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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![1200 to 1240) there existed schools of painting at Siena and at Pisa, not only under Greek but under Italian teachers. The former city produced Guido da Siena, whose Madonna and Child, with figures the size of life, signed and dated 1221, is preserved in the church of San Domenico at Siena. It is en- graved in Posini’s “ Storia della Pittura ” [PI. IV.], on the same page with a Madonna by Cimabue, to which it appears superior in drawing, attitude, expression, and drapery. Pisa produced about the same time Giunta Pisano, of whom there remain works with the date 1236 : one of these is a Cruci- fixion,1 engraved in Ottley’s [“Early Florentine School”], and [another] on a smaller scale in Posini’s “ Storia della Pittura ; ” in [the former] the expression of grief in the hovering angels, who are wringing their hands and weeping, is very earnest and striking. But undoubtedly the greatest man of that time, he who gave the grand impulse to modern Art, was the sculptor Pic- colo Pisano, whose works date from about 1220 to 1270. Fur- ther, it appears that even at Florence a native painter, a certain Maestro Bartolommeo, lived and was employed in 1236.2 Thus Cimabue can scarcely claim to be the “ father of modern paint- ing,” even in his own city of Florence. We shall now proceed to the facts on which his traditional celebrity has been founded. Giovanni of Florence, of the noble family of the Cimabui, called otherwise Gualtieri, was born in 1240. He was early sent by his parents to study grammar in the school of the con- vent of Santa Maria Novella, where (as is also related of other inborn painters), instead of conning his task, he distracted his teachers by drawing men, horses, buildings, on his school-books : before printing was invented, this spoiling of school-books must have been rather a costly fancy, and no doubt alarmed the professors of Greek and Latin. Flis parents, wisely yield- ing to the natural bent of his mind, allowed him to study painting under some Greek artists who had come to Florence to decorate the church of the convent in which he was a scholar. It seems doubtful whether Cimabue did study under the identical painters alluded to by Vasari, but that his masters and models were the Byzantine painters of the time seems to admit of no doubt whatever.3 The earliest of his works men- 1 [Formerly preserved in S. Francesco at Assisi, but now lost.} 2 [ Vide Crowe and Cavalcaselle, History of Pointing in Italy, vol. i. p. 195.] 3 [Ibid. pp. 201, 202.]](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b24877888_0041.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
