Florence Accademia: Giotto and Fra Angelico

 

Edward Hutton used his visit to the Accademia to trace the history of painting in Florence. He began with Giotto. 

Here in the Accademia in the Sala dei Maestri Toscani, you may see an altarpiece that has perhaps come to us from his hands, among much beautiful  languid work that is still in the shadow of the Middle Age, or that coming after him, has almost failed to understand his message, the words of life which may everywhere be found in his frescoes in Assisi, in Florence, in Padua spoiled though they be by the intervention of fools, the spoliation of the vandals.

Those strange and lovely altarpieces ruthlessly torn from  the convents and churches of Tuscany still keep inviolate the secret of those who, not without tears, made them for the love of God: once for sure they made a sunshine in some shadowy place. Hung here today in a museum, just so many specimens that we number and set in order, they seem rude and fantastic enough, and in the cold light of this salone, crowded together like so much furniture, they have lost all meaning or intention. They are dead, and we gaze at them almost with contempt; they will never move us again. That rude and almost terrible picture of Madonna and Saints with its little scenes from the life of our Lord, stolen from the Franciscan convent of S. Chiara at Lucca, what is it to us who pass by? Yet once it listened for the praises of the little nuns of S. Francis, and, who knows, may have heard the very voice of Il Poverello. That passionate and dreadful picture of S. Mary Magdalen covered by her hair as if with a robe of red gold, does it move us at all? Will it explain to us the rise of Florentine painting? And you, O learned archaeologist, you, O scientific critic, you, O careless and curious tourist, will it bring you any comfort to read (if you can) the inscription—

 

Ne despiretis, vos qui peccare soletis

Exempleque mea vos reperate Deo.” *

 

Those small pictures of the life of St. Mary, which surround her with their beauty, do you even know what they mean? And if you do, are they any more to you than an idle tale, a legend which has lost even its meaning? No, we look at these faint and far-off things merely with curiosity as a botanist looks through his albums, like one who does not know flowers…. (300-301)

 

Thus we come really into the midst of the fifteenth century, to the work of Fra Angelico, Fra Lippo Lippi, and Botticelli, which we have loved so much….

 

It is the Renaissance itself, the most simple and divine work it achieved in its earliest and best days that we see in the work of Fra Angelico. One beautiful and splendid picture, the descent from the Cross, alas! repainted, stands near Gentile’s Adoration… but the greater part of Angelico’s work to be found here is in another room. There, in many little pictures, you may see the world as Paradise, the very garden where God talked with Adam. …he will tell us of Paradise, beneath whose towers, in a garden of wild flowers, the saints dance with the angels, crowned with garlands, in the light that streams through the gates of heaven from the throne of God.

How may we rightly speak of such a man, who in his simplicity has seen angels on the hills of Tuscany, the flowers and trees of our world scattered in heaven?...That such things as these could come out of the cloister is not so marvellous as that, since they grew there, we should have suppressed the convents and turned the friars away. For just as the lily of art towered first and broke into blossom on the grave of St. Francis, so here in the convent of S. Marco of the Dominicans was one who for the first time seems to have seen the world, the very byways and hills of Tuscany, and dreamed of them as Heaven. 

 

###

 

 *Do not despair, you who are accustomed to sin.

By my example seek God.

 "Do not despair, you who are accustomed to sin. And by my example, seek God."

 

Edward Hutton: Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa, second edition, London, 1908. Pp. 300-305.

Florence: S. Marco and Fra Angelico

 In discussing the Dominican convent of S. Marco in Florence, Edward Hutton quoted Vasari who claimed that the convent is "the most perfectly arranged, the most beautiful and most convenient building of its kind that can be found in Italy." Hutton's own description showed his love for the work of Fra Angelico.

 

Fra Angelico was nearly fifty years old when his Order took possession of S. Marco. Already he had painted three choir books, which Cosimo so loved that he wished nothing else to be used in the convent, for, as Vasari tells us, their beauty was such that  no words can do justice to it. Born in 1387, he had entered the Order of St. Dominic in 1408 at Fiesole.  The convent into which he had come had only been founded in 1406… he had early been a traveller, going with the brethren to Foligno and later to Cortona, returning to Fiesole in 1418. Who amid these misfortunes could have been his master? It might seem that in the silence of the sunny cloister in the long summer days of Umbria, some angel passing up the long valleys stayed for a moment beside him, so that for ever after he could not forget that vision….It is certainly some divinity that we find in those clouds of saints and angels, those marvellously sweet Madonnas, those majestic and touching crucifixions, that with a simplicity and sincerity beyond praise, Angelico has left up and down Italy, and not least in the convent of S. Marco.

 

Yes, it is a divine world he has dreamed of, peopled by saints and martyrs, where the flowers are quickly woven into crowns and the light streams from the gates of Paradise, and every breeze whispers the sweet sibilant name of Jesus, and there, on the bare but beautiful roads, Christ meets His disciples, or at the convent gate welcomes a traveller, and if He be not there, He has but just passed by, and if He has not just passed by He is to come. It is for Him the sun is darkened, to lighten His footsteps the moon shall rise; because His love has lightened the world men go happily, and because He is here the world is a garden. In all that convent of S. Marco you cannot turn a corner but Christ is awaiting you, or enter a room but His smile changes your heart, or linger in the threshold, but He bids you enter in, or eat at midday but you see Him on the Cross, and hear, “Take, eat; this is My Body, which was given for you.”…                                                                      

 

Pass into the Refectory and He is there; go into the Capitolo and He is there also, the Prince of life between two malefactors, hanging on a cross for love of the world, and in His face all the beauty and sweetness of the earth have been gathered and purged of their dross, and between His arms is the kingdom of Heaven. In that room the name of Jesus continually vibrates with an intense and passionate life, more wonderful, more beautiful, and more terrible than the tremor of all the sea. And it has brought together in adoration not the world…but those who above the tumult of their hearts have caught some faint far echo of that supernal concord which has bound together the whispering universe; for there beneath the Cross of Jesus are none but saints…

Pass into the dormitories, and in every cell you enter Jesus is there before you; on the threshold the angel announces His advent, and little by little, scene by scene, you are involved in the beauty and tragedy of His life….It is the spirit of Christianity that we see here, blossoming everywhere, haphazard like the wild flowers that are the armies of spring.

 

###

Note: Image of the Annunciation by David Orme.

 

 

Edward Hutton: Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa, second edition, London, 1908. Pp. 208-210.

St. Peter's: Oratory of Pope Nicholas V.

 

 

Although he disliked the pomp and splendor of the St. Peter's, Edward Hutton loved the chapel of Pope Nicholas V with its frescoes by Far Angelico. ***

Amid all the dying pomp of the Vatican, the Oratory of Nicholas V stands like a little country chapel, as simple as that, and gay as it were with the wildflowers of Tuscany. Of all the sanctuaries of the Eternal City, it alone keeps about it something of the mysticism and charm of the early Renaissance—of S. Francis, for instance. After the material splendor of S.  Peter’s, the cold magnificence of the great palace of the Popes, it offers you a marvelous repose, in which it is possible to forget even the papacy and to pray to God. And, indeed, in all the Vatican it alone is a place of perfect happiness full of sweetness and light. One finds there nothing of Roman somberness and solemnity, but, as it were, an intimate silence and joy. And to cross the threshold unexpectedly in the midst of the immense ghostly palace, so full of unreal and material things, is to come suddenly out of a dream into the sanctuary of home…. 196

 

Fra Angelico;

 

It was in 1445 that Pope Eugenius had invited Fra Giovanni da Fiesole to Rome, where he remained till, Eugenius dying in 1447, Nicholas V besought him to decorate the new chapel he was building at the Vatican…. 

 

There on the walls Angelico has painted the life and death of SS. Stephen and Laurence….

 

As one looks at these living and exquisite pictures, the work of an old man of sixty three, one is chiefly struck, I think, by their freshness, as though the influence of Rome had revealed to a mind, enclosed till then by a country cloister among the wildflowers, the realities of the world, of life, that contemporary life which was about to become so splendid. The gentle friar, who has dreamed his life away among the saints and has walked hand in hand with Jesus, as it were, has become, under the influence of the Eternal City, the most perfect and most satisfying of naturalists, not copying life but creating it, out of a profound realization of it.  Some joy always secretly in his heart has led him, suddenly so observant of men, to just this realism, as we might say, which is so new and so charming a feature of his work here in the Vatican. Consider then that woman who in the ministration of S. Stephen, lightly, lightly holds her child’s hand, oblivious of everything but the emotion which the saint’s words have suddenly awakened in her heart: or that blind man, who, when S. Laurence distributes alms, approaches with so uncertain a step, one hand stretched out before him, the other holding firmly, blindly to the friendly staff: It is as though we had really seen these people, so surely has Angelico drawn them from the mere details of life in the Eternal City. How well they must have loved one another, these two, the Pope who was the greatest humanist in Italy…and the artist who had, long and long ago, mistaken earth for heaven in his joy at its perfection, only to find here at last, it might seem, that it was in some sort the only truth he might really apprehend. (201-202)

 

 ###

 

 Edward Hutton: Rome, fourth edition, 1922.

*** A reader directed me to a virtual tour of the Pope Nicholas chapel. 

Perugia: Pinacoteca Vannucci

Edward Hutton devoted a lengthy chapter to the Pinacoteca Vannucci, Perugia'a picture gallery of Umbrian painting. He especially liked two famous altarpieces taken from their original locations. Looking at these magnificent paintings, it is hard to imagine what ordinary parishioners thought while attending Mass.

The Pinacoteca Vannucci, the Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria, on the top floor of the Palazzo Communale of Perugia, contains the most complete and representative collection of Umbrian pictures that has anywhere been brought together, as well as a number of early Sienese paintings and a few outstanding masterpieces of various schools; a Madonna and Child by Duccio di Buoninsegna, an altarpiece by Fra Angelico, and one by his pupil Benozzo Gozzoli, an altarpiece by Piero della Francesca and another by Luca Signorelli.

 

Unlike Florence and Siena, Umbria had no Giotto nor Duccio to point out the road she should follow in her art. Umbrian painting, which is not solely centered in Perugia, but which had several centres—Gubbio, Foligno, to name no others—in which it flourished, was really provincial in the true sense of the of the word. And it was from beginning to end the handmaid of the Church, and remained Christian when almost everywhere else art had become pagan. …

 

The two major single treasures of the gallery are the altarpiece by Fra Angelico and the altarpiece by Piero della Francesca.

Fra Angelico

The altarpiece by Fra Angelico is a masterpiece, indeed he never surpassed in feeling and quality some of the smaller figures. The Madonna and Child are enthroned under a baldacchino.  On either side are two angels, the foremost two offering baskets of roses. On panels at the sides are various full-length figures of saints: on the left S. Dominic and S. Nicholas, and these are the most exquisite; on the right S. John Baptist and S. Catherine of Alexandria, perhaps the work of an assistant. … Unfortunately, the face of the Virgin has been damaged; otherwise it seems to be in an excellent state, surprisingly bright in colour, and some of the figures of saints are of such beauty that I do not think Angelico ever surpassed them.

The large polyptych by Piero della Francesco is the other great single treasure of the gallery. It is a puzzling work. In the midst of a late Gothic altarpiece, the Madonna and Child enthroned in the centre with four full-length saints, SS. Anthony, John Baptist, Francis and Elisabeth at the sides, much in the form of Fra Angelico’s altarpiece here. Above in a seven-sided pediment, is the Annunciation; below are two rounds with figures of S. Clare and S. Agatha, and below in the predella three scenes: a miracle of S. Anthony, S. Francis receiving the Stigmata and a miracle of S. Elizabeth of Hungary. …

I find the main part of the altarpiece disappointing, as indeed are the predella scenes. But the Annunciation I find one of the most enchanting of Piero’s works. I can never leave it without returning again and again. And then how characteristic it is of the artistic moment dominated by perspective and the theories of Alberti and the practice of Brunelleschi, Laurana, Uccello and Masaccio! What that gracious and formidable angel is announcing to the Madonna, so classical in her monumentality and repose, is not the birth of Christ. but the rebirth, the renaissance, of Antiquity. It may well be that this is a work of Piero’s old age, but if so, your old men shall see visions.

 

###

 

Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 179, 184-186.

Florence Accademia: Giotto and Fra Angelico

Edward Hutton used his visit to the Accademia to trace the history of painting in Florence. He began with Giotto. 

Here in the Accademia in the Sala dei Maestri Toscani, you may see an altarpiece that has perhaps come to us from his hands, among much beautiful  languid work that is still in the shadow of the Middle Age, or that coming after him, has almost failed to understand his message, the words of life which may everywhere be found in his frescoes in Assisi, in Florence, in Padua spoiled though they be by the intervention of fools, the spoliation of the vandals.

Those strange and lovely altarpieces ruthlessly torn from  the convents and churches of Tuscany still keep inviolate the secret of those who, not without tears, made them for the love of God: once for sure they made a sunshine in some shadowy place. Hung here today in a museum, just so many specimens that we number and set in order, they seem rude and fantastic enough, and in the cold light of this salone, crowded together like so much furniture, they have lost all meaning or intention. They are dead, and we gaze at them almost with contempt; they will never move us again. That rude and almost terrible picture of Madonna and Saints with its little scenes from the life of our Lord, stolen from the Franciscan convent of S. Chiara at Lucca, what is it to us who pass by? Yet once it listened for the praises of the little nuns of S. Francis, and, who knows, may have heard the very voice of Il Poverello. That passionate and dreadful picture of S. Mary Magdalen covered by her hair as if with a robe of red gold, does it move us at all? Will it explain to us the rise of Florentine painting? And you, O learned archaeologist, you, O scientific critic, you, O careless and curious tourist, will it bring you any comfort to read (if you can) the inscription—

 

Ne despiretis, vos qui peccare soletis

Exempleque mea vos reperate Deo.”

 

Those small pictures of the life of St. Mary, which surround her with their beauty, do you even know what they mean? And if you do, are they any more to you than an idle tale, a legend which has lost even its meaning? No, we look at these faint and far-off things merely with curiosity as a botanist looks through his albums, like one who does not know flowers…. (300-301)

 

Thus we come really into the midst of the fifteenth century, to the work of Fra Angelico, Fra Lippo Lippi, and Botticelli, which we have loved so much….

 

It is the Renaissance itself, the most simple and divine work it achieved in its earliest and best days that we see in the work of Fra Angelico. One beautiful and splendid picture, the descent from the Cross, alas! repainted, stands near Gentile’s Adoration… but the greater part of Angelico’s work to be found here is in another room. There, in many little pictures, you may see the world as Paradise, the very garden where God talked with Adam. …he will tell us of Paradise, beneath whose towers, in a garden of wild flowers, the saints dance with the angels, crowned with garlands, in the light that streams through the gates of heaven from the throne of God.

How may we rightly speak of such a man, who in his simplicity has seen angels on the hills of Tuscany, the flowers and trees of our world scattered in heaven?...That such things as these could come out of the cloister is not so marvellous as that, since they grew there, we should have suppressed the convents and turned the friars away. For just as the lily of art towered first and broke into blossom on the grave of St. Francis, so here in the convent of S. Marco of the Dominicans was one who for the first time seems to have seen the world, the very byways and hills of Tuscany, and dreamed of them as Heaven. 

 

###

 

 

 

Edward Hutton: Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa, second edition, London, 1908. Pp. 300-305.

Florence: S. Marco and Fra Angelico

In discussing the Dominican convent of S. Marco in Florence, Edward Hutton quoted Vasari who claimed that the convent is "the most perfectly arranged, the most beautiful and most convenient building of its kind that can be found in Italy." Hutton's own description showed his love for the work of Fra Angelico.

 

Fra Angelico was nearly fifty years old when his Order took possession of S. Marco. Already he had painted three choir books, which Cosimo so loved that he wished nothing else to be used in the convent, for, as Vasari tells us, their beauty was such that  no words can do justice to it. Born in 1387, he had entered the Order of St. Dominic in 1408 at Fiesole.  The convent into which he had come had only been founded in 1406… he had early been a traveller, going with the brethren to Foligno and later to Cortona, returning to Fiesole in 1418. Who amid these misfortunes could have been his master? It might seem that in the silence of the sunny cloister in the long summer days of Umbria, some angel passing up the long valleys stayed for a moment beside him, so that for ever after he could not forget that vision….It is certainly some divinity that we find in those clouds of saints and angels, those marvellously sweet Madonnas, those majestic and touching crucifixions, that with a simplicity and sincerity beyond praise, Angelico has left up and down Italy, and not least in the convent of S. Marco.

 

Yes, it is a divine world he has dreamed of, peopled by saints and martyrs, where the flowers are quickly woven into crowns and the light streams from the gates of Paradise, and every breeze whispers the sweet sibilant name of Jesus, and there, on the bare but beautiful roads, Christ meets His disciples, or at the convent gate welcomes a traveller, and if He be not there, He has but just passed by, and if He has not just passed by He is to come. It is for Him the sun is darkened, to lighten His footsteps the moon shall rise; because His love has lightened the world men go happily, and because He is here the world is a garden. In all that convent of S. Marco you cannot turn a corner but Christ is awaiting you, or enter a room but His smile changes your heart, or linger in the threshold, but He bids you enter in, or eat at midday but you see Him on the Cross, and hear, “Take, eat; this is My Body, which was given for you.”…                                                                      

 

Pass into the Refectory and He is there; go into the Capitolo and He is there also, the Prince of life between two malefactors, hanging on a cross for love of the world, and in His face all the beauty and sweetness of the earth have been gathered and purged of their dross, and between His arms is the kingdom of Heaven. In that room the name of Jesus continually vibrates with an intense and passionate life, more wonderful, more beautiful, and more terrible than the tremor of all the sea. And it has brought together in adoration not the world…but those who above the tumult of their hearts have caught some faint far echo of that supernal concord which has bound together the whispering universe; for there beneath the Cross of Jesus are none but saints…

Pass into the dormitories, and in every cell you enter Jesus is there before you; on the threshold the angel announces His advent, and little by little, scene by scene, you are involved in the beauty and tragedy of His life….It is the spirit of Christianity that we see here, blossoming everywhere, haphazard like the wild flowers that are the armies of spring.

 

###

Note: Image of the Annunciation by David Orme.

 

 

Edward Hutton: Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa, second edition, London, 1908. Pp. 208-210.

Edward Hutton: Cortona

 

Edward Hutton had his own favorite travel guide. He quoted him as an introduction to his visit to Cortona. but when he got there, his interests  differed from those of his guide.  He preferred a magnificent Annunciation by Far Angelico, and then spent most of this chapter on a life and appreciation of Cortona's St. Margaret.

“Traveller, thou art approaching Cortona! Dost thou reverence age—that fullness of years which as Pliny says, ‘in man is venerable, in cities sacred’? Here is that which demands thy reverence. Here is a city, compared to which Rome is but of yesterday—to which most other  cities of ancient renown are fresh and green. Thou mayest have wandered far and wide through Italy—nothing hast thou seen more venerable than Cortona. Ere the days of Hector and Achilles, ere Troy itself arose—Cortona was…. Hast thou respect for fallen greatness? Yon solemn city was once the proudest and mightiest in the land, the metropolis of Etruria and now—but enter its gates and look around.”  

 

Dear Dennis, companion of my boyhood, I have done thy bidding, and if I have forsaken what thou hast loved so eloquently for things that were hidden from thee—forgive me, master. It was thy hand led me thither, and in thy name I went. Also I did thy bidding. I “looked around,” and it seemed to me that Corythus was nothing to me, but Frate Elias very much, and as for heaven-born Dardanus, what was he after all beside S. Margaret, Sister of the Seraphs, Lily of the Fields? … 

 

Nothing, I think, in all Tuscany will impress and astonish the traveller more than his walks up and down Cortona through that maze of narrow precipitous streets between the sombre palaces founded on the naked tock, and cliffs and boulders that a hundred generations have been powerless to wear away. Cortona is indeed, as Dennis says, the most ancient of cities, nor is there any city in Italy that has kept so medieval an aspect. …

 

It will thus be seen that Cortona has much to offer us, a wall of immense antiquity, streets narrow and precipitous, palaces and buildings of the Middle Age. Happily, too, she possesses many of those more human works which smile at us from the early Renaissance. … 

 

Opposite the Duomo is the Church of Il Gesu, the baptistry built in 1505, and here, in fact, are preserved the great treasures of Cortona.

 

The finest of these is the exquisite Annunciation from S. Domenico, which under a delicate loggia just without the house at sunset in the cool of the day Madonna has been reading, when suddenly over the flowers Gabriel has come to her with his Ave Gratia Plena, and she has crossed  her white hands on her bosom, and, the book still open on her knee, has leaned a little breathlessly forward as though to escape, And indeed as the angel has said, the Lord is with her, the Dove hovers sweetly over her bright head, and God the Father Himself overhears His own message passing down under the arches. In the background, as though to show us quite clearly what is happening, we see as in a vision our first parents expelled from Paradise, that Eden to which Mary is about to win for us admission again …. 

 

It is strange that Cortona should have held almost at that same time two such different Franciscans as Frate Elias and S. Margaret—the one a great statesman who abhorred poverty, the other a poor woman who loved it. Elias built here in the city a vast palace full of every sort of splendour that later became the Vescovado, Margarita built the hospital and restored the church which, after being rebuilt, was to bear her name. And it is she who is the victor, not he, for all his power and wealth and greatness of mind. He is forgotten by all men save a few historians, while her name is still familiarly dear on the lips of the peasants and children, who invoke her, their all-powerful friend, as we may any day in the fields or the byways about her home:--

 

“O Lily of the fields,

 O violet of humility,

 O little Sister of the Seraphs,

           Ora pro nobis”

 ###

Edward Hutton, Siena and Southern Tuscany, 1910, pp. 281-294.

Vatican: Chapel of Pope Nicholas

 

Although he disliked the pomp and splendor of the Vatican, Edward Hutton loved the chapel of Pope Nicholas V with its frescoes by Far Angelico. ***

Amid all the dying pomp of the Vatican, the Oratory of Nicholas V stands like a little country chapel, as simple as that, and gay as it were with the wildflowers of Tuscany. Of all the sanctuaries of the Eternal City, it alone keeps about it something of the mysticism and charm of the early Renaissance—of S. Francis, for instance. After the material splendor of S.  Peter’s, the cold magnificence of the great palace of the Popes, it offers you a marvelous repose, in which it is possible to forget even the papacy and to pray to God. And, indeed, in all the Vatican it alone is a place of perfect happiness full of sweetness and light. One finds there nothing of Roman somberness and solemnity, but, as it were, an intimate silence and joy. And to cross the threshold unexpectedly in the midst of the immense ghostly palace, so full of unreal and material things, is to come suddenly out of a dream into the sanctuary of home…. 196

 

Fra Angelico;

 

It was in 1445 that Pope Eugenius had invited Fra Giovanni da Fiesole to Rome, where he remained till, Eugenius dying in 1447, Nicholas V besought him to decorate the new chapel he was building at the Vatican…. 

 

There on the walls Angelico has painted the life and death of SS. Stephen and Laurence….

 

As one looks at these living and exquisite pictures, the work of an old man of sixty three, one is chiefly struck, I think, by their freshness, as though the influence of Rome had revealed to a mind, enclosed till then by a country cloister among the wildflowers, the realities of the world, of life, that contemporary life which was about to become so splendid. The gentle friar, who has dreamed his life away among the saints and has walked hand in hand with Jesus, as it were, has become, under the influence of the Eternal City, the most perfect and most satisfying of naturalists, not copying life but creating it, out of a profound realization of it.  Some joy always secretly in his heart has led him, suddenly so observant of men, to just this realism, as we might say, which is so new and so charming a feature of his work here in the Vatican. Consider then that woman who in the ministration of S. Stephen, lightly, lightly holds her child’s hand, oblivious of everything but the emotion which the saint’s words have suddenly awakened in her heart: or that blind man, who, when S. Laurence distributes alms, approaches with so uncertain a step, one hand stretched out before him, the other holding firmly, blindly to the friendly staff: It is as though we had really seen these people, so surely has Angelico drawn them from the mere details of life in the Eternal City. How well they must have loved one another, these two, the Pope who was the greatest humanist in Italy…and the artist who had, long and long ago, mistaken earth for heaven in his joy at its perfection, only to find here at last, it might seem, that it was in some sort the only truth he might really apprehend. (201-202)

 

 ###

 

 Edward Hutton: Rome, fourth edition, 1922.

*** A reader directed me to a virtual tour of the Nicholas chapel.