Memoirs of the early Italian painters / by Anna Jameson; thoroughly revised and in part rewritten by Estelle M. Hurll.
- Anna Brownell Jameson
- Date:
- 1899
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Memoirs of the early Italian painters / by Anna Jameson; thoroughly revised and in part rewritten by Estelle M. Hurll. Source: Wellcome Collection.
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![donnas, the blood-streaming crucifixes ; and these patterns were followed more or less servilely by the native Italian painters who studied under them. Specimens of this early art remain, and in these later times have been diligently sought and col- lected into museums as curiosities, illustrating the history and progress of Art: as such they are in the highest degree inter- esting ; but it must be confessed that otherwise they are not attractive. There [were] some very valuable examples in the Wallerstein Gallery at Kensington Palace [now dispersed]. We have also one, lately acquired, in our National Gallery, a little Greek picture of the famous Apothecary Saints, Cosmo and Damian, painted by a certain Emanuel. In the Berlin Gallery, in the Florence Gallery, and in the Louvre, a few Greek pic- tures are preserved as curiosities. The subject is generally the Madonna and Child, throned ; sometimes alone, sometimes with angels or saints ranged on each side. The characteristics are in all cases the same : the figures are stiff; the extremities long and meagre ; the features hard and expressionless ; the eyes long and narrow. The head of the Virgin is generally declined to the left: the infant Saviour is generally clothed, and some- times crowned ; two fingers of his right hand are extended in act to bless ; the left hand holding a globe, a scroll, or a book. With regard to the execution, the ornaments of the throne and borders of the draperies, and frequently the background, are elaborately gilded ; the local colors are generally vivid; there is little or no relief; the handling is streaky; the flesh tints are blackish or greenish. At this time, and for two hundred years afterwards (before the invention of oil painting), pictures were painted either in fresco, an art never wholly lost, or on panels of seasoned wood, and the colors mixed with water thickened with white of egg or the juice of the young shoots of the fig-tree. This last method was styled by the Italians a collet or a tempera ; by the French, en detrempe ; and in Eng- lish, in distemper j and in this manner all movable pictures were executed previous to 1440. As it is not the purpose of this little book to trace the grad- ual progress of early Art, but rather to give some account of the early artists, and as we know nothing of those who lived in the first half of the thirteenth century except a name and a date inscribed on a picture, I shall not dwell upon them; onlv revert to the fact that before the birth of Cimabue (from](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b24877888_0040.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
