interest has been lacking. In ancient Egypt, for example,
and among the older Oriental peoples generally, schools of painting
in the modern sense did not exist, for the arts were carried
on on traditional lines and owed little, so far as records tell, to
individual initiative. In ancient Greece, on the contrary, we
find ourselves at once in an atmosphere of names and achievements
which give all the glamour of personal and biographical
interest to the story of art. In the early Christian and early
medieval periods, we return again to a time when the arts were
practised in the same impersonal fashion as in the oldest days,
but with the later medieval epoch we emerge once more into an
era where the artist of genius, with his experiments and triumphs,
his rivals and followers, is in the forefront of interest; when
history is enlivened with anecdote, and takes light and shade
from the changing fortunes of individuals.
There is a danger lest the human interest of such a period may lead us to forget the larger movements, impersonal and almost cosmic, which are all the time carrying these individuals and groups forward on their destined course. The history of painting cannot be understood if it be reduced to a notice, however full, of separate " schools" or to a series of biographies, fascinating as these may be made, of individual artists. Hence in what follows it is still the main course of the development of the art in its relation to nature that will be kept in view, while the information about names and dates and mutual relations of artists and schools, which is in its own way equally important, will be furnished in the tables constituting Part II. of this article.
What has just been said will prepare the reader for the fact that the first schools of painting here mentioned are those of Germany and Flanders, not those of Italy, though the latter are more important as well as actually prior in point of time.
§ 13. The Gothic Movement and the Proto-Renaissance, in their Influence an Painting north and south of the Alps. — The revival of the arts of sculpture and painting in the Italy of the last part of the 13th century was an event of capital importance, not only for that country but for the west at large. Its importance has, however, been exaggerated, when it has been said to imply the rediscovery of the arts after a period in which they had suffered an entire eclipse. So far as Italy is concerned, both sculpture and painting had in the previous period sunk to a level so low that they could hardly be said to exist, but at the same epoch in lands north of the Alps they were producing works of considerable merit. Romanesque wall-painting of the 12th century, as represented in some Rhineland churches and cloisters, is immeasurably better than anything of the same period south of the Alps. In the arts of construction and ornament the lead remained for a long time with the northern peoples, and in every branch of decorative work with the exception of mosaic the craftsmanship of Germany and France surpassed anything that native Italian workmen could produce. By the middle of the 12th century the intellectual and social activity of the French people was accompanied by an artistic movement that created the most complex and beautiful architectural monuments that the world has seen. The adornment of the great French Gothic cathedral was as artistically perfect as its fabric was noble. For one, at any rate, of the effects at which the painter aims, that of glowing and sumptuous colour, nothing can surpass the stained-glass windows of the Gothic churches, while the exteriors of the same buildings were enriched with hundreds of statues of monumental dignity endowed with a grace and expressiveness that reflect the spirit of the age.
The Gothic age in France was characterized by humanity, tenderness and the love of nature, and there are few epochs in human history the spirit of which is to us more congenial. The 1 2th century, which witnessed the growth of the various elements of culture that combined to give the age its ultimate character, saw also a movement of revival in another sphere. The reference is to what has been aptly termed a " Proto-Renaissance, " the characteristic of which was a fresh interest in surviving remains of classical antiquity. In more than one region of the west, where these remains were specially in evidence, this interest
manifested itself, and the earliest sign of it was in Provence, the highly Romanized part of southern Gaul known par excellence as the " Provincia." To this is due the remarkable development of decorative sculpture in the first decades of the 12th century, which gave to that region the storied portals of St Gilles, and of St Trophime at Aries. Somewhat later, in the early part of the 13th, those portions of southern Italy under the direct rule of the emperor Frederick II. presented a similar phenomenon that has been fully discussed by M. Bertaux in his L' Art dans I'llalie meridional (Paris, 1904). There were other centres of this same movement, and a recent writer enumerates no fewer than seven. The Gothic movement proper depended in no degree on the study of the antique, and in art the ornamental forms which express its spirit are naturalistic, not classical, while the fine figure sculpture above referred to is quite independent of ancient models, which hardly existed in the central regions of France where the Gothic movement had its being. Still the proto-Renaissance can be associated with it as another phase of the same awakening of intellectual life that marked the 12th century. Provence took the lead in the literary revival of the time, and the artistic movement that followed on this was influenced by the fact of the existence in those regions of abundant remains of classical art.
The Gothic movement was essentially northern in its origin, and its influence radiated from the lie de France. What has been described as the idyllic grace, the tenderness, that mark the works of the early Cologne school, and to some extent those of the early Flemings, were Gothic in their origin, while the feeling for nature in landscape that characterizes van Eyck, and the general tendency towards a realistic apprehension of the facts of things, may also be put down to the quickening of both thought and sympathy due to the Gothic movement. Hence it is that the northern schools of painting are noticed before the Italian because they were nearer to the source of the common inspiration. All the lands of the West, however, exhibit, each in its own special forms, the same stir of a new intellectual, religious and artistic life. In Italy we meet with the same phenomena as in France, a proto-Renaissance, first in southern Italy and then, as we shall presently see, at Rome and at Pisa, and a religious and intellectual movement on Gothic lines that was embodied in the attractive personality of St Francis of Assisi. Francis was as perfect an embodiment of the Gothic temper as St Louis himself, and in his romantic enthusiasm, his tenderness, his humanity is in spirit more French than Italian.
§ 14. The Rise of the Italian Schools of Painting. — The revival of the arts in Italy in the latter part of the 13th century was the outcome of the two movements just noticed. The art of Niccola Pisano is now recognized as a phase of the proto-Renaissance of southern Italy, whence his family was derived. It represents a distinct advance on the revived classical sculpture of Provence or Campania because Niccola's artistic personality was a strong one, and he gives to his work the impress of the individual of genius. Throughout its history Italian art depends for its excellence on this personal element, and Niccola's achievement is epoch-making because of his personal vigour, not because he reinvented a lost art. Towards the end of the 13th century, painting began to show the results of the same renewed study of antique models, and here again the revival is connected with the names of gifted individuals. Among these the most noteworthy are the Roman Pietro Cavallini and Duccio di Buoninsegna of Siena. The condition of painting in Italy in late medieval days has already been indicated. Cavallini and Duccio now produce, in two standard forms of the art, the mural painting of the " Last Judgment " and the enthroned Madonna with angels — works characterized by good taste, by largeness and suavity of treatment, and by an execution which, if still somewhat primitive and laboured, at any rate aims at beauty of form and colour. The recently uncovered fresco of the Last Judgment by Cavallini, executed about 1 293 on the western waD of S. Cecilia in Trastevere at Rome, is classical in feeling and represents an immense advance on the older rendering of the same subject in S. Angelo in Formis (see § 10). The vast
