Preface

Lubbock, Jules

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Preface

Jules Lubbock

Storytelling in Christian Art from Giotto to Donatello

~My interest in narrative pictures painted and sculpted in Italy during the early Renaissance was aroused when I was an earnest young student forty years ago. I remember being struck by a small painting by Fra Angelico showing the beheading of five saints (Fig. 1). The sense of the rhythm of the executioner swinging his sword as he...

Author

Jules Lubbock

PublisherYale University Press

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-20534

Preface

My interest in narrative pictures painted and sculpted in Italy during the early Renaissance was aroused when I was an earnest young student forty years ago. I remember being struck by a small painting by Fra Angelico showing the beheading of five saints (Fig. 1). The sense of the rhythm of the executioner swinging his sword as he moved around the circle of kneeling martyrs, three already beheaded, two awaiting their fate; the simplicity of the background with its five cypress trees and the five towers of the walled city; the pure and brilliant colours and clear morning light all helped to stimulate the vivid impression that the event was actually taking place before my eyes. I felt that I could ‘read’ the picture as easily as a book.

~

Description: The Beheading of Saints Cosmas and Damian by Angelico, Fra

1. Fra Angelico, The Beheading of Saints Cosmas and Damian, predella panel from the altarpiece for the high altar of San Marco, Florence, c. 1440–42, Musée du Louvre, Paris.

Once upon a time this was probably the dominant mode of engaging with pictures. Narrative was considered to be the most difficult and prestigious branch of painting, but for most of the twentieth century, perhaps because of the very practices of modern art, other concerns have replaced it.1 ‘Narrative is not a topic which has unduly engaged the attention of historians of Italian medieval painting, despite its self-evident analyticity, and despite the fact that it has been widely discussed by literary critics of the same period.’ Julian Gardner, ‘The Louvre Stigmatization and the Problem of the Narrative Altarpiece’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 45, 1982, p. 237. The history of style, formal analysis of composition, iconography, the development of representational techniques and skills, social history and the theory of art have succeeded one another as the latest fashion in art-historical writing about the Renaissance. All have their place, but the neglect of narrative is regrettable. Likewise the fact that such images were made to assist instruction in Christian doctrine, serving religious and moral ends to which aesthetic ingenuity was the means, is also somewhat neglected.2 Christianity and the Renaissance: Image and Religious Imagination in the Quattrocento, ed. Timothy Verdon and John Henderson, Syracuse, 1990. This book is an attempt to remedy the situation by focusing upon a small group of important narrative images from the period 1300–1465. Almost all of these are biblical cycles by artists considered to be major such as Giovanni Pisano, Duccio, Giotto, Ghiberti, Brunelleschi, Donatello and Masaccio. Inevitably some artists have been omitted, but this is not intended to be a comprehensive history of pictorial narrative in the period even though various historical themes are suggested.

The chapters consist of detailed analytical descriptions3 Christopher Green, in an unpublished inaugural lecture at the Courtauld Institute, 25 Feb. 1997 entitled ‘Fictional Artists, Real Spectators: “Amico di Sandro, Roger Fry’s Cézanne and the Demoiselles d’Avignon”’, observed that active spectatorship and its record in prose is characteristic of English art history in a tradition going back to Ruskin and Pater, continued in the twentieth century by Roger Fry, Lawrence Gowing, John Golding and David Sylvester. of the works and a group of photographs some of which have been specially taken, showing the images both from the ground and from other positions from which I believe they were designed to be viewed, rather than photographed frontally on scaffolding, as is customary.4 The positioning of paintings and sculpture in relation to buildings and the spectator is more studied now than previously, thanks to the pioneering work of Eve Borsook, Michael Podro, Thomas Puttfarken and Julian Gardner. See: Eve Borsook, The Mural Painters of Tuscany from Cimabue to Andrea del Sarto, London, 1960; revised second edition Oxford, 1980; Julian Gardner, ‘The Decoration of the Baroncelli Chapel in Sta Croce’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 1971, 34, H2, pp. 89–114; Thomas Puttfarken, Masstabfragen: über die Unterschiede zwischen grossen und kleinen Bildern, Hamburg, 1971; Michael Podro, Piero della Francesco’s Legend of the True Cross, 1973 Charlton Lecture in Art, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, Newcastle upon Tyne, 1974, pp. 3 and 14–16; Thomas Puttfarken, The Discovery of Pictorial Composition: Theories of Visual Order in Painting, 1400–1800, New Haven and London, 2000, pp. 137–47 on Titian’s Madonna di Ca’ Pesaro, partic. pp. 144–5. No photograph can be an adequate substitute for seeing the work in its original context particularly because this art was designed for specific locations inside or outside churches, and much of it was relief sculpture. But some photographs are better than others in suggesting the best angles for looking, and they may excite the reader enough to visit, or revisit, the originals.

The introduction provides a brief account of storytelling in general and Christian Art in particular. The conclusion draws some generalisations about the context and circumstances in which artists approached the task of making these images and how they might be read.

There are two parts. Part one includes some seminal works of the first decade of the fourteenth century. I have taken liberties with the strict chronological order by beginning with Duccio’s Maestà for the high altar of Siena Cathedral of 1308–11, before turning to Giotto’s somewhat earlier Scrovegni Chapel in Padua of 1303–05 and finally addressing Giovanni Pisano’s two sculpted pulpits of 1298–1301 for St Andrea in Pistoia and of 1302–11 for Pisa cathedral. The problem of the best order in which to tell a story is one with which all these artists were familiar. The Trial of Jesus, a section from Duccio’s Maestà, the subject of the first chapter, acts as an introduction to pictorial narrative. Giotto’s frescoed chapel for Enrico Scrovegni is more complicated and has been treated as a whole. Still more demanding upon the viewer, though for different reasons, are Giovanni Pisano’s pulpits, partly because they are relief sculptures. Part two examines works produced in the first seven decades of the fifteenth century, in chronological order.

The first part also sketches an implicit debate between these three great artists at the beginning of the fourteenth century, particularly between Giovanni Pisano and Giotto, one favouring a more impassioned and the other a more restrained approach to pictorial narrative. Because they left almost no statements of their intentions, these have to be inferred from their works. In the second part, their successors Brunelleschi, Ghiberti, Donatello and Masaccio, take up the discussion, disagreeing with, competing with and trying to improve upon the work both of their predecessors and of one another to produce the best approach to narrative. All were artist-intellectuals and one of them, Ghiberti, has left a considerable body of writing which helps us to understand his views.5 Lorenzo Ghiberti, ed. Ottavio Morisani, I commentari, Naples, 1947.

What emerges is a dynamic story in which the work both of contemporaries and of predecessors was not perceived as something relatively primitive to be improved upon, as lower points on an ascending graph of progress towards greater naturalism, but as self-sufficient works of art forming part of a living tradition from which artists continued to learn even two centuries after the originals had been produced.

1 ‘Narrative is not a topic which has unduly engaged the attention of historians of Italian medieval painting, despite its self-evident analyticity, and despite the fact that it has been widely discussed by literary critics of the same period.’ Julian Gardner, ‘The Louvre Stigmatization and the Problem of the Narrative Altarpiece’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 45, 1982, p. 237. »

2 Christianity and the Renaissance: Image and Religious Imagination in the Quattrocento, ed. Timothy Verdon and John Henderson, Syracuse, 1990. »

3 Christopher Green, in an unpublished inaugural lecture at the Courtauld Institute, 25 Feb. 1997 entitled ‘Fictional Artists, Real Spectators: “Amico di Sandro, Roger Fry’s Cézanne and the Demoiselles d’Avignon”’, observed that active spectatorship and its record in prose is characteristic of English art history in a tradition going back to Ruskin and Pater, continued in the twentieth century by Roger Fry, Lawrence Gowing, John Golding and David Sylvester. »

4 The positioning of paintings and sculpture in relation to buildings and the spectator is more studied now than previously, thanks to the pioneering work of Eve Borsook, Michael Podro, Thomas Puttfarken and Julian Gardner. See: Eve Borsook, The Mural Painters of Tuscany from Cimabue to Andrea del Sarto, London, 1960; revised second edition Oxford, 1980; Julian Gardner, ‘The Decoration of the Baroncelli Chapel in Sta Croce’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 1971, 34, H2, pp. 89–114; Thomas Puttfarken, Masstabfragen: über die Unterschiede zwischen grossen und kleinen Bildern, Hamburg, 1971; Michael Podro, Piero della Francesco’s Legend of the True Cross, 1973 Charlton Lecture in Art, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, Newcastle upon Tyne, 1974, pp. 3 and 14–16; Thomas Puttfarken, The Discovery of Pictorial Composition: Theories of Visual Order in Painting, 1400–1800, New Haven and London, 2000, pp. 137–47 on Titian’s Madonna di Ca’ Pesaro, partic. pp. 144–5. »

5 Lorenzo Ghiberti, ed. Ottavio Morisani, I commentari, Naples, 1947. »

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