Italian Art

In a certain sense classical tradition lay behind all Italian art, but it did not become predominant until the fifteenth century. In the twelfth century it influenced the Romanesque architecture of Pisa and the sculptures of the Antelami at Parma . In the thirteenth century the sculpture of Niccolo Pisano on the Pisan pulpit is an evident attempt to reproduce the classical Roman style, but the young Italian nation, descended alike from a southern and northern stock, had to go through its time of storm and stress, its wanderjahr was spent in company with the brilliant transcendentalism of the North.

The genius of Michael Angelo, of Giorgione, of Titian, of Paul Veronese, was unable to conquer the inevitable. When the headship of Spain and the decrees of the Council of Trent became possible, the great period of Italian art was at an end, there was no longer a correspondence between the Italian organism and its environment.

The astonishing vitality of Italian art was due to the extraordinary power which enabled painters and sculptors to synthesize so completely not only the life of their own time, but the spirit which had moved bygone ages. In classical life they found an ideal of freedom and beauty; from the Byzantine civilization of Constantinople came the love of symbolism and mysticism; from Rome came regard for law, a passion for order, and the tendency to crystallize life into form; while the conception of love, of which asceticism is the final term, sprang from Christian tradition, and brought into being the emotional life of the Middle Ages.

The development of the various products of man's collective action closely resembles, in not a few respects, the natural development of plants and animals. Phenomena well known in the organic world have their counterpart and parallel in the super-organic. Everybody is now aware that this is true in the case of languages, which can be traced back, like birds or beasts, to a common origin; but not everybody is aware that it is equally so in the case of arts, of religions, of institutions, of ceremonies. In these papers it is my intention to take certain products of early Italian art, and show how closely their evolution resembles that familiar process of "descent with modification" which Darwin pointed out for us in fish and insect, in fern and flower.

Put briefly, every subject or theme in Italian art starts, like an organic type, from a special central form, Byzantine or Giottesque, as the case may be; and varies therefore by descent with modification. And the resulting varieties are produced by diversities of type in the environment. The Umbrian and Sienese forms, influenced by the pietism of St. Francis of Assisi and St. Catherine of Siena , vary in the direction of spirituality, fervor, a purely religious aim, a certain almost affected daintiness of composition.

But, above all things, notice the building in the background, now becoming more conspicuous, and with its round arch slowly leading up to the later and far more elegant arrangement in Pacchiarotto and Mariotto Albertinelli. The development of this round arch is to my mind one of the most instructive points in the evolutionary history of early Italian art, and I hope my readers will pay proper attention to it.

The evolution of the Madonna is a far more subtle and difficult problem than any of those we have hitherto considered in the present chapters. I do not merely mean that the number of Madonnas in existence makes the subject unmanageable, and that a complete collection of specimens representing its treatment in all ages of Italian art must extend to at least several thousand examples.