182 



THE POPULAR EDUCATOR. 



after the barbarian invasions. The Italian towns had continued 

 their existence in unbroken descent from the Eoman days ; and 

 when Europe as a whole began to settle down into something like 

 a regular political order, after the chaos of the dark ages, Italy 

 still remained the centre of civilisation for the Christian world. 

 Florence, Venice, and Genoa were already great mercantile 

 towns, while London and Paris were still mere small and rude 

 trading communities. The merchants of the Italian cities, 

 trafficking as they did with Constantinople and the East on the 

 one hand, and with France, Spain, Flanders, and England on 

 the other, grew wealthy and prosperous at a time when the 

 North was still only slowly settling down into peaceable pur- 

 suits. Industrial life was common in Italy when military life 

 was almost the only type in France and England. Hence the 

 great palaces which line the streets of Florence, Venice, and 

 Genoa differ wholly in style from the castles of the same date 

 in our Northern countries. Instead of being constructed for 

 war and defence, such a house as the Pitti Palace at Florence is 

 constructed for state and splendour in a peaceful city. Its 

 broad faQade, with open windows, its wide staircases, its long 

 galleries, its splendid reception-rooms, are all widely different 

 from the gloomy, menacing fronts, the narrow slit windows, the 

 tortuous stairs, and the small dark chambers of a contemporary 

 English castle. Living in such a world as this, passing a city 

 life of wealth and security, and holding in their hands the trade 

 of the civilised world, the Florentines and Venetians soon 

 learned to develop high artistic tastes ; and with enlightened 

 criticism and patronage came, as usual, marked advance in 

 handicraft. This forma one side in the origin of the Italian 

 Renaissance. 



The other side is supplied us by the industrial character of 

 the people themselves. The Italians were not all soldiers, 

 agriculturists, and blacksmiths, like the northern nations ; they 

 were workmen in every kind of industrial art. As builders of i 

 churches, palaces, and villas ; as workers in gold and metal ; as 

 painters, decorators, and carvers of wood and ivory ; as manu- 

 facturers of ecclesiastical ornaments ; as makers of glass, 

 pottery ware, and upholstery the Italian handicraftsmen were 

 always practising manual arts which easily led on to higher 

 artistic pursuits. For all these crafts were performed through- 

 out by hand. Machines were unknown, and every workman 

 turned out all his work with his own fingers. Thus the 

 mechanic was also to some extent an artist; and this was 

 especially the case in the higher trades, such as those of the 

 wood-carver, the brass-founder, and the goldsmith. Moreover, 

 the mediaeval religious spirit, attaching great importance to the 

 internal decoration of churches, did much towards promoting 

 the growth of art-handicrafts. Every cathedral, nay, every 

 village church, was filled with frescoes and wall-paintings, with 

 wooden crucifixes and images of saints, with bronze ornaments 

 and stained glass windows. To this day, in Italy there is far ] 

 more artistic handicraft than anywhere else in the world; in 

 the Middle Ages, however, Italy not only supplied its own 

 churches and palaces with all the decorations they required, but . 

 also exported works of art to every part of civilised Europe, j 

 Thus the growth of wealth and industrial society in Florence | 

 and other Italian towns naturally had for its first result an 

 immense increase in the artistic impulse. 



One other point must also be considered. Italy was growing 

 more enlightened. While the North was still a mere rude 

 battle-ground for conflicting military parties, as in our own 

 Wars of the Roses, men in the South were beginning to read 

 the old literature of Greece and Borne, and to think a little 

 beyond the narrow circle of earlier mediaeval thought. Hence 

 their art began to be freer than of old to go more directly to 

 nature, and to emancipate itself more and more fully from the 

 old, r:tiff, wooden conventionalisms of the Byzantine style. 

 Giotto ha: 1 begun this fresh departure in painting ; and after 

 his time it was continued by his successors. From age to age, 

 the Italians grew more and more free in their scope of thought, 

 and therefore more free in their artistic ideas. The great 

 upward movement of the human intellect, which resulted in the 

 Renaissance, in the revival of learning, and in the Protestant 

 Reformation, had now set in, and art moved onward with the 

 rest of the stream. When men's minds were daily expanding 

 and widening, it was impossible for painting, sculpture, and 

 architecture to remain at the early wooden stage in which even 

 Giotto had largely left it. The world could see that these older 



works were yet far from having attained perfection, and new 

 artists were ready to make further attempts towards the reali- 

 sation of a better and more natural style. 



In painting, the great master-art of all, the upward movement 

 is very noticeable. The great painters of the fifteenth century 

 belonged for the most part to Florence, Siena, and the other 

 Tuscan cities, where wealth and consequent ease were more 

 common than elsewhere, and where art therefore found the 

 greatest stimulus and the most intelligent criticism. Not, of 

 course, that mere patronage can ever produce great artists ; but 

 wherever there is the largest thoughtful and appreciative culti- 

 vated public, wherever the greatest number of people interest 

 themselves in art, wherever the whole atmosphere is, as it were, 

 steeped in artistic ideas, there will art naturally best flourish. 

 Among purely commercial people, no amount of mere money 

 reward or even of fame is sufficient to bring forth artists ; but 

 in communities like those of Italy in the fifteenth century, 

 brought up from childhood to take an interest in all that per- 

 tained to painting or sculpture born critics and connoisseurs 

 from their very cradles the production of great painters was 

 as natural as the production of great inventors and engineers in 

 our own industrial and mechanical nation. The Florentines 

 took as naturally to art as the Manchester or Birmingham folk 

 take to machines. Among them it was not a carefully tended 

 exotic, but a part and parcel of the every-day life of every-day 

 people. And as the Florentines grew in intelligence and 

 developed in breadth of mind, their painting grew and developed 

 with them. To such people, improvements in art were 

 watched and fostered in somewhat the same way as improve- 

 ments in railways, or telegraphs, or telephones are watched and 

 fostered among ourselves. 



Nevertheless, painting still remained tied down, for the most 

 part, to sacred subjects. Its great employment was still in the 

 decoration of churches, and it was usually practised in the 

 form of frescoes on panels in walls, where the subject was 

 largely subordinated to the necessities of space and the needs 

 of decorative harmony or symmetry. In most Italian churches 

 where these pre-Raffaelite pictures are preserved, they are 

 found in particular bits of the wall, sometimes square or 

 oblong, sometimes in round-topped arched niches, sometimes in 

 triangular or irregular spaces. Here, two pictures will answer 

 to one another in two corresponding corners of a side chapel ; 

 there, a fresco will be employed to decorate the otherwise blank 

 space over a small shrine or a petty altar. In every case the 

 painting is still largely subordinated to the architectural design, 

 and its subjects are of course such as are fitted for churches, 

 being ordinarily scenes from the life of the particular saint to 

 whom the church or chapel is dedicated. 



In spite of this restriction, however, there is a slow but 

 decided increase in naturalness from the time of Giotto to the 

 time of Lionardo. Anatomy is more and more studied : legs 

 and arms and bodies are placed in simpler and more natural 

 attitudes ; and recourse is oftener had to living models and to 

 the nude form. Instead of copying old fixed types, like the 

 Byzantines, the Florentine artists of the fifteenth century 

 began to take their ideas from life from actual sitters then 

 and there before them. Geometry and perspective were also 

 more carefully attended to, though still for the most part as 

 applied to human figures only, for the animal forms are yet 

 very incorrect ; there is little background, and what there is 

 is chiefly architectural, while the few attempts at landscape, 

 always as a mere accessory to back up the prominent figures, 

 are very hard, mechanical, and badly drawn. The distant 

 perspective is ill managed, and the mountains or trees are 

 wooden-looking and unreal. The study of drapery, on the 

 other hand, is well cared for, and the dress now begins to fall 

 in natural folds, instead of standing stiffly, as if starched, 

 around the figure. From the beginning of the fifteenth century 

 onward, we find fidelity to nature and a correct rendering of 

 details is more and more insisted on with every generation. 



This naturalness of representation has one rather curious 

 side to us moderns, accustomed as we are to a careful anti- 

 quarian rendering of every historical scene. If we nowadays 

 wish to paint an incident from the Bible, we are particular to 

 represent it with all the dresses and accessories as correctly 

 reproduced as possible. If we paint Joseph before Pharaoh, 

 we copy the Egyptian costumes from the temples of Thebes, 

 and we lay the scene in a palace whose columns and decorations 



