LATER DEVELOPMENTS
For details of painting and sculpture
in different Italian cities during
the quattrocento and cinqecento,
please see:
Renaissance Art in Florence
Renaissance Art in Rome
Renaissance Art in Venice |
Giotto's most important students are Maso
di Banco (active around 1330-1350), who developed a special sense for
abstract surface effects (Bar-di-Vernio Chapel, Santa Croce, Florence.
c.1330-1340) and Taddeo Gaddi (c.1300-1366) who introduced experimental
illumination effects into fresco painting.
In addition, all subsequent Old
Masters of the Renaissance era including the Italians Masaccio, Mantegna,
Leonardo Da Vinci, Raphael,
Michelangelo
and Titian, as well as the Dutch
and German painters Roger
Van der Weyden, Van Eyck, Hieronymus
Bosch and Albrecht Durer
were highly familiar with Giotto's work and acknowledged his contribution
to the history of art.
Duccio de Buoninsegna, Simone Martini,
Ambrogio & Pietro Lorenzetti
In Siena, it took longer for religious painting to move away from the
Byzantine tradition - a development that Giotto had accomplished in one
leap. As a result, for many years, early 13th century Siennese painting
unjustly stood in the shadow of Giotto and his school. Where Giotto employed
block-like volumes to enhance his figure
painting, line remained everything for Duccio de Buoninsegna (1255-1318).
In both beauty of line and graphic development, as well as in the richness
of his materials and colours, Duccio is in no way inferior to Giotto,
and in fact his imaginative narration, his drawing,
his sensitive gradations of colour, and surprisingly deep pictorial and
landscape spaces, even surpass those of the Florentine artist, as seen
in Duccio's Scenes from the Life Of Christ on the reverse side of the
Maesta, the gigantic former main altar painting of the Cathedral of Siena.
On the front, Mary sits amid a circle of saints, in an early rendition
of the sacra conversazione or "holy conversation" - a painting
theme that later became popular in the Florentine Quattrocento.
Duccio's student Simone Martini (1284-1344) presents a still broader spectrum
of themes and styles. He also made his start in Siena with a Maesta (1315),
painted as a fresco for the Palazzo Pubblico in a courtly variation on
Duccio's front painting of the cathedral. Martini's further work in Italy
increasingly reveals influences from late French Gothic book painting,
as evident in the Frescos of the Martin's Chapel in the lower church of
San Francesco in Assisi, and the artist in fact became a court painter
in Naples to Robert I of Anjou in 1317.
From Martini we learn far more about courtly life of the trecento than
from Giotto, who pursued timelessly classic religious pictorial images
which existed apart from daily life. Martini slowly worked his way to
Avignon, although his works there are no longer extant. In all probability,
the brothers Ambrogio (c.1290-1348) and Pietro Lorenzetti (c.1280-1348)
were students of Duccio. Their altar paintings and frescos, revealing
also the influence of Giotto, are more emotional and more lively than
those of their contemporaries. Ambrogio's major work, the monumental portrayal
of The Allegory of Good Government, is not only the first landscape and
cityscape in European art, but also reveals the self-understanding of
the city government of Siena in its innumerable details.
International Gothic Art Movement
Between approximately 1370 and 1430, a
similar phenomenon appears throughout European painting from England,
through France, Burgundy, northern and central Germany, Bohemia, Austria
to Italy. Characteristics of the International Gothic style came together
in the sculptures of the "Beautiful Madonnas, in the wall, panel
and book painting of the age, as well as in goldsmith metalwork. The term
describes common stylistic characteristics, without the existence of a
direct connection between individual works, which in fact were produced
in widely distant locations. As it was, increased mobility after the Black
Death of 1348, as well as the expansion of European trade, allowed a quick
exchange of ideas. Sculpture, illuminated
manuscripts, and devotional pictures functioned both as a medium of
diplomacy and as gifts between courts and governments. A refined courtly
culture - for whose style initially the Bohemian Habsburg court of Emperor
Charles IV, and later the courts of the Burgundian dukes, set European
standards - celebrated itself in painting in the form of shimmering gold
backgrounds, delicately changing colours, subtly moving garments, preciously
refined gestures, and the ambiguously smiling faces of saints and angels.
Stemming from the early years of the period, the private chapels of Emperor
Charles are comprehensive works of art
which incorporate precious stones with panel
painting, frescos, and liturgical equipment.
The Medieval people increasingly began to see themselves as individuals,
and for this reason, private religious devotion became more important,
resulting in an increase of commissions for smaller household altar-panels.
The wasteful riches of this art form may have been a consumer-reaction
to the misery and devastation of the Black Death in the middle of the
century, which had already depopulated wide areas of Europe. In fact,
images of death and the transitoriness of life, which reflect the existential
experiences of the age, begin to appear in art between 1350 and 1450.
In France, double grave sculptures representing the deceased as a worldly
figure in the full glory of office and worldly honor, but underneath as
a transi, or worm-eaten corpse, become typical at this time. Religious
art concentrated on devotional pictures containing drastic portrayals
of the suffering and patiently endured martyrdom of Christ, found in the
"suffering crucifixions" (also called "plague crucifixions");
panel paintings depicted the instruments of martyrdom and scenes of the
Passion of Christ through multiple signs and symbols. At the same time,
in a counter movement, pictures began to convey more strongly the dogmatic
contents of faith, especially in the environment of the Dominican order
which was responsible for carrying out the Inquisition.
The late gotico internationale period in Italy - a variant of the
earlier Gothic style - occured at the same time
as the early Renaissance, and enjoyed equal favor from contemporaries.
Influences deriving from the work of Lorenzo Monaco (c. 1370-1425) and
Gentile da Fabriano (c.1365-1427) are still evident after 1498 in Botticelli's
late religious work. In Burgundy, Melchior Broederlam (active c.1381-1409)
pointed the way to the art of Jan
van Eyck and the Flemish Master of Flemalle, whereas in Germany, painters
of the School of Cologne, in particular Stephan Lochner (c.1405-1451),
and in the north the Masters Bertram (c.1340-1415) and Francke (c.1380-1430),
combined the linearity of Bohemian courtly art with the richness of details
found in French book painting and the early Dutch masters.
French Book Painting
Avignon is, so to speak, the launching
pad for the dispersal of Italian art northward into Burgundy, central
France, and the Netherlands. At the court of Avignon, the late Gothic
observation of nature, poetry, mystical theology of the devotio moderna,
united with Italian beauty of line. Book painting became the medium of
the hour: at once luxurious and easy to pack and transport, illuminated
books became collector items. They both enhanced the honor of courtiers
and princes such as the Duc de Berry in Bourges (the brother of Philip
II, the Bold, of Burgundy) and served in private worship.
Among the multiplicity of high quality
miniatures, the work of the Limbourg Brothers (c.1380-1416) stand out.
Commissioned by the Duc de Berry, they produced several parchment books
of hours, including Les Belles Heures (Metropolitan Museum of Art, The
Cloisters, New York) and Les Tres Riches Heures, "the most tender
and finest creation of miniature art," according to historian Johan
Huizinga. With their detailed illustration of the annual cycle of nature,
these early 15th century books of hours represent the first series of
genre pictures in the history of painting. They anticipated later religious
pictorial inventiveness, and their deeply boxed interiors prepared the
way for the art of Van Eyck "in miniature."
Panel and wall painting reveal at this time a correspondingly less independent
profile, aside from the work of various regional schools, such as that
in Provence around 1400. Jean Fouquet (c.1420-1479), as a miniaturist
and panel painter, also forms an exception, and essentially founded French
painting.
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