ILLUSTRATIONS. PAGE THE UNKNOWN MADONNA AT ASSISI. ATTRIBUTED TO GIOTTO-Frontispiece "As in passing through life we learn many new things, so do we forget many old things, and gradually the remembrance of them is lost from among men. Therefore those persons do not reason well who do not study to perpetuate useful things by writing, because in such case posterity will hereafter seek in vain for their origin, perfection, and use.”—Tambroni. "Such as are ignorant of things done and past before themselves had any being continue still in the estate of children, able to speak and behave themselves no otherwise; and even within the bounds of their native countries (in respect of knowledge or manly capacity) they are no more than well-seeming dumb images." — From the Dedication of an anonymous translation of Boccacio's Novels, &c. 1634. "And so it is with all truths of the highest order: they are separated from those of average precision by points of extreme delicacy, which none but a cultivated eye can in the least feel, and to express which all words are absolutely meaningless and useless. Two lines are laid on canvas, or cut on stone: one is right and another wrong. There is no difference between them appreciable by the compasses-none appreciable by the ordinary eye-none which can be pointed out if it is not seen. One person feels it, another does not; but the feeling or sight of the one can by no words be communicated to the other. That feeling and that sight have been the reward of years of labour."—John Ruskin. 1853. "I offer this little work as long as I live to the correction of those who are more learned. If I have done wrong in anything I shall not be ashamed to receive their admonitions; and if there be anything which they like, I shall not be slow to furnish more."— Wilhelm of Bamberg, circa 1000 A.D. GIOTTO. CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY. HE biographies in this series* are intended to help in the TH preservation of the memories of those great artists, who, leaving to the world the legacies of their genius, have not all died, but live to this hour in the far-reaching influence their works exert. That such men lived, worked, and perished, is almost the sum of knowledge that most of us can boast of with regard to them; we here try to add the simple story of their lives, and perhaps a few touches of description as to the friends they loved, the country they lived in, and the times in which they worked; so that, perhaps, they may become in some measure to us, not only wielders of the chisel and the brush, but men like ourselves, with moments of frailty as well as exaltation, with lives more or less difficult through fading ambitions and frequent failure, but nevertheless bound to us by the tie of a common humanity, and claiming our sympathy and love, not only for the beauty they have left. us, but because they also carried the burden, and fought the fight that we are fighting to-day. If it be true, as George Eliot tells us, that the aspect of affairs for the race, is largely This essay was originally written for, and will ultimately appear in, the series of "Illustrated Biographies of the Great Artists," published by Messrs. Sampson Low, and Co. B altered by the influence of "those who have lived faithfully hidden lives, and rest in unvisited tombs," it is none the less true, that there is some danger in regarding those whose achievements are of historic magnitude, as if they belonged to a separate order of humanity, and were removed alike from its every-day joys and sorrows; and we shall gain a knowledge by no means to be despised, if we once bring fairly home to our consciousness the fact that the seeds of greatness flourish in no other soil than that which we all possess ; that the divine light of genius glorifies natures that are subject to the like joys, sorrows, and passions as our own, nay, that even, "like the fierce light that beats upon a throne," it often reveals faults of which the weakest of us might well be ashamed, as well as virtues of which we are all capable. It is not by elevating the great to a passionless region of undisturbed supremacy of life and action, that we show them our truest reverence, or learn from them our most worthy lesson, but by seeing them as they were in sober truth. If we would knit into firmer unison the varying struggles, failures, and triumphs of our great brotherhood, we must learn to look upon genius, not as some cold, unapproachable excellence that finds its work in alien spheres of imagination and action, but rather as a keener insight into the truths of thought and feeling, with its relations to the everyday aspects of life, no less than to its most exalted phases. It will not be wasted time to the busy dwellers in the England of the nineteenth century, to be led back in spirit to those old Italian days when as yet civilisation dozed upon the stream of time, when the Arno and the Tiber ran their course unspanned by other bridges than those grey stone ones that remain to this day, when under the shadows of the Umbrian mountains, the rushes of Thrasymene wavered not with the rush of the locomotive, but the sighing of the breezes, and on the hills of Assisi the brethren of St. Francis chanted their earliest anthems, and took their first solemn vows of poverty and obedience. It will not be wasted time, if a thrill of kindly sympathy can be raised within us for that old life without whose struggles our fuller knowledge could never have existed, when the world was plainly divided into soldiers and scholars, rulers and ruled, men of action and men of thought, when the good was encrusted with no uncertainties, and the evil mitigated by no doubts, and all the lives of men were poured along a deeper and narrower channel than now. Though we should not regret, we should still remember kindly those times and all that they wrought for us, and the lessons that they teach, though our lives be cast in a far different mould. It is not possible now for a new regenerator of art to cause a new departure for art by plain reference to natural fact, as did the subject of this book six hundred years ago; but how long has it been impossible? For little more than twenty years! Strange as it may seem to many of our readers, a large portion of the very best art of the present day is based upon principles which were derived from the works of Giotto and his immediate successors, and such men as Millais, Holman Hunt, Rossetti, and Burne Jones, would never have painted as they have done,* had it not been for the Umbrian shepherd boy, whose story we are about to tell. The quality which they found in Giotto's work, of simple unswerving truth to the facts of nature and life, this it is which lies at the root of all their work, this it is which they sought to find in vain in the pictures of later artists, however superior such might be, and were, in beauty of form and refinement of colouring. Forced and eccentric as the work of the modern pre-Raphaelites at first seemed, it was indubitably based upon a sound principle--the principle of painting what they saw, and consequently what they believed in, rather than what they might have seen. They took up the theory that nature was * See Pre-Raphaelitism, by John Ruskin. 1862. |