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.

 

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

Church of San Francesco: Simone Martini

  

 

 

Edward Hutton believed that in the upper and lower churches of San Francesco "the beginnings of Italian art can be studied." He began with the work of Simone Martini in the Chapel of San Martino.

 

As one passes into the nave of the great church the darkness is deeper. The walls are decorated with much destroyed frescoes by the Maestro di S. Francesco. The first chapel on the left, of San Martino, is painted in fresco by Simone Martini with scenes from the life of S. Martin. Simone Martini, born probably in Siena in 1283 was the pupil of Duccio, and not, so far as his work tells us, much influenced by Giotto. He has been called “the most lovable of all the Italian artists before the Renaissance”, and, indeed, looking on the strange beauty of his work here, who can doubt it? He is more aristocratic and refined than Giotto, has, indeed a sense of beauty subtler, though, perhaps less profound, than his. Is there anything in all pre-Renaissance art more lovely than these frescoes where S. Martin divides his cloak with a beggar, and later, as he lies asleep, has a vision of Christ wearing that same cloak? And best of all, perhaps, is that in which the young S. Martin girded with the sword and all the accoutrements of knighthood, his hands clasped in prayer. The gaiety of all that—the beauty of the young men who look on, the splendour and magnificence of the emperor, the charm of the thought, the perfection of the craft! A great master, you might say, and then you think of the life-enhancing work of Giotto, and all it meant to Italy, and means to us. And yet Simone Martini is a great painter, though scarcely an original painter, as Giotto is. He was content to carry out more exquisitely the ideas of his master, Duccio, by whom he seems always to have been overshadowed. There is nothing of the immense vitality of the Florentine. When his young men stretch out their arms, as in this fresco, you do not feel as though they might embrace you, as you do with Giotto over and over again.  Yet in his equestrian portrait of Guidoriccio da Fogliano, in Siena, he has created a captain who moves as surely and irresistibly towards his enemy as the Colleoni of Verrocchio or the Gattamelata of Donatello. It might be said that he was the most beautiful illustrator of the book of life in all the pre-Renaissance, the whole vitality and reality of life being in the text. One looks on these frescoes always with new joy, but never with the sense of life with which one gazes at Giotto’s work in Padua. S. Martin, in the upper line of the frescoes, is ordained, and retires to Albenga; he preaches in some city, possibly Tours; he restores a child to life, and at last dies. In all this work, too detailed to describe, one finds the same grace and entrancing beauty. The jambs of the windows are frescoed with fine busts and the entrance arch has beautiful full-length figures of saints. Even the glass in the windows here was also probably designed by Simone.

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Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 5-6.

Assisi: Church of San Francesco

  

 

 

Edward Hutton began his tour of Assisi in the church of San Francesco.

 

It is to this great triple church one comes first, by Porta San Francesco and the cloistered Piazza Inferiore, into the cool darkness of the lower church of San Francesco. It seems more like a fortress than a church as you climb the hill, built as it is on arches of stone against the hill-side; and this impression is greater yet if you approach Assisi by the old road from Bastiola. But as you enter the church you seem to have wandered back into the north with its twilight churches, where the sun never shines and they worship God in semi-darkness. And, indeed, it is not till evening that the level light of the setting sun throws a glory over a splendour that in the morning is rather felt than seen.

 

San Francesco is the grandiose tomb of the little poor man, who should have been buried in the lee of some wood where birds sing and the earth is carpeted with primroses. Begun by Frate Elias in 1228 for the Holy See, immediately after the death of the saint, San Francesco consists of two churches, superimposed one on another, to which a large crypt is now added. The lower church has a cavernous nave, lined with chapels, with an apse, and eastern and western transepts. Beneath this is the crypt, now enlarged, in the midst of which towers the rock to which the tomb of the saint, hidden for seven hundred years, is chained. Above the lower church is the radiant upper church, consisting of nave, apse and wide transept. San Francesco was completed in 1253….

 

It is here, in the upper and lower churches, perhaps, better than anywhere else in Italy, that the beginnings of Italian art can be studied.

 

The lower church, one of the most impressive buildings in the world, is precious with the paintings and the glass of the masters of the fourteenth century. It is the irony of fate that the darkness which fills the church should make a sight of all the splendour so difficult….

 

The Upper Church, in contrast with the Lower Church, is a temple of colour and light. It is as though the one symbolized the humble life of S. Francis on earth, the other his glory in heaven. Of the same form as the Lower Church, save that it has no chapels and no eastern transept, it gives us an idea of space and light and beauty such as we never receive in the Lower Church, where the low roof and the twilight mask the frescoes, the chapels, the colour on wall and ceiling, and even the very church itself, in the sombre, mysterious night of the catacombs. But in the Upper Church all is changed; it seems to glow like some perfect jewel, and almost to illuminate itself rather than to receive light from the sun shining over the world outside. And it is here are preserved some of the most precious early frescoes in Italy. (10)

 

 

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Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 3-4, 10.