Lectures on Painting, Delivered to the Students of the Royal Acadamy. Edward Armitage
Pictures painted in this style may be more or less neatly executed, but their artistic merit varies very little, whether they be of the seventh or the nineteenth centuries, whether they decorate St. Mark’s at Venice or an obscure monastery on Mount Athos. As an illustration of this, note a picture in the National Gallery, by a Greek artist of the name of Emmanuel. The date of this work is 1650. It was therefore painted long after Titian, Raffaelle, P. Veronese, and all the great masters had departed this life, and yet with all their glorious works before his eyes what does this primeval artist produce? All I can say is, “Go and see for yourselves.” Other schools have their ups and downs. The Italian, the Flemish, the French, and the English schools have all had, and will continue to have, their periods of elevation and depression; but Byzantine painting always maintains its dead level, and will continue to do so as long as the Greek Church lasts.
Pictures of this school are often associated with ideas of sanctity, not only in holy Russia but in Western Europe. Almost all miracle-working pictures belong to this class. The Calabrian peasant, or the Andalusian muleteer, who would probably be unmoved by the Madonna di S. Sisto, is wrought up to a high pitch of religious fervor at the shrine of some olive Byzantine Virgin, with her pinched peevish face and wooden shoulders.
That this class of pictures has at all times been held to be peculiarly sacred, is proved from the fact that at Venice (even in the time of Titian) the cultivation of the stiff Byzantine style, for popular devotion, was maintained in juxtaposition with that of the most perfectly developed form of painting.
We may smile at the Venetian religious world, but I am not sure that at the present day an analogous tendency could not be imputed to some of us.
Is there not to some æsthetic nostrils a kind of odor of sanctity about mediæval perspective and composition? It is true that our revivalists do not wish to go back to the Byzantine period for our religious art; the Romanesque or at any rate the Quattro Cento style is the correct thing. But why go back at all? I can quite understand that in restoring an old cathedral it would be desirable to do so; but in a modern building (whether gothic or not) to reproduce forms which we know to be incorrect, and to introduce perspective which we know to be absurd, seems to me to be carrying our reverence for the past a little too far.
A letter appeared in the Times last summer which is so much to the purpose that I really must read it to you:—
“To the Editor of the ‘Times.’”
June 30th.
“Sir—I have before me a design for a window which it is proposed to place in a village church in Lincolnshire, as one of a group memorial of the late vicar, his widow, and two sons, clergymen, one of them a missionary of the Church Missionary Society who died in India. May I be allowed to describe the design? The window is of two lights. The dexter represents a cardinal in red hat and stockings, red robe with blue lining, and a nimbus round his head of a color resembling olive-green. The sinister light has an archbishop with mitre, pall, polychromatic vestments, and a blue nimbus round his head; in his left hand a pastoral staff, and in his right the Sacred Heart, crimson, with gold flames issuing from the top. The drawing is signed by an eminent London firm, and is submitted by the present vicar as a suitable memorial of his predecessor, who was an Evangelical of the old school, and of his widow, a lady whose dread of ‘Popery’ was almost morbid.”
Writers on art are fond of asserting that in spite of the repulsive ugliness of the Byzantine types, we ought to be grateful to the school for keeping the lamp of art alive during seven or eight centuries; but I think that the history of the great revival does not bear out this assertion. We find Giotto and his followers hampered with the old traditions. We find Byzantine work rampant in Venice down to the time of the Bellinis, impeding and indeed excluding all the various forms of progress which were spreading over Northern Italy; and it may be noticed that all the faults and weaknesses of the early Italian painters are traceable to Byzantine sources. I question very much whether the revival of art would not have been more rapid and complete had the Byzantine school never existed.
The early reformers, Cimabue, Giotto, and Duccio, would have had the great mosaics of the fifth century, and such remnants of ancient pagan art as were then known, to inspire them. They would have been unfettered by Byzantine tradition, and I think it probable that their works would have been better in every respect.
Every one with any experience knows that it is easier to instil sound principles of art into one who is totally uninstructed, than into one who has already contracted a bad style of drawing; and as it is with individuals, so also is it with schools and phases of art.
Then again it must be remembered that although the Byzantine school was the dominant one during the Middle Ages, there were, in Italy, France, and Germany, artists who had no connection with it, and whose compositions, as seen in manuscripts and missals, will bear favorable comparison with similar work by Greek artists of the same period.
I must refer you again to d’Agincourt’s book, where you will find a great number of outlines from these miniatures.
In judging these works you must not, however, form your opinion as to their merits entirely by d’Agincourt’s illustrations. They give a very fair idea of the drawing and composition, but the charm of these small paintings lies in their color and execution, which are sometimes very beautiful.
The Bayeux tapestry, for instance, though charming in the original, becomes very uninteresting and ugly when translated into black and white.
The transition from Byzantine to Romanesque art was so gradual that it is very difficult to decide when the change took place. Byzantine rules and traditions had taken such firm root, that it was not till the end of the fourteenth century that its influence was finally overcome.
We are, however, approaching the time of Guido da Siena and Guinto da Pisa, and it is pleasant at last to know (or to suppose we know) the names of two artists after centuries of anonymous work. The fact of these names having been preserved shows at any rate that their bearers were not mere workmen bound to execute the morbid fancies of the Church, but painters of some repute, whose creations, though still very cramped and stiff, show better modelling and a more intelligent execution than are to be found in the works of their predecessors.
Every one has heard of Cimabue, but comparatively few have seen his frescoes. I imagine that his best work is in the Church of St. Francis at Assisi. I once spent six weeks at Assisi, and devoted a good deal of time to the wall-paintings of the church.
The frescoes of Cimabue seemed to me infinitely better than his panel pictures, but they were (even then) in such a state of decay that it was difficult to form an opinion of them. This was twenty-two years ago, and since that time I believe that the progress of decay has been very rapid indeed. The Arundel Society had some admirable fac-simile drawings of these works executed five years ago.
It is curious how much more rapidly all the old frescoes are decaying now than formerly.
I attribute this accelerated rate of ruin to the presence of gas in the towns. At Pisa the Campo Santo frescoes are deteriorating much more rapidly than before the introduction of gas into the town. I don’t know whether Assisi is now blessed with a gasometer, but if it is, poor old Cimabue’s work is doomed.
His famous Madonna, which was carried in triumphant procession through the streets of Florence, is painted quite in the Greek style. The flesh is better modelled, and the draperies of the surrounding angels are much better drawn, than in any previous example of Byzantine work, but I cannot understand the enthusiasm of the Florentines.
The specimen we have in the National Gallery appears to me to have been much re-painted; the heads especially (although ugly enough to be early work) are of a later character, and are painted in the fumbling, uncertain way which is characteristic of restorers.
There are other artists of this period whose works show a great improvement on the old Byzantine. These are Toriti, who executed some fine mosaics in Rome; the brothers Cosmati, also of Rome; and Gaddo Gaddi, the Florentine. The mosaics of the last named in the dome of the baptistery at Florence are very highly commended, but they appear to me rather improved Byzantine than true Romanesque.