of religion and of art. But the Christianity of those earlier times met the ideal of physical perfection with the spiritual doctrine of mortifying the flesh, and the pagan art of old Greece was condemned by the Church, Yet pictures of some sort were needed as an aid to the teachings of religion, and the Church found what it required in the art of Byzantium.
This old Greek city stood where Constantinople now stands, and was the gateway between the Eastern and Western worlds. Now the ideals of the East and West are very different. While the Greek artist carved or painted human or animal forms, striving to give them a perfection of shape in every part that would express his ideal, the artist of the Fast reached his ideal through the perfection of beautiful lines, of beautiful patterns of form and color. Thus the one art is represented at its best by the sculptures of Phidias on the Parthenon, the other by a decorated porcelain vase.
The arrival, therefore, at Byzantium of this Oriental art, so far removed from the pagan study of the human form, so beautifully decorative, was welcomed by the Church, both for the decorating of the sacred buildings and for the illuminating of the sacred manuscripts; and it was as decorators and illuminators that the Byzantine artists did their finest work. But as the old Greek study of the human figure had been abandoned, the ignorance of the artists regarding the real character of the human form increased; their types of figure became less and less like nature and more and more according to an unnatural figure established by the Church. As “mortifying the flesh” was preached, the figures must be thin and gaunt, their gestures angular, the expression of their emaciated faces one of painful ecstasy. And so, in time, all that was required of or permitted to the painters of those days was to go on reproducing certain chosen subjects in a sort of stencil-like way.
Now, therefore, we can understand why those two pictures of “The Madonna Enthroned,” by Cimabue and Giotto, are so similar in arrangement. They both followed the rules prescribed by the Church. Yet the Florentines of Cimabue’s day found his picture so superior to anything they had seen before—so much more splendid in color, if not much nearer to the true representation of life— that, when it was completed, they carried it in joyous procession from the artist’s home, through the streets of Florence, and deposited it with ceremony in the Church of Santa Maria Novella.
Cimabue had chanced upon the boy Giotto as, like David of old, he watched his flock upon the mountain; and he found him drawing the form of one of the goats upon a rock with a sharp piece of slate, The master must have seen some hint of genius in the work, for he straightway asked the boy if he would like to be his pupil, and, having received a glad assent and the father's permission, carried him off to Florence to his bottega. This, the artist’s studio of that period and for long after, was rather what we should call a workshop, in which the pupils ground and prepared the colors under the master’s direction; and it was not until they had thoroughly mastered this branch of the work, a task which in Giotto’s time was supposed to occupy about six years, that they were permitted to use the brushes. How often, as he worked in the gloom of the bottega, must the shepherd-boy have peeped wistfully at the master standing in the shady garden, before a great glory of crimson drapery and golden background, and wondered if he himself should ever acquire so marvelous a skill!
He was destined to accomplish greater things, for in the free air of the mountain the boy’s eager eyes had learned to love and study nature. It was the love of form that had set him to try to picture a goat upon the surface of the rock; it was the actual appearance of objects that he sought to render when in due time he learned to use the brush.
If you turn again to a comparison of his Madonna with that of Cimabue, you will see what strides he had already made toward natural truth. Observe how the figure of the Virgin is made real to us, notwithstanding that it is covered, as in Cimabue’s, with drapery; and that the Holy Child in Cimabue’s picture is not nearly so strong and firm and lifelike as Giotto's, though his is enveloped in a garment. Examine also the other figures in Giotto’s picture; you will find the same suggestion of a substantial form that could be touched and grasped. Notice further how his feeling for truth has affected his arrange-