01 



OIARTttNr, FELICR 



to Qhiberti alone. The** door*, which contain twenty compartment*, 

 or paneli, filled with M many reliefs, confuting of scriptural subject*, 

 beude* profusion of ornamental ork in tlie intermediate space*, 

 obtained from Michel Augvlo the well-known eulogiuro, that they were 

 worthy to be thcgatee of Paradiae. Yet* modern critic (Von Kumohr), 

 whose discrimination, as well aa his intimate acquaintance with early 

 Italian art, entitle* Ins opinion to more than ordinary inspect, says that 

 although they display great invention and admirable skill, they in some 

 rwprcts fnll short of thote by Andrea Puano, who treating his subjects 

 with greater simplicity, and more conformably with the principles of 

 sculpture, avoided the confused oud crowded appearance which prevails 

 in those of Ghiberti. The latter, he goes on to say, give us the spirit 

 of painting working upon material* belonging to the plastic art ; so 

 that in order to be fully appreciated and enjoyed, they ought to be 

 looked upon as pictures rather than as uiero sculptures for as such 

 tin ir author evidently conceived them. 



Kemark* of a similar tendency have been made by others, who have 

 objected to the attempt to give the effect of perspective and distance 

 by means of various degrees of relief as utterly futile, because the 

 part* which are nearly in full relief must inevitably throw shadows on 

 those next them, although these latter may be intended to represent 

 objects at a considerable distance beyond them. On the other hand 

 theee productions of Uhiberti display extraordinary genius, an atten- 

 tive study of nature, and a sadden emancipation from that formal 

 traditionary style of design and composition which had till then been 

 adhered to by the Italian masters of that period. An excellent cast 

 of these remarkable gates is in the Renaissance Court at the Crystal 

 Palace, Sydenham. 



Ohiberti afterwards executed for the same building another pair of 

 bronze doors, containing tea reliefs upon a larger scale, representing 

 various subjects from the Old Testament those of the first door being 

 entirely from the New. Being thus limited as to their number, ho 

 endeavoured to render each history aa complete 33 possible, by com- 

 bining in each compartment four distinct action.- 1 . In the first, for 

 instance, he has introduced the creation of Adam, that of Eve, their 

 disobedience iu tasting the forbidden fruit, and their expulsion from 

 Paradise amounting in all to a great number of figures. Among his 

 other works may be mentioned the admirable bronze relief iu the 

 Duomo at Florence, representing San Zenobi bringing a dead child to 

 life, and the three bronze statues of St. John the Baptist, St. Matthew, 

 and .St. Stephen, at the church of Or S.iu Michele in the same city. 

 He also painted on glass and executed some of the windows in the 

 Duomo. lie was even appointed Brunelleschi's coadjutor iu the erec- 

 tion of the cuuola of the edifice just mentioned ; and was consulted 

 by artists and their patrons upon every important undertaking. The 

 exact time of his death is not known, but it is supposed to have 

 happened shortly after he made his will, which was dated November 

 1455, when he was about seventy-seven years old. 



Several of the bos reliefs of the second or larger door of the Bap- 

 tistery, namely, that facing the Duomo, have been engraved by Piroli 

 for a work on the monument* of Modern Italy, previous to the time 

 of Raffaelle ; and a very interesting kind of artistical biography of 

 him, including notices of all his most celebrated contemporaries, lias 

 been published by August Uagen, under the title of ' Die Ciiroiiik 

 seiner Vaterstadt vom Florentiner Lorenz Ohiberti,' 1833. 



UIURLANDAIO, DOMIMCO CORKADI, called DEL GHIHLANDAIO, 

 from the profession of his father, a maker of a kind of garland worn 

 by children, one of the 'old Florentine painters, was born in 1451, 

 and died in 1405. He was fertile in invention, and later artist* often 

 made use of his works. He was one of the first who, with some cor- 

 rectness of outline, gave character to the face ; and was the first 

 Florentine whose works evince a due knowledge of perspective. His 

 greatest work?, consisting of events iu the livis of St. Francis, the 

 Virgin Mary, and St. John the Baptist, are in tho Sa-setti chapel, the 

 church of tho Holy Trinity, and the choir of the church of Santa 

 Maria Novella. He painted in the Sistine chapel the ' Itesurrection of 

 Christ,' which has perished, and the ' Call of St. Peter and St. Andruw,' 

 which yet remains. He is said by Lunzi to have also e^c/lltd as a 

 worker in mosaic. His brothers, David and Benedetto, were not equal 

 to him. KIDOLFO GHIKLANDAIO, his BOD, born about 1485, died in 

 1560, was a pupil of Fra Bartolomeo and a friend of KaB'aelle, some 

 analogy with whose genius, but with inferior powers, may be traced iu 

 his pictures. Domiuico has the honour of numbering among his pupils 

 Michel Angela Buonarotti. 



OIANNO'NE, PIETKO, born at Ischitella, in the province of 

 Capitanata, in 1670 ; studied at Naples, and applied himself to the 

 profession of the law. From the profits of his practice he managed 

 by assiduous labour and economy to purchase a small country-house, 

 where he spent all the time he could spare from his professional occu- 

 pations, and where he wrote his great work, ' Storia Civile del Regno 

 Oi .vipoli,' 4 vols. 4to, 1724. Unlike most other historians who had 

 preceded him, and whose narratives were merely chronicles of kings 

 and wars and battles, Uiannone laboured particularly to investigate 

 the history of civil institutions, tho laws, the manner*, and the govern- 

 ment of the various countries which were afterwards united by the 

 Normans into one state, called by the various names of the dukedom 

 of Puglia and Calabria, Sicily citra 1'harum, and lastly the kingdom of 

 Naples ; and then to describe the changes in the institutions of tho 



monarchy under the Norman*, the Swabians, tho Anjong, and the 

 Arngoneee, and in the time of Charles V. and the Spanish conquest, 

 lie lint ivl.iv< the events of two centuries of the Spanish vi 

 Administration down to the year 1700. 'Storia del Iteame di Napoli,' 

 1S34, by Coll-tta, is a continuation of Qiannone's work. 



A principal object of Giannone was to draw the distinction, so long 

 left undefined, between the spiritual and the secular powers, and to 

 show by what means and gradual steps the Church of Rome, or rather 

 its hierarchy, had trespassed upon those limits, until at last, " having 

 invaded every civil jurisdiction, it strove to render the empire wholly 

 subservient to the priesthood." ('Storia Civile,' b. i. ch. 2.) The 

 profound learning of the author in the history and practice of the 

 jurisprudence of the dark and middle ages, and the frequent citation 

 of his authorities, constitute the chief merits of the work. In oth< r 

 respect* he has been charged by some and not unfriendly critics with 

 occasional historical and chronological inaccuracies ; with borrowing 

 without acknowledgment from Costanzo, Summonte, and other writers 

 who had preceded him ; and also with displaying throughout his work 

 a spirit of fixed hostility to the clergy not always restrained within tho 

 limits of historical impartiality. But the pretensions of the ecclesias- 

 tical power were iu < riannoue's time so exorbitant, their encroach- 

 ments fo formidable, and their intermeddling so vexatious, as to sour 

 the naturally irritable temper of Uiaunone, who felt already, and was 

 also warned by his friends, that his boldness would cost him dear. 

 Naples was then under the dominion of the Emperor Charl* 

 whose government was rather favourable to Qiaunone's views ; this 

 however did not prevent the author from being assailed, after thu 

 publication of his work, by the clerical party, and being openly 

 intuited iu the streets of the capital. Being obliged to leave Naples, 

 he went to Vienna, where the emperor assigned him a small ] 

 out of the Neapolitan treasury. Meantime his book was solemnly 

 condemned by the Inquisition at Rome, and a monk wrote a refutation 

 of it, in which he undisguisedly asserted the absolute authority of the 

 pope over the temporal state 'Delia Potesta Politica della Chiesa : 

 Trattati due del Padre G. A. Bianchi contro le Nuove Opinion! tli 

 Pietro Uiannone,' 5 vols., Rome, 1745. In the year 1734 the Austrian* 

 lost the kingdom of Naples, and Giannone, who lost his pension at 

 the same time, repaired to Venice in quest of employment, but he 

 there incurred the suspicion of the government, and was ordered away 

 iu 1735. He then took refuge at Geneva, where he completed a work 

 which he had begun at Vienna, called ' II Triregno, ossia del Hegno 

 del Cielo, della Tona, e del Papa,' in which he no longer confines hU 

 attacks to the temporal pretensions of tho papal see, but impugns 

 also several dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church. The book was 

 never printed, though manuscript copies of it were circulated, and a 

 copious extract of it is found iu the biography of Gi.muoue by 

 Leonardo Pauziui Giannone however was, or thought himself, all 

 the while a true member of the Romish Church ; and aa he wi>lu-d i:> 

 take the sacrament at Easter, and there was thi-n no Roman Catholic 

 church at Geneva, he listened to the advice of a pretended friend 

 from Savoy, who invited him to pass over the border of the Gei 

 territory to a neighbouring village, where he could perform the sacred 

 rite. The advice was treacherous; Giannone, as soon as he entered 

 the territory of Savoy, was arrested, iu 1736, and taken to the cat-tlo 

 of Miolans, whence he was transferred to the fortress of Ceva, and 

 lastly to the citadel of Turin, by order of the King of Sardinia. He 

 was treated however with some degree of attention, but never recovered 

 his liberty, and he died in the citadel of Turin, in March 1748, at the 

 age of seventy-two, after twelve years of imprisonment. During his 

 captivity he had conferences with a priest, and was induced to abjure 

 the opinions which had been condemned by Rome, and was conse- 

 quently relieved from the interdict by the Inquiaitiou. After the 

 accession of Don Carlos of Bourbon to the throne of Naples, that 

 sovereign sent for the surviving sou of Giannone, and assigned to him 

 a liberal pension, stating by an edict, dated Portici, May S, ITii; 1 , 

 " that it was unbecoming the interest and the dignity of his govern- 

 ment to leave in distress the sou of the most useful subject and tho 

 most unjustly persecuted mau that tho age had produced." (Cormani, 

 'Secoli della Letteratura Italiaua;' Botta, ' Storia d'ltalia,' b. xli ) 

 Giaunone's 'Opere Postume,' chiefly in his own defence, were published 

 at Lausanne alter his death. 



(ilAKDl'NI, FELICE, one of the greatest violinists of tho last 

 century, who contributed largely to an improved manner of perform- 

 ing hi England, was born at Turin, in 1716, and entered aa a chorister 

 in the cathedral at Milan, where ho received his elementary education 

 in singing, on tho harpsichord, and iu composition, and at the same 

 time studied the violin under Lorenzo Gomis, a favourite disciple of 

 Con-Hi. At the age of seventeen he joined the orchestra of the 

 Opera at Naples; then, making the usual tour of the Italian th 

 visited Germany, and at Berlin excited a furore by his performance on 

 the instrument which he early adopted, <!iai-diui, coining to our 

 shores iu 1750, immediately distinguished himself, and sptciiily was 

 appointed to almost every situation of honour aud proQt that u great 

 violinist could obtain iu the British capital. In 1756, joining with 

 the famous cantatrice Mingotti, he became manager of the King's 

 Theatre, on office for which he was BO little qualified that he soon 

 abandoned it, having sustained a considerable loss by his iucou-iiderato 

 undertaking. But, untaught by experience, he and his former partner, 



