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    Art History Early Italian art
    Art History Early Italian art
    Art History Early Italian art
    Ebook87 pages42 minutes

    Art History Early Italian art

    By Joseph Archer Crowe, Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle and Anna Brownell Jameson

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    About this ebook

    Oscillating between the majesty of the Greco-Byzantine tradition and the modernity predicted by Giotto, Early Italian Painting addresses the first important aesthetic movement that would lead to the Renaissance, the Italian Primitives. Trying new mediums and techniques, these revolutionary artists no longer painted frescoes on walls, but created the first mobile paintings on wooden panels. The visages of the figures were painted to shock the spectator in order to emphasise the divinity of the character being represented. The bright gold leafed backgrounds were used to highlight the godliness of the subject. The elegance of both line and colour were combined to reinforce specific symbolic choices. Ultimately the Early Italian artists wished to make the invisible – visible. In this magnificent book, the authors emphasise the importance that the rivalry between the Sienese and Florentine schools played in the evolution of art history. The reader, in the course of these forgotten masterworks, will discover how the sacred began to take a more human form, opening a discrete but definitive door through the use of anthropomorphism, a technique that would be cherished by the Renaissance.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherParkstone International
    Release dateJul 27, 2024
    ISBN9798894050058
    Art History Early Italian art

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      Book preview

      Art History Early Italian art - Joseph Archer Crowe

      Christ in Majesty, c. 1072-1087. Fresco. Basilica of Sant’Angelo in Formis, Capua.

      INTRODUCTION

      The progress made in painting was predominantly achieved by carrying out the principles of Giotto in expression and in imitation. Taddeo Gaddi and Simone excelled in the first; the imitation of form and of natural objects was evolved by Stefano Fiorentino, so much so that he was styled by his contemporaries as "Il Scimia della Natura, or the Ape of Nature". Giottino, the son of Stefano, and others, improved in color, in softness of execution, and in the means and technology of the art; but oil painting was not yet invented, and linear perspective was unknown. Engraving on copper, cutting in wood, and printing, were the inventions of the next century. Portraits were seldom painted, and were only ever of very distinguished persons, introduced into larger compositions. The imitation of natural scenery, that is, landscape painting, as a branch of art now so familiar a source of pleasure, was as yet unthought-of. When landscape was introduced into pictures as a background or accessory, it was merely to indicate the scene of the story: a rock represented a desert; some laconic trees, much like upside-down brooms, indicated a wood; a bluish space, sometimes with fishes in it, signified, rather than represented, a river or a sea. Yet in the midst of this simplicity, this imperfect execution and limited range of power, how exquisitely beautiful are some of the remains of this early time! The simple, genuine grace and lofty, earnest feeling that marks these works have provided modern painters with examples of emotive excellence to be understood and techniques which the great Raphael himself did not disdain to study and even copy.

      The purpose to which painting was applied during this embryonic period was almost wholly of a religious character. No sooner was a church erected than the walls were covered with representations of sacred subjects, either from scriptural history or the legends of saints. Devout individuals or families built and consecrated chapels; and then, at a great cost, employed painters either to decorate the walls or to paint pictures for the altars. The Madonna and Child or the Crucifixion of Christ were the favorite subjects; the donor of the picture or founder of the chapel was often represented on his knees in a corner of the picture, and sometimes (as a more obvious expression of humility) in a most diminutive size, out of all proportion to the other figures. Where the object was to commemorate the dead, or to express both the grief and devotion of the survivors, the subject was generally a Deposition from the Cross — that is, Christ taken down from the cross and lying in the arms of his afflicted mother. The doors of the sacristies, and of the presses in which the priests’ vestments were kept, were often covered with small pictures of scriptural subjects, as were the chests in which the utensils for the Holy Sacrament were deposited. Almost all the small moveable pictures of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that have come down to us are either the borders or small compartments cut out from the broken-up altarpieces of chapels and oratories, or from the panels of doors, the covers of chests, or other pieces of ecclesiastical furniture.

      Simone Martini and Lippo Memmi, Altarpiece of The Annunciation, 1333. Tempera on wood, 184 x 210 cm. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.

      Giotto, Baroncelli Polyptych, 1334. Paint and gold

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