believe that I am looking into a book that is nearly a thousand years old. Some of the illuminations are so clean and fresh that they seem but lately done-not the slightest taint of yellowness, unless it be in the parchment itself, and what touches of white there are have remained as pure as though put on but yesterday. The fineness of the detail can only be thoroughly appreciated under a magnifying glass,-as in the feet with their sandals and straps, and in the expressions of the faces and hands; the hatchings of gold on the garments and the shrubbery are as delicate as a cobweb. The glories are of gold also. The delicate hatchings of gold are not visible until the light catches the page slantingly, when they shine out in the glories with surprising luster. It was impossible for me to do anything like justice to these wonderfully delicate things in engraving, and my proofs of them are but lifeless things at best. The gold hatchings I could only suggest by the finest possible white lines; but then these mingle up and are lost with the whites in the high lights of the folds. And then the various colors of the garments, green, blue, yellow, red, etc., are all lost in black and white, and the marvelous delicacy of the detail could by no means be approached in wood-engraving. You will see these same gold hatchings in the works of Cimabue and Duccio; while the distinction between the apostles and the heretics in the Byzantine, given

in the uncovered feet and legs of the former opposed to the black legs of the latter, is alike characteristic of Duccio, as well as the grouping of the figures. Each illumination is designed to tell several progressive stages in the story-as, for instance, in the one I have called "The Passion," the first group is illustrative of the passage, "They went out unto the Mount of Olives" (the Mount is indicated behind Jesus). "Jesus saith unto them, All ye shall be offended because of me this night." Peter answers, "Although all shall be offended, yet will not I." Peter is seen bending forward from the group. In the second group the story is continued, and he leaves the disciples and goes aside to pray. The third part, to the right of the tower, shows him in the garden praying; a ray from heaven is descending upon him. The fourth group would seem to tell the moment when he exclaims, "Behold, the hour is at hand, and the Son of man is betrayed into the hands of sinners." In the other block is seen the moment of the betrayal, the unbelievers being distinguished by their black legs. Peter is shown cutting off the ear of the servant of the high priest. These illuminations are distinguished by great certainty of touch. Those in the first half of the book are much superior to those in the latter half. The initial piece that I have called "The Vision" is from the latter half. T. Cole.

by having left them the fame accorded by their primitive critics and destroyed all works by which we might have checked it. The taste even of an educated public is only equal to the art it has been trained on, and is, therefore, always behind the best of the day; so that any advance from that is sufficient to excite its enthusiasm, and much more so that of the masses; and the greatest impressibility, and hence the most uncontrolled enthusiasm, accompany invariably the lower state of education in art. The popular triumphs, the processions of admiration, and all the elements which make the legends of early art, are not material enough for the determination of the rank of an artist. What the ignorant wonder at is what a trained taste generally despises; and while it is possible that the development of the art of painting under Zeuxis was worthy of the sculpture of the period, we have no indication of the fact; but, on the contrary, the legends preserved to us indicate that his great successes were those of a very low technical development. To understand this, one has only to note the extravagant admiration which certain very crude efforts of the itinerant portrait-painter excite to-day in rural circles, and even among comparatively educated people with no sound art training.

With Cimabue we touch the middle ground, where the legendary can be to a slight extent put to proof; and we find, as usual, that what the popular taste fancied worthy of the most unrestrained exaltation-his presumed fidelity to nature is an illusion, and that his great virtues the extreme, and perhaps immediately before him unexampled, devotion to his art, and sincerity in technical treatment of his subjects were never noted by the legend-makers as part of his endowments.

It is doubtful if there has ever been any sudden great advance in art. Accident, perhaps oftener than transcendent merit, has led to certain men being made the personification of the art of their day, while as good or better men have lapsed into oblivion; and this to a certain extent has served the fame of Cimabue. We, looking at art from the modern and scientific point of view, translate the reputation which Cimabue got in his own day, of bringing art back to nature, as implying that he was, in our sense of the word, naturalistic as compared with his predecessors. To understand his real merits this reputation must be utterly demolished, for it puts him in a false light. Neither he nor his contemporaries or immediate successors ever studied nature in the sense of making direct use of a model or natural object. Their art was traditional, set about by rules both technical and theological, which left the field for distinction mainly in a better and more complete

technique, minuter and more facile execution, etc., which probably Cimabue acquired to the extent of an important advance on his masters. But to estimate rightly this phase of Italian art one must recognize the wide difference between Cimabue's education and that which is the object of art schools nowadays. Sacred subjects alone were admissible, and these were treated according to set rules, as they still are in the Byzantine schools of Mt. Athos; only certain poses were permitted to certain subjects, and the types, methods, colors, and compositions were rigidly determined. This education Cimabue conformed to, and in realization, which to us is the meaning of "natural," his pictures had no more to boast of than those of his predecessors and his contemporaries. We have seen, and shall have further evidence, that Cimabue was part of a general quickening of art, and that the revival of painting with which he is identified was one that far outreached his career, retrospectively and prospectively, and was, in fact, the slow reanimation of the hieratic and prescriptive types carried on for generations, and not invented or developed by one mind-Byzantine art, in fact, roused from its lethargy and made progressive by many painters under the influence of the general intellectual awakening of Italy, beginning just before Dante and continuing until the sixteenth century. This awakening was more complete in the active Tuscan brain, stimulated by commercial prosperity and civic independence and possibly by the constant contest for liberty, than in other parts of Italy.

There is a curious parallel to this in the change wrought on Greek sculpture when the archaic, traditional types were carried from the Peloponnesus into the Attic atmosphere and ripened there into the perfected ideal art. And the analogy goes further in the decline of both schools from the ideal to the naturalistic. In the antecedents of the two great revivals the preparation was the same-technical training, mastery of handicrafts, bronze-casting, marblecutting, and wood-carving in the one, and in the other the processes of tempera and wall-painting; facility of execution being acquired, as it can only be acquired in the greatest excellence, by following and completing the conventional ideals by the aid of more perfect knowledge. Painters and mosaicists of the Byzantine school had been for some time, perhaps for several centuries, at work in Florence, as we know that at Ravenna and Venice they had been at work as early as the eighth century.

To one of these painters Giovanni Cimabue was apprenticed, after the fashion of the time, as he would have been to any other trade. He had been judged to be a clever boy and worthy

to be educated, in a time when only the clever boys were considered worth the trouble and expense of education, and was sent to the convent of Santa Maria Novella to be taught letters. In place of attending to his grammar, he passed his time, like many a school-boy since, in drawing in his books and on other blank spaces "men, horses, houses, and all kinds of fantastic things," which talent, considering that all books were in manuscript and of greater value than our "first readers," and that Solomon was regarded in those days as the head of magisterial wisdom, was most probably recompensed primarily by the rod. But the lad had his own way, for "certain Greek painters," i. e., painters in the Byzantine manner, being called to Florence for public works, Giovanni played the truant to see them at their painting, and passed entire days there. The enthusiasm of the boy leading his father and the Greek masters to judge well of his chance of having an "honorable success" as a painter, as Vasari puts it, he was, to his great delight, sent to them to learn the business properly.

Milanesi, in his commentary on Vasari's life of Cimabue, attempts to discredit the attribution of Cimabue's masters to the Byzantine school; but his contention is illogical and shortsighted, for not only was the only authoritative school of painting at that time the Byzantine, and all contemporary work, including that of Cimabue himself, tinged with the typical Byzantine traits, but the methods employed in painting, the general treatment, the use of golden backgrounds, and the type of face of the Madonna, with its almond-shaped eyes, borrowed from some Eastern ideal, were distinctly characteristic of that school.1 There is no doubt that, as Milanesi contends, there were Italian painters before Cimabue; but, as Richmond points out in his lectures, the masterhood of all art of those days belonged to the school of Constantinople, then the great Christian empire and the head of civilization, regarding all western Europe as still barbarian and in the darkness of heresy.

That Cimabue was not alone in excellence, and is therefore unjustly regarded as the restorer of art, is, indeed, now generally recognized; and it is probable that his traditional supremacy, which has come down to us, is due rather to the fact that Florence was the literary center of Italy at that time than that his work was so much better than any other. As between the two, I prefer the works of Duccio

1 Vasari and Lanzi distinctly declare him to have been the pupil of Greek artists, and we know that Greek artists worked then at the Baptistery. Richmond says: "Whether Cimabue was directly a pupil of Greek artists or not is a question of some doubt; but indirectly evidence tends to show that the Greek art of the thir

of Siena, though to the casual observer they seem hardly to be separated as the work of different schools; and the strong similitudes, the elements common to both, and the uniform technical methods are proof even stronger than traditional of a community of origin in the Byzantine school.

It was only when he went to Assisi that, still working under his Greek masters, he began to separate himself from them; for "in these pictures he surpassed greatly the Greek painters; whence taking courage, he began to paint for himself in the church above." (Vasari.) Certainly from this we have a clear right to conclude that up to this time he had not distinguished his manner or treatment of subject from the pure Byzantine; but that, working under the Greek painters, he had come to paint better than they. The way in which the marvelous helped his reputation is shown by the influence on it, even to our own day, of the triumphal procession of his masterpiece, the Madonna of Santa Maria Novella, from his studio to the church, which legend, and Dante's Credette Cimabue nella pintura

Tener lo campo,

have given more color to his position as the restorer of art than anything we can now discover of the qualities of his work, and doubtless are in great part responsible for his preëminence in tradition over all his contemporaries. And it is not unlike the spirit of our own time that something was added when royalty in the person of Charles of Anjou was brought to see the picture in the painter's house, and "all the men and all the women of Florence gathered there, with the greatest festivities and the greatest crowd in the world; whence, for the rejoicing which the neighbours had, that place was called Borgo Allegri [the joyous suburb], which, with time inclosed in the city wall, has always since retained the name"; the festivities and the glorification being as much on account of the king as of Cimabue.

The painter of those days, it must be understood, was simply of a superior class of workmen in whom excellence of workmanship was the chief claim to distinction. He probably was paid, according to the magnitude of his work, with an extra allowance for gold for his background; and we see still in Cimabue's madonna that the work was to a great extent such as required merely mechanical dexterity and honest patience. The freedom of action —

teenth century was far in advance of any Italian art. Consequently the possibility is that Cimabue went for instruction to those artists most highly esteemed. It is, however, perfectly evident that the artistic laws upon which Cimabue founded himself, or was founded, were Greek and not Italian."

comparative, however-of the child Jesus, which seems the chief variant from the orthodox Byzantine type, appears also in Duccio; and reasoning from analogy and the slight remains of previous art, I am, I think, enabled to understand the preceding art from which the revival took its new departure. Its productions were very closely alike in design, the composition and type of figure and attributes not materially varying, and following, in more or less dexterous execution, ancient types, with color reverentially reproducing, as in our emulations of old masters to-day, the venerable and sacred dinginess of time. The art element had gone out, and pictures were merely a kind of church furniture, more sacred according to age, apparent as well as real.

Probably in the revival religion also awoke a little; and the child Jesus being the object most human and nearest the feeling of the revivalists, the first movement was in the attempt to make him real, more like the children they knew. Then the Tuscan energy of character, always less reverent than the Greek, revolted against the unnatural blackness of the conventional palette, and, delighting in vivid colors, attempted to substitute the brilliancy of the costume of the day. In addition to this general tribute to popular feeling we know that the picture which marks the high tide of Cimabue's glory was the largest which had ever been attempted (on panel, it is to be understood); and this in itself was to the people reason enough, as it is sometimes even yet, to mark him as the greatest painter of the day. Beyond this it is not evident that Cimabue could have gone, and in this he did not go alone. We find in his pictures and those of all his contemporaries the traditional type of Madonna - long-eyed, ill-proportioned, the preternaturally long fingers, the conventional attitudes, the drapery as stiff and as methodically and even mechanically ornamented as the Byzantine.

The modern conception of art, in either the dramatic or the esthetic aspects, was clearly not given to the revivalists. They displayed more minuteness, a more vivid color, a larger scale of work and therefore a more competent workmanship, but always the same aims and the same elements. These they may have had, as compared with the Byzantines, simply as freer and more energetic men, and less respectful to tradition and prescription. And even this advance must be understood as revival rather than discovery, and as contrasted with contemporary Byzantine work, as the Florentines saw it in San Giovanni and elsewhere; but it was still only

1 Most of the detail of decoration at this time was done by a kind of stamp or punch, giving great decorative effect without any exercise of the artistic powers, and analogous to our modern ornament in cast iron.

comparative restoration, as we found in studying the Byzantines, especially in their mosaics. That Cimabue was, more than his contemporaries, difficult with himself in his work, we may judge from the commentator of Dante, quoted by Vasari:

the author [Dante], greater than men knew [before]; Cimabue of Florence was a painter of the time of and, beside, was so arrogant and scornful that if any one pointed out any defect in his work, or if he himself saw it, he immediately threw it up, however valuable it might be.

We do not now attach the same meaning to "arrogant" and "scornful" that the commentator did; but that is only one of the changes which time has produced in our standards of men and qualities, and the epithet "greater" as here employed is probably due to the scale of his work. In judging of Cimabue's art and relative position we must not only make allowance for the material obscuration by time, which perhaps tells against him, but of that comparative recession, time's perspective, by which the newcomer pushes the elder into the background, as Dante even then put it:

Credette Cimabue nella pintura

Tener lo campo, ed ora ha Giotto il grido,
Si che la fama di colui è oscura.

And this sometimes increases the grandeur of the remote and undefinable. Then he was the countryman of Dante and the master of Giotto, circumstances which unite with those I have noted to explain his exceptional position. As master of Giotto we have generally, I think, given him credit for Giotto's art, which is not justifiable; for Giotto was not a reviver — he was an inventor.

So that, taking all things into consideration, I believe that we are perfectly justified in considering Cimabue to have been overrated from his own day down; that he was simply the ablest painter of his day in Florence, and that his fortune in being the master of Giotto is his greatest claim to our gratitude.

Italian writers, from Vasari down, have tried so to detach him from the Byzantine system that he shall appear as the first great Italian painter; and they have held the field for want of advocates of the other view. Vasari says that the angels around Cimabue's Madonna showed that "while he had still the Greek manner, he approached in some respects the features and method of the modern"; and Richmond, in his Oxford lectures on the early Italian painters, says:

He [Cimabue] inherited from the Greek severity of design, a grand manner, notwithstanding occasional defects of proportion; the main point of his inheritance being the perfect understanding of the manner proper to wall decoration in mosaic, and directness in telling his story. Up to the time of Cimabue, mosaic