RISE OF EUROPEAN SCHOOLS Florentine School.—In Italy Gothic architecture did not take root, or at least Italy adopted from it only the original vault while retaining all the forms of Roman architecture and, in particular, the plain walls. Thus it was in Italy that, thanks to this favourable circumstance and thanks above all to a man of genius, Giotto, preceded, accompanied and followed by men of great talent, the art of the fresco appeared and developed, and that the first great school of painting arose. At the time when Giotto was born (c. 1266) a French miniaturist was deco rating with elegant little figures the Psalter of St. Louis.
In Italy there was a whole movement prior to Giotto, on which scholars have recently thrown new light (Van Marle, The Develop ment of the Italian Schools of Painting; Hautecoeur, in Gazette des Beaux Arts, 1925). Cimabue at Florence showed the way to Giotto in passing from the mosaic, still impregnated with Byzari tine legacies, to the more free and flexible fresco work. Giotto, like Cimabue, was himself connected with the Roman school of mosaicists turned painters, Cavallini and the Cosmati, as well as with the work of Giunta Pisano, Nicolas d'Apulia and Coppo di Marcovaldo. But his own personal work was what brought him glory. While accepting the conventions of his time he introduced into painting a simple grandeur of conception, a hitherto unknown force of pathetic expression and that equilibrium of the spiritual and of the perceptible, of nature and of thought, which remain an ideal for the art of all time. Therein he is truly a precursor of modern art. His disciples and successors without recapturing his grandeur, developed and enriched the heritage of their master. In place of the abstract decorations of Giotto, concrete details accumulated, compositions grew more complicated, and great ingenuity was exercised in the choice of dramatic or picturesque accessories for the scenes depicted. The most justly famous work of the period is The Triumph of Death which, with a mixture of brutality and refinement, unfolds its eloquent teachings on the walls of the Campo Santo at Pisa.
Siena School.—Parallel with that of Florence, a school of almost equal brilliancy, less powerful perhaps but more delicate, was developing also at Siena from the Byzantine models. The Madonna in Glory of Duccio di Buoninsegna seemed to the Sienese, when they first saw it, so much of a miracle that the whole town, led by the bishop, bearing lighted candles in their hands, carried it in state to the Duomo. It is composed almost
entirely of Byzantinesque elements, but its precious novelty lies in the gentle smile animating the face of the Queen of Heaven.
At the beginning of the 15th century Italy already showed signs heralding the approach of the first Renaissance.
The painters not only mingled scenes of common life with their religious compositions, but they applied themselves with a kind of scientific realism to the study of the human form. Pisanello (138o–I456) was a marvellous draughtsman. Masaccio (1401-28), a man of genius who died at the age of twenty-seven, was already a sort of classic. He was keenly devoted to the study of anatomy and the nude made its appearance in art with his Adam and Eve in the Carmine, an example which was repeated in the curious figures of the apostles unrobing on the banks of the Jordan in Masolino's Baptism of Christ. Nothing shows more clearly than the example of Fra Angelico the lengths to which naturalism was carried. This Dominican monk (1387-1455), who well merited his title of Angelico, the only painter to be beatified by the Church, seemed destined by his piety to carry on the profoundly religious, but abstract and severe, tradition of Giotto, or perhaps the gentler one of Siena. But in everything which concerned him as a painter he showed the same preoccupa tions as Masolino and Masaccio. By a special grace he was able to apply his love of nature to the expression of the purest and most mystic soul to be met with in the history of art.