Rise of European Schools

In addition to this group of initiators whose work had already a classic air, more classic even in certain ways than that of their immediate successors who, like Botticelli, did not escape a cer tain mannerism, were certain seekers after the scientific spirit. These contributed to the formation of the doctrine of the Floren tine school, intellectual and free, which was to become the educa tor of the great spirits of the full Renaissance.

Discovery of Perspective.

One, Paolo Uccello, discovered perspective of which he made a kind of mathematical poetry. Others, perhaps under the influence of the great sculptor Ghiberti, laboured incessantly to perfect drawing by the conquest of the third dimension. Verrocchio, Pollaiuolo and Botticelli, who began their careers as sculptors, carvers or goldsmiths, added to draughts manship, already so penetrating, a kind of trenchant or metallic precision, a sort of precious hardness. The most poetical of them, Botticelli (1444-151o), had also other preoccupations besides that of technical perfection. He was the inventor of a delightful type of Virgin. Better than anyone else of his time perhaps, he translated into painting with a mysterious and at times rather morbid grace, the reveries of the humanists. The Birth of Venus and the Primavera opened a new world to painting.

. Outside Florence, among the schools which had not had such long and such consistent histories, the fertile finish of the fifteenth century saw the rise of certain men whose peculiar energy or original grace helped to prepare the complete expansion of Italian art in the first years of the 16th century. In Arezzo Piero della Francesca, an independent in advance of his time, took up after an interval of thirty or forty years, the researches of Masaccio and invented engaging harmonies in blue and white of which Italian art offers us no other example. The powerful anatomist Signorelli was a precursor of Michelangelo.

Antonello da Messina brought to Italy the brutal but expressive realism which he had gained from contact with the Flemings.

Mantegna (143I–I5o6) humanist, geometrist, archaeologist, of great intellectual and imaginative intelligence, dominated the whole of northern Italy by virtue of his imperious personality. He had known the Florentine painters and the great sculptor Donatello in Padua. He was the link between Florence and

Venice, whose school sprang from him through his more or less direct disciples, the Bellinis and Carpaccio. Classical art was born.

Flanders and France.

During this period painting developed through its own strength in the northern countries, France, Flanders and Germany, which came in contact with Italian art in a series of actions and reactions which led to reciprocal ex changes. By reason of her geographical position and of her intelligence France was specially predisposed to serve as a ground of understanding and conciliation between northern and southern influences. With the reservation already made that Gothic archi tecture did not there encourage the development of mural painting or of fresco, which remained the special province of Italy, France in the 14th century and at the beginning of the 15th century was a centre of artistic inspiration radiating in many directions and receptive of outside influences. Unfortunately few definite works, with the exception of the miniatures, have been preserved.

The portrait of the king, Jean le Bon, in the condition in which it has reached us, is merely an archaeological curiosity, but its date (c. 135o) is significant. It is very little later than the time when Simone Martini, almost in the same spirit and the same style, painted the Condottiere Guidoriccio.

The Narbonne frontal, that long piece of white silk intended to adorn an altar, consisting of a vast grisaille comprising a Crucifixion, portraits of the king, Charles V. and the queen, Jeanne de Bourbon, and a series of scenes from the life of Christ, shows to what elegance of drawing, ease of composition, and harmonious mingling of reality and style the artists of the Parisian school had already attained by about 1375. A little later (towards 1415) the Tres Riches Heures of the Duke of Berry, decorated by the three Limbourg brothers, contained little master pieces, in which the themes of everyday life and of landscapes were treated with as much truth as poetry, and with more than a shade of refined fantasy. It shows both Flemish and Sienese influence. But this art of the court, which was born in Paris, clearly reveals the image of the French spirit.