CHAPTER PAGE I. GIOTTO AND THE NEW FLORENTINE HUMANISM 1 II. SIENA AND THE CONTINUING OF THE MEDIAEVAL STYLE 59 III. MASACCIO AND THE NEW REALISM 109 IV. FRA FILIPPO LIPPI AND THE NEW NARRATIVE STYLE 157 V. DAWN OF THE GOLDEN AGE: BOTTICELLI AND LEONARDO DA VINCI 201 VI. THE GOLDEN AGE: RAPHAEL AND MICHELANGELO 263 VII. VENETIAN PAINTING BEFORE TITIAN 323 VIII. TITIAN AND VENETIAN PAINTING IN THE RENAISSANCE 389 IX. THE REALISTS AND ECLECTICS 451 NOTES 473 HINTS FOR READING 489 INDEX 491 CHAPTER I GIOTTO AND THE NEW FLORENTINE HUMANISM The Florentine ideal of Mass and Emotion—Its Humanism—The City of Florence about 1300—The Position and Methods of the Painter—The General demand for Religious Painting—Accelerated by the religious reforms of 1200, and changed in character—Insufficiency of the current Italo-Byzantine Style—Experiments towards a new manner: Duccio and the Sienese, Cimabue, Cavallini and the “Isaac Master”—Giotto—Immediate followers of Giotto, Andrea Orcagna and the return to sculptural methods—Later Panoramists, Andrea Bonaiuti and the Spanish Chapel. Leonardo da Vinci, from the summit of Florentine art, has written “What should first be judged in seeing if a picture be good is whether the movements are appropriate to the mind of the figure that moves.” And again he has expressed somewhat differently the highest merits of painting as “the creation of relief (projection) where there is none.” For Florence, at least, these notions are authoritative, and they may well serve as text for most that I shall say about Florentine painting. To give significant emotion convincing mass—this was the problem of the Florentine painter from the moment when Giotto about the year 1300 began to find himself, to that day more than two centuries and a half later when Michelangelo died. No Florentine master of a strenuous sort ever failed to perceive this mission, and no unstrenuous artist was ever fully Florentine. This twofold aim—humanistic, in choice and mastery of emotion; scientific, in search for those indications which most vividly express mass where no mass is—this twofold endeavor Florence shared with the only greater city of art, Athens. Thus Florence is to the art of today what Athens was to that of classical antiquity.