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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![that any of his descendants became distinguished in Art or otherwise.1 Before we proceed to give some account of the personal character and influence of Giotto, both as a man and an artist, of which many amusing and interesting traits have been handed down to us, we must turn for a moment to reconsider that revolution in Art which originated with him — which seized at once on all imaginations, all sympathies; which Dante, Boc- caccio, and Petrarch have all commemorated in immortal verse or as immortal prose; which, during a whole century, filled Italy and Sicily with disciples formed in the same school and penetrated with the same ideas. All that had been done in painting before Giotto resolved itself into the imitation of cer- tain existing models, and their improvement to a certain point in style of execution : there was no new method ; the Greekish types were everywhere seen, more or les's modified — a Madonna in the middle, with a couple of lank saints or angels stuck on each side ; or saints bearing symbols, or with their names writ- ten over their heads, and texts of Scripture proceeding from their mouths ; or at the most a few figures, placed in such a position relatively to each other as sufficed to make a story intelligible, the arrangement being generally traditional and arbitrary; such seems to have been the limit to which painting had advanced previous to 1280. Giotto appeared; and almost from the beginning of his career he not only deviated from the practice of the older painters, but stood opposed to them. He not only improved — he changed ; he placed himself on wholly new ground. He took up those principles which Niccolo Pisano had applied to sculpture, and went to the same sources, to nature, and to those remains of pure antique art which showed him how to look at nature. His residence at Borne while yet young, and in all the first glowing development of his creative powers, must have had an incalculable influence on his after-works. Deficient to the end of his life in the knowledge of form, he was deficient in that kind of beauty which depends on form ; 1 In the foregoing sketch some disputed points in the life of Giotto are for obvious reasons left at rest, and the order of events has been somewhat changed, in accordance with more exact chroniclers than Vasari. [It is still impossible to trace accurately the order of works, and the enumeration here does not cor- respond exactly to that of Crowe and Cavalcaselle.]](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b24877888_0060.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
