MEMOIRS

OF THE

EARLY ITALIAN PAINTERS.

GIOVANNI CIMABUE,

Born at Florence, 1240; died about 1302.

To Cimabue for three centuries had been awarded the lofty title of "Father of Modern Painting;" and to him, on the authority of Vasari, had been ascribed the merit, or rather the miracle, of having revived the art of painting when utterly lost, dead and buried; of having by his single genius brought light out of darkness, form and beauty out of chaos. The error or gross exaggeration of Vasari in making these claims for his countryman has been pointed out by later authors. Some have even denied to Cimabue any share whatever in the regeneration of art; and, at all events, it seems clear that his claims have been much over-stated; that, so far from painting being a lost art in the thirteenth century, and the race of artists annihilated, as Va

sari would lead us to believe, several contemporary painters were living and working in the cities and churches of Italy previous to 1240; and it is possible to trace back an uninterrupted series of pictorial remains and names of painters even to the fourth century. But, in depriving Cimabue of his false glories, enough remains to interest and fix attention on the period at which he lived. His name has stood too long, too conspicuously, too justly, as a landmark in the history of art, to be now thrust back under the waves of oblivion.

A rapid glance over the progress of painting before his time will enable us to judge of his true claims, and place him in his true position relative to those who preceded and those who followed him.

The early Christians had confounded, in their horror of heathen idolatry, all imitative art and all artists. They regarded with decided hostility all images, and those who wrought them as bound to the service of Satan and heathenism; and we find all visible representations of sacred personages and actions confined to mystic emblems. Thus, the Cross signified Redemption; the Fish, Baptism; the Ship represented the Church; the Serpent, Sin, or the Spirit of Evil. When, in the fourth century, the struggle between paganism and Christianity ended in the triumph and recognition of the latter, and art revived, it was, if not in a new form, in a new spirit, by which the old forms were to be

gradually moulded and modified. The Christians found the shell of ancient art remaining; the traditionary handicraft still existed; certain models of figure and drapery, &c., handed down from antiquity, though degenerated and distorted, remained in use, and were applied to illustrate, by direct or symbolical representations, the tenets of a purer faith. From the beginning, the figures selected to typify our redemption were those of the Saviour and the Blessed Virgin, first separately, and then conjointly as the Mother and Infant. The earliest monuments of Christian art remaining are to be found, nearly effaced, on the walls and ceilings of the catacombs at Rome, to which the persecuted martyrs of the faith had fled for refuge. The first recorded representation of the Saviour is in the character of the Good Shepherd, and the attributes of Orpheus and Apollo were borrowed to express the character of him who "redeemed souls from hell," and "gathered his people like sheep." In the cemetery of St. Calixtus, at Rome, a head of Christ was discovered, the most ancient of which any copy has come down to us. The figure is colossal; the face a long oval; the countenance mild, grave, melancholy; the long hair parted on the brow, falling in two masses on either shoulder; the beard not thick, but short and divided. Here, then, obviously imitated from some traditional description (probably the letter of Lentulus to the Roman Senate, supposed to be a fabrication of the