it was dry, with water-colors mixed in a glutinous medium, so that as the surface hardened the colors became fixed and blended in it. While the technical knowledge displayed in them may seem to you hardly greater than that of a school-boy of our own day, yet they are so simple and unaffected, so earnest in feeling, that they arouse the interest and enthusiasm of the modern student,
In his own day Giotto’s fame as a painter was supreme. He had numerous followers, and these “Giotteschi,” as they were styled, continued his methods for nearly 2 hundred years. But, like all the great men of the Florentine school, he was a master of more than one craft. “Forget that they were painters,” writes Mr, Berenson, “they remain great sculptors; forget that they were sculptors, and still they remain architects, poets, and even men of science.”
The beautiful Campanile, which stands beside the cathedral in Florence, and represents a perfect union of strength and elegance, was designed by Giotto and partly erected in his lifetime. Moreover, the sculptured reliefs which decorate its lower part were all from his designs, though he lived to execute only two of them.
Thus, architect, sculptor, painter, friend of Dante and of other great men of his day, Giotto was the worthy forerunner of that brilliant band of artists which a century later made Florence forever renowned as the birthplace of that great revival, or “new birth” of art, generally called “The Renaissance.”
II
We have seen that the revival of painting began with a study of the appearances of objects, and an attempt to represent them as real to the senses of sight and touch; that the painters learned from the sculptors, who themselves had learned from the remains of antique sculpture, and that the result was a closer truth to nature, in the representation of the human form.
We have now to consider the effect produced upon painting by the revival of the study of Greek, which revealed to Italy of the fifteenth century a new light. Botticelli represents this new inspiration, and I have coupled with him the Flemish painter, Memling, because these two artists, though they worked apart and under different conditions, had one quality of mind in common, An unaffected simplicity, frank and artless, fresh and tender, like the child-mind or the opening buds of spring flowers, appears in each.
In the year 1396 Manuel Chrysoloras, a Byzantine scholar, was appointed professor of Greek at Florence. From him and from his pupils the knowledge of Greek literature spread rapidly over Italy, accompanied by an extraordinary enthusiasm for Roman and Greek art, and for Greek thought and Greek ideals. Artists of that time soon began to cherish the old Greek devotion to the beauty of the human form; the scholars gave themselves up to admiration of Plato’s philosophy. Artists and scholars thronged the court of Duke Lorenzo de’ Medici (Lorenzo the Magnificent), patron of arts and letters, and among the brilliant throng none was more highly honored than Sandro Botticelli. His father was in comfortable circumstances, and he had been “instructed in all such things as children are usually taught before they choose a calling.” But he refused to give his attention to reading, writing, and accounts, so that his father, despairing of his ever becoming a scholar, apprenticed him to the goldsmith Botticello; whence the name by which the world remembers him. His own family name was Filipepi.
In those day's, as we have noted before, men were often masters of more than one craft, One well-known painter was also a goldsmith; another was goldsmith, painter, and sculptor. Botticello’s Sandro, a stubborn-featured youth with large, quietly searching eyes and a shock of yellow hair,—he has left a portrait of himself in one of his pictures,— would also fain have been a painter, and to that end was placed with a well-known painter, who was also a monk, Fra Philippo Lippi. Sandro made rapid progress, and loved his master. But his own pictures show that Sandro was a dreamer and a poet.
You will feel this if you refer to the two pictures and compare his “Virgin Enthroned” with Memling’s. The latter’s is much more realistic. It is true that it does not, as a whole, represent
