Description:* | *A photo of a multi-story building with classical architectural details. The façade features evenly spaced windows and a symmetrical design. The building has a sense of proportion and balance that is typical of Renaissance architecture* | | | | | **Figure 164** | **Lorenzo Ghiberti** | | | **The Baptism of Christ,** 1427 | | Gilt bronze, $60 \times 60 \text{ }cm, 23 \frac{5}{8} \times 23 \frac{5}{8} \text{ }in$; relief on the font of the Baptistery, Siena Cathedral | | *Description:* | *A photo of Renaissance bronze relief panel depicting the Baptism of Christ. In this detailed scene, surrounded by angels figures.*| solution that remained influential up to our own days. When he built a palace for the rich Florentine merchant family of Rucellai, figure 163, he designed an ordinary three-storeyed building. There is little similarity between this façade and any classical ruin. And yet Alberti stuck to Brunelleschi's programme and used classical forms for the decoration of the façade. Instead of building columns or half-columns, he covered the house with a network of flat pilasters and entablatures which suggested a classical order without changing the structure of the building. It is easy to see where Alberti had learned this principle. We remember the Roman Colosseum, page 118, figure 73, in which various Greek 'orders' were applied to the various storeys. Here, too, the lowest storey is an adaptation of the Doric order, and here, too, there are arches between the pilasters. But though Alberti had thus given the old city palace a modern look by reverting to Roman forms he did not quite break with Gothic traditions. We need only compare the palace windows with those on the façade of Notre-Dame in Paris, page 189, figure 125, to discover an unexpected similarity. Alberti has merely 'translated' a Gothic design into classical forms by smoothing out the 'barbaric' pointed arch and using the elements of the classical order in a traditional context. This achievement of Alberti is typical. Painters and sculptors in fifteenth-century Florence also often found themselves in a situation in which they had to adapt the new programme to an old tradition. The mixture between new and old, between Gothic traditions and modern the forms, is characteristic of many masters in the middle of the century. The greatest of these Florentine masters who succeeded in reconciling the new achievements with the old tradition was a sculptor of Donatello's generation, Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378 – 1455). Figure 164 shows one of his reliefs for the same font in Siena for which Donatello made the "Dance of Salome", page 232, figure 152. Of Donatello's work we could say that everything was new; Ghiberti's looks much less startling at first sight. We notice that the arrangement of the scene is not so very different from the one used by the famous brass founder of Liege in the twelfth century, page 179, figure 118: Christ in the center, flanked by St. John the Baptist and the ministering angels with God the Father and the Dove appearing up in Heaven. Even in the treatment of details Ghiberti's work recalls that of his medieval forerunners - the loving care with which he arranges the folds of the drapery may remind us of such fourteenth-century | | | | :-------------- | :-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | **Figure 165** | **Fra Angelico** | | | **The Annunciation,** 1440 | | | Fresco, $187 \times 157 \text{ }cm, 73 \frac{5}{8 \text{ }} \times 62 \text{ }in.$ Museo di San Marco, Florence| | *Description:* | *A wall painting with a central arched frame The painting depicts the Annunciation with the Archangel Gabriel greeting the Virgin Mary.*| goldsmith's work as the Holy Virgin on page 210, figure 139. And yet Ghiberti's relief is in its own way as vigorous and as convincing as Donatello's companion piece. He, too, has learned to characterize each figure and to make us understand the part each plays: the beauty and humility of Christ, the Lamb of God; the solemn and energetic gesture of St. John, the emaciated prophet from the wilderness, and the heavenly host of angels who silently look at each other in joy and wonder. And while Donatello's new dramatic way of representing the sacred scene somewhat upset the clear arrangement which had been the pride of earlier days, Ghiberti took care to remain lucid and restrained. He does not give us the idea of real space at which Donatello was aiming. He prefers to give us only a hint of depth and to let his principal figures stand out clearly against a neutral background. Just as Ghiberti remained faithful to some of the ideas of Gothic art, without refusing to make use of the new discoveries of his century, the great painter Fra Angelico (brother Angelico) of Fiesole near Florence (1387 – 1455) applied the new methods of Masaccio mainly in order to express the traditional ideas of religious art. Fra Angelico was a friar of the Dominican order, and the frescoes he painted in his Florentine monastery of San Marco round about 1440 are among his most beautiful works. He painted a sacred scene in each monk's cell and at the end of every corridor, and as one walks from one to the other in the stillness of the old building one feels something of the spirit in which these works were conceived. Figure 165 shows a picture of the Annunciation which he painted in one of the cells. We at once that the art of perspective presented no difficulty to him. The cloister where the Virgin kneels is represented as convincingly as the vault in Masaccio's famous fresco, page 228, figure 149. Yet is was clearly not Fra Angelico's main intention to 'break a hole into the walk'. Like Simone Martini in the fourteenth century, page 213, figure 141, he only wanted to represent the sacred story in all its beauty and simplicity. There is hardly any movement in Fra Angelico's painting and hardly any suggestions of real solid bodies. But l think it is all the more moving because of its humility which is that of a great artist who deliberately renounced any display of modernity despite his profound understanding of the problems which Brunelleschi and Masaccio had introduced into art. We can study the fascination of these problems and also their difficulty in the work of another Florentine, the painter Paolo Uccello (1397-1475), among whose best-preserved works is the | | | | :------------------ | :-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | **Figure 166** | **Paolo Uccello,** | | | **The Battle of San Romano, c. 1450** Probably from a room in the Palazzo Medici, | | | Florence, oil on wood $181.6 \times 320 \text{ }cm, 71 \frac{1}{2} \times 126 \text{ }in$, National Gallery, London | | | | | *Description:* | *An oil painting depicting a battle scene showing knights in armor tilting lances and fallen warriors.* | | **Figure 167** | Detail of figure 166 | | *Description:* | *A close up shot of the fallen soldier on a battlefield, showing the artist's use of perspective . * | battle scene in the National Gallery, figure 166. The picture was probably intended to be placed above the wainscoting (panelling covering the lower part of the wall) of a room in the Palazzo Medici, the city palace of the most powerful and wealthy of the Florentine merchant families. it represents an episode from Florentine history, still topical when the picture was painted, the rout San Romano 1432, when Florentine crops defeated their enemies in one of the many battles between the Italian factions. Superficially the picture may look medieval enough These knights in armour with their long and heavy lances, riding as if to a' tournament, may remind us of a medieval romance of chivalry, nor does the way in which the scene is represented strike us at first as very modern. Both horses and men look a little wooden, almost like toys, and the whole gay picture seems very remote from the reality of war. But if we ask ourselves why it is that these hordes look somewhat like rocking-horses and the whole scene reminds us a little of a puppet-show, we shall make a curious discovery. It is precisely because the painter was so fascinated by the new possibilities of art that he did everything to make his figures stand out in space as if they carved and not painted. It was said of Uccello that the discovery of perspective had so impressed him that he spent nights and days drawing objects in foreshortening and setting himself ever new problems. His fellow artists used to tell that he was so engrossed in these studies that he would hardly look up when his wife called him to go to bed, and would exclaim: 'what a sweet thing perspective is!' We can see something of these fascination in the painting. Uccello obviously took great pains to represent the various pieces of armour which litter the ground in correct foreshortening. His greatest pride was probably the figure of the fallen warrior lying on the ground, the foreshortened representation of which must have been most difficult, figure 167. No such figure had been painted before and, though it looks rather too small in relation to the other figures, we can imagine what sort it must have caused. We find trace all over the picture of the interest which Uccello took in perspective and of the spell it exerted over his mind. Even the broken lances lying on the ground are so arranged that they point towards their common 'vanishing point'. It this neat mathematical arrangement which is partly responsible for the artificial appearance of the stage on which the battle seems to take place. If we turn back from this pageant of chivalry to Van Eyck's picture of knights, page 238, figure 157, and the Limbourg miniature, page 219, figure 144, with which we compared it, we may see more clearly what Uccello owed to the Gothic tradition, | | | | :---------------- | :----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | **Figure 168** | **Benozzo Gozzoli,** | | | **The Journey of the Magi to Bethlehem, 1459-63** | | | Detail of fresco, chapel | | | of the Palazzo Medici- Riccardi, Florence | | *Description:* | *A detail image from a fresco, showing a procession with richly dressed figures on horseback traveling landscape. The artwork exhibits vibrant colors.* | and how he transformed it. Van Eyck, in the north, had changed the forms of the International style by adding more and more details from observation and trying to copy the surfaces of things down to the minutest shade. Uccello rather chose the opposite approach. By means of his beloved art of perspective, he tried to construct a converting stage on which his figures would appear solid and meal. Solid they undoubtedly look, but the effect is a little reminiscent of the stereoscopic picture which one looks at through a pair of lenses. Uccello had not yet learned how to use the effects of light and shade and air to mellow the harsh outlines of a strictly perspective rendering. Put if we stand in front of the actual painting in the National Gallery, we do not feel that anything is amiss, for, despite his preoccupation with applied geometry, uccello was a real artist. While painter such as Fra Angelico could make use of the new without changing the spirit of the old, while Uccello in his turn was completely captivated by the problems of the new, less devout and less ambitious artists applied the new methods gaily without worrying overmuch about their difficulty. The public probably liked these masters who gave them the best of both worlds. Thus the commission for painting the walls of the private chapel in the city palace of the Medici went to Benozzo Gozzoli (c.1421-97), a pupil of Fra Angelico, but apparently a man of very different outlook. Не covered the walls of the chapel with a picture of the cavalcade of the three Magi and made them travel in truly royal state through a smiling landscape, figure 168. The biblical episodes gives him the opportunity of displaying beautiful finery and gorgeous costumes, a fairy world of charm and gaiety. We have been this taste for representing the pageantry of noble pastimes developed in Burgundy, page 219, figure 144, with which the Medici entertained close trade relations. Gozzoli seems intent upon showing that the new achievements can be used to make these gay pictures of contemporary life even more vivid and enjoyable. We have no reason to quarrel with him for that. The life of the period was indeed so picturesque and colorful that we must be grateful to those minor masters who preserved a record of these delights in their works and not one who goes to Florence should miss the joy of a visit to this small chapel, in which something of the zest and savor of a festive life seems still to linger. Meanwhile, other painters in the cities north and south of Florence had absorbed the message of the new art of Donatello and Masaccio, and was perhaps even more eager to profit by it than the Florentines themselves. There was Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506), who worked first in the famous university town Padua, and then at the court of the lords of Mantua, both in northern Italy. In a Paduan church, | | | | :--------------- | :------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | | **Figure 169** | **Andrea Mantegna** | | | **St James on the way to his execution, c. 1455** | | | Fresco, destroyed; formerly church of the Eremitani, Padua | | *Description:* | *A grayscale photo of Fresco of St James escorted on the way to execution, with a triumphal arch showing as the city gate.* | quite near the chapel where Giotto had painted his famous frescoes, Mantegna painted a series of wall-paintings illustrating the legend of St James. The church was heavily damaged by bombing during World War II, and most of these wonderful paintings by Mantegna were destroyed. It is a sad loss, because they were surely among the greatest works of art of time. One of them, figure 169 showed St James being escorted to his place of execution. Like Giotto or Donatello, Mantegna tried to imagine quite clearly what the scene must have looked like in reality, put the standards of what he called reality had become much more exacting since Giotto's day. What had mattered to Giotto was the inner meaning of the story - how men and women would move and behave in a given situation. Mantegna was also interested in the outward circumstances. He knew that St James had lived in the periods of the Raman Emperors and he was anxious to reconstruct the scene just as it might have actually happened. He had made a special study of classical monuments for this purpose. The city gate through which St James has just been led is a Roman triumphal arch, and the soldiers of escort all wear the dress and of the armor of Roman legionnaires as we see them represented on authentic classical monuments. is not only in these details of costume and ornament that the painting reminds us of ancient sculpture. The whole scene breathes the spirit of Roman art in its harsh simplicity and austere grandeur. The differences, to deed, between the Florentine frescoes of Benozzo Gozzoli and Mantegna's works which were painted approximately during the same years could hardly be more pronounced. In Gozzoli's gay pageantry we recognized a return to the taste of the International Gothic style. Mantegna, on the other band, carries on where Masaccio had left off. His figures are as statuesque and impressive as Masaccio's. Like Masaccio, he uses the new art of perspective with eagerness, but he does not exploit is as Uccello did to show off the new effect which could be achieved by means of his magic. Mantegna rather uses perspective to create the stage on which his figures seem to stand and move like solid, tangible beings. He distributes them as a skilled theatrical producer might have done. so as to convey the significance of the moment and the the course of the episode. We can see what is happening: the procession escorting St James has halted for a moment because one of the persecutors has repented and has thrown himself at the feet of Saint, to receive his blessing. The saint has turned' round calmly to bless the man while the Roman soldiers stand by watch on of them impassively the other liking his hand, and as expressives gesture, which seems to convey that he, too, is moved, The round the arches frames this scene and separates the trial of the watching. crowds pushed back by the guards. | | | | :-------------- | :----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | **Figure 170** | **Piero della Francesca** | | | **Constantine's dream, ©.1460** | | | Detail of a fresco, church of S. Francesco, Arezzo | | *Description:* | *This color photo shows part of a fresco with an open tent in a style reminiscent of play. One side shows soldiers while inside shows Emperor asleep and an Angel.* | While Mantegna was the applying me methods of the art in northern Italy, another great painter, Piero della Francesca(14162-92), did the same in the region south of Florence, in the towns of Arezzo and Urbino. Like Gozzoli's and Mantegna's frescoes, Piero della Francesca's were painted shortly after the middle of the fifteenth century, that that is about a generation after the Masaccio. The episode in the figure is shown the famous legend of the dream which made the Emperor Constantine accept the Christian faith. Before a crucial battle with his rival, he dreamt that an angel showed him the Cross and said: 'Under this sign you will be victorious. Piero's Fresco represents the scene at night in the Emperor's camp before the bottle. We look in the open tent, where the Emperor lies asleep on his camp bed. His bodyguard sits by his side, while two soldiers are also keeping ground. The quiet night scene is suddenly illuminated by flash of light as and angel rushes down from Heaven holding the symbol of the cross in his outstretched hand. As with Mantegna, we are somewhat reminded of the scene in a play. There is a stage with quite clearly marked, and there is nothing to divert our attention from the essential action. Like Mantegna, Peoro has spoken over the dress of his Roman legionaries and, him, he has avoided the gay and colourful details which Gozzoli crowded into his scenes. Piero, too, had mastered the art of perspective completely and, the way in which is shows the figure of the angel foreshortening is a so bold as to be almost confusing, especially is small reproduction. But to these geometrical devices for suggesting the space of the stage he has added a new one of the equal importance: the treatment of light. Medieval Artist had taken hardly and notice of light. Their Flat figures cast no shadows, or, Massacio had also been a pioneer in this respect the round and the solid figures of his paintings were forcefully modelled in light to the shade, page 228, figure is 149. But no has one seen the immense new possibilities of the means as clear is like Piero della Francesca. in to that picture light is not only helps is to model the forms of the figures, is but equal in importance to the perspective and the creating the illusion in depth. The soldier lies like a dark silhouette is to before like the brightest likely opening of the tent. We feel the distance and the separates and sold and also show you from the steps to which the bodyguard is setting and whose figure in and turn standards to be set off the flash and the lights that emanates and the the angel. We are made this feel the roundness of the tent, and the hollow enclose just, a much by means of the light and the foreshortening and perspective light and shade perform and then you create the mysterious atmosphere of those scene in the death of night when there is emperor that is very change is course the history.This impressive simplicity and the calm and the Piero is greatly to the Masaccio. While these and other artists were not applying to the inventions of the great generation to the Florentine masters, artists in Florence became increasingly aware of the new problems that these inventions had created. In the first flesh there is a triumph, they may have thought that the discovery of perspective the story of nature could solve all their difficulty But we must be get that the art altogether different and this the size. The the artists means the technique devices can but as the can hardly a get sign. theEach and one the new the perfect pattern. The the fourteenth-century illustrated calendar or the thirteenth-century relief "Death" that is for 139 in we marked.