Assisi: Cimabue and Giotto

 

 

 

Edward Hutton regarded the Church of San Francesco as the source of all the Italian art to come. Below he discusses Cimabue and Giotto, even though many of the frescoes attributed to Giotto may have been done by his followers.  First, the lower church. 

 

In the right-hand transept is the grandly impressive work of Cimabue, a great fresco of the Madonna enthroned with angels and with St. Francis himself standing there. Though not painted in the saint’s lifetime, it is, one might think, a fine portrait and well preserved, whereas the figures of Virgin and Child have suffered much from restoration. …

The other frescoes in this right transept are the work of the assistants of Giotto and are for the most part concerned with the life of Our Lord. They are of great beauty; the frescoes of the Birth of Christ, and of the Flight into Egypt, are among the sweetest and loveliest things in the Lower Church….As one looks at these frescoes, one realizes, perhaps more easily than in the works in the vaults over the high altar, to what splendour Italian art was being called. And yet, if we compare them with that early picture of the Madonna and Child, by Cimabue, we are aware that, after all, something has been lost. How lovely that fresco of the Madonna and Child is, how sacred and noble, and how surely it marks for us the change that is coming from the Byzantine manner, to the manner of Giotto. [8-9]…

On to the Upper Church.

The nave, choir and both transepts were painted by Cimabue, according to Mr. Berenson, between 1277 and 1280, and at any rate by 1296, the date we find inscribed in the apse. These frescoes, ruined though they be, are Cimabue’s most important work and the most important series of medieval wall-paintings in Italy. The finest of these is the great Crucifixion on the left wall of the left transept, most tragic in its majesty, and the arch-angels and angels above. [11]

Death of Lord of Celano

 

Giotto or others, working on the long spaces below these marvellous  works, could not have escaped their authority. Day by day as they worked on the frescoes of the life of St. Francis, which it may well be are not from Giotto’s own hand, these frescoes of the earlier masters, in all their noble beauty, no doubt told many a secret.  There are twenty-eight frescoes…. All taken from the Legends of S. Bonaventura…They are among the best known works of art in the world and have been written about again and again. Though there might seem to be little if anything of the work of Giotto himself in these frescoes how magnificent is the gesture of Pietro Bernadone in the fresco where S. Francis has been taken before the bishop only to renounce his father for ever; how naturally, in another fresco—that of the death of the Lord of Celano—the saint rises in haste from the table where he is sitting; how lovely are those angels who bear him to heaven, clothed in light, in the ruined picture of his death. Designed or not by the young Giotto, these frescoes are, in their simplicity and naturalness, the centre of the movement that was soon to excite all Italy to enthusiasm. They are earlier than the work attributed to him in the Lower Church, and they remain among the most precious things in Italy, strewn though she is with the triumphs of art. [12-13]

I am indebted to my English friend David Orme for the images above. Here is a link to his excellent online tour of San Francesco and its artworks.

 

###

 

Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 8-13. 

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. Croce

 To Edward Hutton, Florence's Piazza di S. Croce had the aspect of a  cemetery, but my wife and I loved to visit and found it to be teeming with life. We also found it difficult to view the work of Giotto in the Peruzzi chapel that he described so well.

 

The Piazza di S. Croce, in which stands the great Franciscan church of Florence, is still almost as it was in the sixteenth century when the Palazzo del Borgo on the southern side was painted in fresco by the facile brush of Passignano; but whatever charm so old and storied a place might have had for us…it is altogether spoiled and ruined, not only by the dishonouring statue of Dante, which for some unexplained reason has here found a resting place, but by the crude and staring façade of the church itself, a pretentious work of modern Italy, which lends to what was of old the gayest Piazza in the city, the very aspect of a cemetery.

(228)…

And indeed the very real beauty of the church consists in just that splendour of space and light which so few seem too have cared for, but which seems to me certainly in Italy the most precious thing in the world. And then S. Croce is really the Pantheon, as it were, of the city; the golden twilight of S. Maria Novella even would seem too gloomy for the resting place of heroes. Already before the sixteenth century it had been here  that Florence had set up the banners of those she delighted to honour….(229)

The Peruzzi chapel was built by the powerful family of that name, who had already done much for S. Croce, when about 1307 they employed Giotto to decorate these walls with frescoes of the story of St. John Baptist and St. John the Divine. In 1714…Bartolommeo di Simone Peruzzi caused the place to be restored, and it was then, as we may suppose, that the work of Giotto was covered with whitewash….In their original brightness they formed probably “the finest series of frescoes which Giotto ever produced”, but the hand of the restorer has spoiled them utterly, so that only the shadow of their former beauty remains, amid much that is hard or unpleasing…. (234)

 

But it is in the frescoes on the right wall that Giotto is seen at his highest; it is the story of St. John the divine; above he dreams on Patmos, below he raises Drusiana at the gate of Ephesus, and is himself received into heaven. Damaged though they be, there is nothing in all Italian art more fundamental, more simple, or more living than these frescoes. It is true that the Dream of St. John is almost ruined, and what we see today is very far from being what Giotto painted, but in the raising of Drusiana, and in the ascension of St. John we find a grandeur and force that are absent from painting till Giotto’s time, and for many years after his death. The restorer has done his best to obliterate all trace of Giotto’s achievement, especially in the fresco of Drusiana, but in spite of him we may see here Giotto’s very work, the essence of it at any rate, its intention and the variety of his powers of expressing himself. (235)

 

###

 

 

Edward Hutton: Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa, second edition, London, 1908. Pp. 228-235.

San Francesco: Cimabue and Giotto

 

 

 

Edward Hutton regarded the Church of San Francesco as the source of all the Italian art to come. Below he discusses Cimabue and Giotto, even though many of the frescoes attributed to Giotto may have been done by his followers.  First, the lower church. 

 

In the right-hand transept is the grandly impressive work of Cimabue, a great fresco of the Madonna enthroned with angels and with St. Francis himself standing there. Though not painted in the saint’s lifetime, it is, one might think, a fine portrait and well preserved, whereas the figures of Virgin and Child have suffered much from restoration. …

The other frescoes in this right transept are the work of the assistants of Giotto and are for the most part concerned with the life of Our Lord. They are of great beauty; the frescoes of the Birth of Christ, and of the Flight into Egypt, are among the sweetest and loveliest things in the Lower Church….As one looks at these frescoes, one realizes, perhaps more easily than in the works in the vaults over the high altar, to what splendour Italian art was being called. And yet, if we compare them with that early picture of the Madonna and Child, by Cimabue, we are aware that, after all, something has been lost. How lovely that fresco of the Madonna and Child is, how sacred and noble, and how surely it marks for us the change that is coming from the Byzantine manner, to the manner of Giotto. [8-9]…

On to the Upper Church.

The nave, choir and both transepts were painted by Cimabue, according to Mr. Berenson, between 1277 and 1280, and at any rate by 1296, the date we find inscribed in the apse. These frescoes, ruined though they be, are Cimabue’s most important work and the most important series of medieval wall-paintings in Italy. The finest of these is the great Crucifixion on the left wall of the left transept, most tragic in its majesty, and the arch-angels and angels above. [11]

Death of Lord of Celano

 

Giotto or others, working on the long spaces below these marvellous  works, could not have escaped their authority. Day by day as they worked on the frescoes of the life of St. Francis, which it may well be are not from Giotto’s own hand, these frescoes of the earlier masters, in all their noble beauty, no doubt told many a secret.  There are twenty-eight frescoes…. All taken from the Legends of S. Bonaventura…They are among the best known works of art in the world and have been written about again and again. Though there might seem to be little if anything of the work of Giotto himself in these frescoes how magnificent is the gesture of Pietro Bernadone in the fresco where S. Francis has been taken before the bishop only to renounce his father for ever; how naturally, in another fresco—that of the death of the Lord of Celano—the saint rises in haste from the table where he is sitting; how lovely are those angels who bear him to heaven, clothed in light, in the ruined picture of his death. Designed or not by the young Giotto, these frescoes are, in their simplicity and naturalness, the centre of the movement that was soon to excite all Italy to enthusiasm. They are earlier than the work attributed to him in the Lower Church, and they remain among the most precious things in Italy, strewn though she is with the triumphs of art. [12-13]

I am indebted to my English friend David Orme for the images above. Here is a link to his excellent online tour of San Francesco and its artworks.

 

###

 

Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 8-13. 

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, Croce

To Edward Hutton, Florence's Piazza di S. Croce had the aspect of  cemetery, but my wife and I loved to visit and found it to be teeming with life. We also found it difficult to view the work of Giotto in the Peruzzi chapel that he described so well.

 

The Piazza di S. Croce, in which stands the great Franciscan church of Florence, is still almost as it was in the sixteenth century when the Palazzo del Borgo on the southern side was painted in fresco by the facile brush of Passignano; but whatever charm so old and storied a place might have had for us…it is altogether spoiled and ruined, not only by the dishonouring statue of Dante, which for some unexplained reason has here found a resting place, but by the crude and staring façade of the church itself, a pretentious work of modern Italy, which lends to what was of old the gayest Piazza in the city, the very aspect of a cemetery.

(228)…

And indeed the very real beauty of the church consists in just that splendour of space and light which so few seem too have cared for, but which seems to me certainly in Italy the most precious thing in the world. And then S. Croce is really the Pantheon, as it were, of the city; the golden twilight of S. Maria Novella even would seem too gloomy for the resting place of heroes. Already before the sixteenth century it had been here  that Florence had set up the banners of those she delighted to honour….(229)

The Peruzzi chapel was built by the powerful family of that name, who had already done much for S. Croce, when about 1307 they employed Giotto to decorate these walls with frescoes of the story of St. John Baptist and St. John the Divine. In 1714…Bartolommeo di Simone Peruzzi caused the place to be restored, and it was then, as we may suppose, that the work of Giotto was covered with whitewash….In their original brightness they formed probably “the finest series of frescoes which Giotto ever produced”, but the hand of the restorer has spoiled them utterly, so that only the shadow of their former beauty remains, amid much that is hard or unpleasing…. (234)

 

But it is in the frescoes on the right wall that Giotto is seen at his highest; it is the story of St. John the divine; above he dreams on Patmos, below he raises Drusiana at the gate of Ephesus, and is himself received into heaven. Damaged though they be, there is nothing in all Italian art more fundamental, more simple, or more living than these frescoes. It is true that the Dream of St. John is almost ruined, and what we see today is very far from being what Giotto painted, but in the raising of Drusiana, and in the ascension of St. John we find a grandeur and force that are absent from painting till Giotto’s time, and for many years after his death. The restorer has done his best to obliterate all trace of Giotto’s achievement, especially in the fresco of Drusiana, but in spite of him we may see here Giotto’s very work, the essence of it at any rate, its intention and the variety of his powers of expressing himself. (235)

 

###

 

 

Edward Hutton: Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa, second edition, London, 1908. Pp. 228-235.