The accounts of the cathedral at Orvieto give us names of artists who
devoted themselves to its decoration towards the end of the fourteenth
century--others were working in Perugia, painting effigies of traitors,
hanging head downwards on the walls of the Palazzo Pubblico, but we have
no reason to rank them higher than those who have left traces of their
work in the little votive chapels that lie in the hills and
out-of-the-way corners of Umbria. Some of these, going back to 1393, are
not without a character of their own, guiltless indeed, of technique,
but naïve, vivid, and full of energy; yet they show little of that
gradual growth which marks the Florentine school, nor do we find in them
any trace of the fine, precise touch, which the early Sienese painters
drew from the school of Byzantium. According to Mariotti, the art of
miniature painting and illumination was carried on with great enthusiasm
in Perugia, in the fourteenth century. Dante speaks of Oderisio of
Gubbio:
"--Non se' tu Oderisi,
L'Onor d'Agobbio, e l'onor di quell' arte,
Ch' alluminare è chiamata in Parisi?"
Then, when the fifteenth century was unfolding, two streams of art sweep
across the province, distinct, yet mighty, mingling like the waters of
the Rhine and Rhone. The many scattered towns of Umbria led to a far
greater variety of type, individuality was more frequently maintained,
influences spread more fitfully and partially than in those parts of
Italy where all studied together, and practice and theory flew like
wildfire from one to the other, emulations flourished, traditions were
quickly formed and earnestly followed.
Gentile da Fabriano stands forth among the dearth of talent in Umbria at
the dawn of the century, as the one master who was great enough to add
realism to glowing colour and vivacity of fancy, and who, taking the
old missal-painting character as a groundwork, could transplant all the
pride of pageantry of the Middle Ages on to his panels, and give us in
the gold brocades and velvet robes, in fairy princes and beautiful
ladies, tropic birds and strange beasts, such a scene of joyous
gallantry that, as in the "Adoration of the Magi," we can hear the
tinkle of bells and the clang of gilded trappings, as the long
procession winds down the gay hillside.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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