The Thirteenth Century in Europe

     Before we give our whole attention to the first picture, of which theoriginal was painted in England in 1377, let us imagine ourselves inthe year 1200 making a rapid tour through the chief countries of Europeto see for ourselves how the people lived. The first thing that willstrike us on our journey is the contrast between the grandeur of thechurches and public buildings and the insignificance of most of the houses. Some of the finest churches in England, built in the style of architecture called 'Norman,' one or more of which you may haveseen, date before the year 1200, as for example, Durham Cathedral, and the naves of Norwich, Ely, and Peterborough Cathedrals. The great churches abroad were also beautiful and more elaborately decorated, in the North with sculpture and painting, in the South with marbleand mosaic. The towns competed one with another in erecting them finerand larger, and in decorating them as magnificently as they could. This was done because the church was a place which the people usedfor many other purposes besides Sunday services. In the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, the parish church, on week-daysas well as on Sundays, was a very useful and agreeable place to most of the parishioners. The 'holy' days, or saints' days, 'holidays' indeed, were times of rejoicing and festivity, and the Church processions and services were pleasant events in the lives of many who had few entertainments, and who for the most part could neither read nor write. Printing was not yet invented, at least not in Europe,and as every book had to be written out by hand, copies of books were rare and only owned by the few who could read them, so that stories were mostly handed down by word of mouth, the same being told by motherto child for many generations.

     The favourites were stories of the saints and martyrs of the Catholic Church, for of course we are speaking now of times long before the Reformation. The Old Testament stories and all the stories of the life of Christ and his Apostles were well known too, and just as we never tire of reading our favourite books over and over again, our forefathers of 1200 wanted to see on the walls of their churches representations of the stories which they could not read. Their daily thoughts were more occupied with the Infant Christ, the saints, and the angels, than ours generally are. They thought of themselves asunder the protection of some saint, who would plead with God the Fatherfor them if they asked him, for God Himself seemed too high or remoteto be appealed to always directly. He was approached with awe; the saints, the Virgin, and the Infant Christ, with love.

     We must realise this difference before we can well understand a picture painted in the twelfth, thirteenth, or fourteenth centuries, nor canwe look at one without feeling that the artist and the people for whomhe painted, so loved the holy personages. They thought about themalways, not only at stated times and on Sundays, and never tired of looking at pictures of them and their doings. It is sometimes said that only Catholics can understand medieval art, because they feeltowards the saints as the old painters did. But it is possible for any one to realize how in those far-off days the people felt, and itis this that we must try to do. The religious fervour of the Middle Ages was not a sign of great virtue among all the people. Some were far more cruel, savage, and unrestrained than we are to-day. Verywicked men even became powerful dignitaries in the Church. But it wasthe Church that fostered the impulses of pity and charity in a fierceage, and some of the saints of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, such as St. Francis of Assisi and St. Catharine of Siena, are stillheld to be among the most beautiful characters the world has ever known.

     The churches of the eleventh and twelfth centuries in Florence were lined with marble, and a great picture frequently stood above the altar.It is difficult to realize to-day that the processes which we calloil and water-colour painting were not then invented, and that no shopsexisted to sell canvases and paints ready for use. The artist paintedupon a wooden panel, which he had himself to make, plane flat, andcut to the size he needed. In order to get a surface upon which hecould paint, he covered the panel with a thin coating of plaster whichit was difficult to lay on absolutely flat. Upon the plaster he drewthe outline of the figures he was going to paint, and filled in the background with a thin layer of gold leaf, such as is to-day used forgilding frames. After the background had been put in, it was impossible to correct the outline of the figures, and the labour of preparing the wooden panel and of laying the gold was so great that an artist would naturally not make risky attempts towards something new, lesthe should spoil his work. In the Jerusalem Chamber of Westminster Abbeythere is a thirteenth-century altar-piece of this kind, and you can see the strips of vellum that were used to cover the joins of the different pieces of wood forming the panel, beneath the layer ofplaster, which has now to a great extent peeled off.

     The people liked to see their Old Testament stories and the stories from the Life of Christ painted over and over again. They had becomefond of the versions of the tales which they had known and seen painted when they were young, and did not wish them changed, so that the range of subjects was not large. The same were repeated, and because of thepainter's fear of making mistakes it was natural that the same figures should be repeated too. Thus, whatever the subject pictured, atradition was formed in each locality for the grouping and general arrangement of the figures, and the most authoritative tradition for such typical groupings was preserved in Constantinople or Byzantium, from which city the 'Byzantine' school of painting takes its name.

     Before 1200, Byzantium had been a centre of residence and the civilizing influence of trade for eighteen centuries. It had been the capital of the Roman Empire, and less civilized peoples from the north had never conquered the town, destroying the Greek and Roman traditions, as happened elsewhere in Europe. You have read how the Romans had to with draw their armies from England to defend Rome against the attacks of the Goths from the north, and then how Britain was settled by Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Danes, who destroyed most of the Roman civilization. A similar though much less complete destruction took place in Italya little later, when Goths and Lombards, who were remotely akin tothe Angles and Saxons, overwhelmed Roman culture. But next to Constantinople, Rome had the best continuous tradition of art, for the fine monuments of the great imperial days still existed in thecity. In Byzantium the original Greek population struggled on, andcontinued to paint, and make mosaics, and erect fine buildings, tillthe Turks conquered them in 1453. The Byzantines were wealthy and madeexquisite objects in gold, precious stones, and ivory. While they werepainting better than any other people in Europe, they too reproducedthe same subjects and the same figures over and over again, only the figures were more graceful than those of the local Italian, English, and French artists, who in varying degrees at different times triedto paint like the Byzantine or Greek artists, but without quite thesame success. So long as there was no need for an artist to paint anything but the old well-established subjects, and so long as people desired them to be painted in the old conventional manner, there waslittle reason why any painter should try to be original and paint what was not wanted. But in the thirteenth century a great change took place.

     Let us here refresh our memories of what we may have read of that delightful saint, Francis of Assisi. He was born in 1182, the son of a well-to-do nobleman, in the little town of Assisi in Umbria, andas a lad became inflamed with the ideal of the religious life. But instead of entering one of the existing monastic orders, where he would have been protected, he gave away every possession he had in the world and adopted 'poverty' as his watchword. Clad in an old brown habit, he walked from place to place preaching charity, obedience, and renunciation of all worldly goods. He lived on what was given to him to eat from day to day; he nursed the lepers and the sick. Ever describedas a most lovable person, he won by his preaching the hearts of people of all classes, from the King of France to the humblest peasant. He wrote beautiful hymns in praise of the sun, the moon, and the stars, and had a great love for every living thing. The birds were said to have flocked around him because they loved him, and we read that hetalked to them and called them his 'little sisters.' An old writertells this story in good faith:

     Wherever he preached he made converts who 'married Holy Poverty,' as St. Francis expressed it, gave up everything they had, and lived his preaching and roaming life. St. Francis himself had no idea of forminga monastic order. He wished to live a holy life in the world and show others how to do the same, and for years he and his companions worked among the poor, earning their daily bread when they could, and when they could not, begging for it. Gradually, however, ambition stirred in the hearts of some of the followers of Francis, and against the will of their leader they made themselves into the Order of Franciscan Friars, collected gifts of money, and began to build churches and monastic buildings. At first the buildings were said to belong to thePope, who allowed the Franciscans to use them, since they might not own property; but after the death of St. Francis, the Order built churches through out the length and breadth of Italy, not of marbleand mosaic but of brick, since brick was cheaper; but the brick walls were plastered, and upon the wet plaster there were painted scenes from the life of St. Francis, side by side with the old Christian and saintly legends. This sudden demand for painted churches with paintings of new subjects, stirred the painters of the day to altertheir old style. When an artist was asked to paint a large pictureof St. Francis preaching to the birds, he had to look at real birds and he had to study a real man in the attitude of preaching. There was no scene that had ever been painted from the life of Christ or of any saint in which a man preached to a bird, so that the artist was driven to paint from nature instead of copying former pictures.

     Let us now read what a painter who lived in the sixteenth century, Vasari by name, wrote about the rise of painting in his native city.Some learned people nowadays say that Vasari was wrong in many of thestories he told, but after all he lived much nearer than we do to thetimes he wrote about, and it is safer to believe what he tells us thanwhat modern students surmise, except when they are able to cite other old authorities to which Vasari did not have access.

     If you were to see a picture by Cimabue (there is one in the National Gallery which resembles his work so closely that it is sometimes saidto be his), you would think less highly than Vasari of the life-likequality of his art, though there is something dignified and stately in the picture of the Virgin and Child with angels that he painted for the Church of St. Francis at Assisi. Another story is told by Vasari of a picture by Cimabue, which tradition asserts to be the great Madonna, still in the Church of Santa Maria Novella at Florence.

     For this story we may thank Vasari, because it helps us to realize the love the people of Florence felt for the pictures in their churches, and the reverence in which they held an artist who could paint a more beautiful picture of the Virgin and Child than any they had seen before.It is difficult to think of the population of a town to-day walking in procession to honour the painter of a fine picture; but a picture of the Madonna was a very precious thing indeed to a Florentine ofthe thirteenth century, and we may try to imagine ourselves walking joyfully in that Florentine procession so as the better to understand Florentine Art.

     I have repeated this legend about Cimabue, because he was the master of Giotto, who is called the Father of Modern Painting. The story isthat Cimabue one day came upon the boy Giotto, who was a shepherd, and found him drawing a sheep with a pointed piece of stone upon asmooth surface of rock. He was so much struck with the drawing thathe took the boy home and taught him, and soon he in his turn farsurpassed his master. In order to appreciate Giotto we need to go to Assisi, Florence, or Padua, for in each place he has painted a series of wall-paintings. In the great double church of Assisi, built by the Franciscans over the grave of St. Francis within a few years of his death, Giotto has illustrated the whole story of his life. An isolated reproduction of one scene would give you no idea of their power. In many respects he was an innovator, and by the end of his life had broken away completely from the Byzantine school of painting. He composed each one of the scenes from the life of St. Francis in an originaland dramatic manner, and so vividly that a person unacquainted with the story would know what was going on. Standing in the nave of the Upper Church, you are able to contrast these speaking scenes of thelives of people upon earth, with the faded glories of great-wingedangels and noble Madonnas with Greek faces, that were painted in the Byzantine style when the church was at its newest, before Giotto wasborn. These look down upon us still from the east end of the church.

     Giotto died in 1337, and for the next fifty years painters in Italy did little but imitate him. Scenes from the life of St. Francis and incidents from the legends of other saints remained in vogue, but they were not treated in original fashion by succeeding artists. The newmen only tried to paint as Giotto might have painted, and so far from surpassing him, he was never even equalled by his followers.

     We need not burden our memories with the names of these 'Giottesque'artists; and now, after this glimpse of an almost vanished world, wewill turn our attention to England and to the first picture of our choice.