(BORN ABOUT 1275, DIED 1348.) MONG the losses the world has to lament in the achievements of early Italian art the most important from the historical and one of the most important from the artistic point of view is that of the greater part of the works of Lorenzetti. The few things of his which remain, principally the pictures in the town hall of Siena, show an ability as painter and an intellectual largeness which none of the painters of that day except Giotto and Duccio rivaled, and which, in the particular vein in which religious art ran in those times, were even more subtle and mystical than those of Giotto himself. And though in the purely technical and dramatic powers which mark the universal artist and determine his rank to all time Giotto still reigns supreme, in that field which to his contemporaries was the most important, namely, the moral and didactic, Lorenzetti is as much alone. Vasari, whose own judgment in art seems to have been a very lame one, reflects the temper of an earlier and more religious time when he says: If, as is certain, the debt is great that artists of genius owe to nature, much greater is ours towards them, seeing that they with so much earnestness fill our cities with noble buildings and useful and beautiful compositions of histories, reaping for themselves generally great fame and riches by their work, as did Ambrogio Lorenzetti, a Sienese painter who had a great and happy invention in composing thoughtfully, and posing his figures in his histories. He then goes on to tell of the series in which Lorenzetti tells the story of a monk who goes to the Sultan and suffers martyrdom, and in which he seems, by Vasari's description, to have painted some remarkable and at that day unprecedented landscape effects, in which the blowing of the wind and the falling of the rain upon his personages are introduced. From all that we know of art contemporary with his, this was certainly a bold and daring invention, for even Giotto never treats landscape with any suggestion of the landscape spirit. The earliest attempt at a genuine landscape effect of which I know is in one of the Pinturicchio series in the library of the Duomo at Siena, in which is represented the storm which drove the ambassador of the Pope, Piccolomini, ashore in Africa; but this was more than a hundred years after Lorenzetti, and it is pretty certain that the work of which Vasari speaks as of his personal knowledge must have been seen by Pinturicchio. We may therefore, without straining conjecture, conclude that the landscape of Lorenzetti was no more naturalistic than that of the later artist, who, with his predecessor's work before his eyes. in Siena, could hardly have failed in the scope of his own, however he might in individual ability. For the rest the exceedingly interesting treatment of a stormy sky by Pinturicchio is an important lesson in the way in which the early painters Pinturicchio was contemporary with Raphael-treated Nature; and this is not at all in the modern or naturalistic spirit, of which, in fact, even Vasari could have known nothing, so that when he lauds Lorenzetti's landscape he may indeed be right in calling it unprecedented without rendering a judgment which to us has the same significance that it had to him. Vasari praises Lorenzetti's technical power, and especially his treatment of fresco and tempera, which indeed were the only methods known to him. He sent a panel with a sample of his work to Volterra, Siena's nearest neighbor, and was called there to paint for the churches; thence to Massa and to Florence, where he painted some pictures in San Procilo. Going to Cortona for another commission, he returned to Siena, where he passed the rest of his life in the highest honor in the state as painter and as man of letters. Vasari says of this part of his life: Thenceforward he not only associated with literati and learned men, but was also employed with much honor and utility in the affairs of the republic. His habits were always of the most praiseworthy and rather those of the gentleman and philosopher than of the artisan, and, what most showed his prudence in human affairs, he had always his mind disposed to contentment with what the world and and tranquillity the good and ill of fortune. gave him, whence he accepted with moderation time Then the biographer goes on in the moralizing vein to which the contemplation of the character of Lorenzetti had induced him, with a general conclusion not much in agreement with ours of to-day: And truly it is impossible to say how much gentle manners and modesty, with other good moral qualities, are honorable company to all the arts, but especially to those which grow out of the intellect and noble and lofty genius-whence every one ought to make himself as acceptable by his manners as by this excellence of his art. It is impossible to look into the world of art. by any of those little peep-holes which these passages of personality give us, even in Vasari's time,-which was one of decadence in every quality of art and in most of intellect,— without seeing that the artist of the three centuries prior to the death of Michael Angelo was a creature of very different influences from those which rule him to-day; was in all senses and directions a more serious, more largely developed, and more widely affiliated man than the men who rule the taste of to-day. The excessive and exclusive study of nature not only has narrowed and lowered art, but in so doing has restricted the field in which the greater intellects of the time can find a satisfactory range of activity. A man like Lorenzetti coming into the world to-day would be more likely to be in the pulpit or the professorial chair; the value of art as a moral or an intellectual lever is too little to-day to call his enthusiasm into its channels. He was a teacher, and allegory was in his day the form in which the moralities reached the world with most power. Though his works have mostly perished, those which remain in the council room of the town hall of Siena will show how he felt his art. He painted great allegories where Justice, Concord, and Peace were presented to the common mind with all the force of moral law. Justice is a crowned and royally robed woman on a golden throne, looking up to Wisdom, who stands above with a balance in her right hand and a book in her left; Justice, reaching out, holds the balance in equilibrium. From the right scale of the balance comes a winged genius who places a crown on the head of one man of two before it while decapitating the other, thus rewarding good and evil deeds. Another genius in the other scale gives a sword and a lance to one man and a box of money to his companion. The former is called Distributive Justice, the latter Compensatory. Under Justice sits crowned a richly appareled woman holding on her knees a plane with two handles where is written "Concordia." She holds two cords which pass through the hands of twenty-four persons, evidently well-disposed citizens, and thence to a gray-bearded man on the right, who sits on a bench above some others,―probably the symbol of the government of the city,-Civic Rule being crowned. He is robed in a black mantle with a vest covered with pearls and precious stones, and holds a scepter in his right hand to which the cords are attached. In his left he holds a shield with a Madonna and Child and the arms of Siena. Above him are the virtues, theological, moral, and civil, with a long metri cal inscription-probably the painter's. This is Ma ben comune per lor signor si fanno, Delle Virtu che turno [intorno] a lui si danno. (TRANSLATION.) This holy virtue where it rules Follows all civic influence The school of Lorenzetti has left many works from which the characteristics of his art may be seen, and his elder brother Pietro, though less celebrated and esteemed in their own day, was one of the eminent painters of the Sienese school. There is in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts a picture of the school and by one of Ambrogio's scholars, who, though not known by name, is recognizable by his style. It preserves the quaint architectural framing and decorative accessories which were inherent in all work of that epoch from the Byzantine down to Masaccio, during which time painting was in the estimation of its patrons, the clergy, simply ecclesiastical furniture, a consideration which explains why the pictures were so frequently repainted, or even simply renewed by whitewashing. Whatever might have been the ideas of the artists, the clergy were until a late period in the Renaissance utterly indifferent to the artistic merit of their decoration, and the period of enlightenment was of brief duration. Lorenzetti is supposed to have died in the plague of 1348. NOTES BY T. COLE, ENGRAVER. W. J. Stillman. 'HE Madonna and Child of Ambrogio Lorenzetti favorable light; but towards the afternoon, when the sun in sacristy of or 5. Frau cesco, Siena. Being underneath the little window of the chapel and covered with glass, it is not in a very to better advantage by the reflected light. It is painted upon a panel, in tempera, and measures about thirty 1 The graybeard shown in the picture. or thirty-two inches high by eighteen or twenty inches wide. In my reproduction of it I have cut off a portion of the Gothic point, in order to get the figures larger upon the block; so by continuing the sloping lines of each side to a point you have the shape of the original. I first saw a photograph of this picture at the studio of Mr. Murray in Florence, who referred to it as the finest and best preserved of all this master's works. It is soft and rich in coloring. The background and glories are gilded, the latter being elaborately and delicately worked. The robe of the Madonna, which falls down from her head, is of a rich dark blue with a border of soft brown. Her breast and her sleeve are of a fine soft tone of red. The rest of her garment, showing underneath the Child, is of some deep tone of green or blue. The white veil or linen around her head and falling over her breast is finely contrasted with the mellow tones of the flesh. The drapery of the Child is of a yellowish tone, and blends very harmoniously with the color of his skin. The whole is a warm and pleasing combination of color, and forms one of the finest examples in this respect of the Sienese school. There is a dignified air of tenderness in the Madonna, and the soul of the mother is seen in the way she holds her Child. It is the most motherly Madonna I have seen. And how true a child it is, with both its little hands clasped about the breast! Something has attracted its attention, and it instinctively strikes this attitude as it endeavors to glance around, which gives the crescent form to the white of the eye and which many a father has noticed, especially in his first-born, under like circumstances. It is this which arrests the attention of the beholder and fixes it upon the main object of interest. It is a perfectly natural expression in an infant, and, selected and portrayed in a picture such as the present, it assumes a singular air of importance, and suggests in a most artless manner the supernatural character of the Child. AN excellent work by Lorenzetti is in the Gallery of the Belle Arti, Florence-"The Presentation in the Temple," one of his very finest works, and from which I should have selected a detail had not the picture in Siena presented the advantage of giving a full-page illustration, and so disposing of the necessity for cutting out a detail, always a painful thing to have to do. T. Cole. SOME ASPECTS OF THE SAMOAN QUESTION. BY THE SPECIAL COMMISSIONER SENT BY THE UNITED STATES TO SAMOA IN 1886. AMOA is very far away and hitherto little known, but in spite of these conditions discussion has disclosed the fact that there still remains in the American people, regardless of party lines, the instinct of self-assertion and of adherence to honorable engagements, whether express or implied, always characteristic of our people. The settlement of the Pacific coast and of the great interior regions of our country has been so rapid that it requires a mental effort even now to realize that in place of a confederation of States lying mainly between the Mississippi River and the Atlantic Ocean, with the narrow strip upon the Pacific coast, we have now a great empire stretching from ocean, to ocean, in which, between the Missouri River and California, great and populous States will soon replace vast unsettled Territories. In the near future the interests of the Pacific coast will be equal to those of the Atlantic, and it is possibly fortunate that the Samoan difficulty has arisen to awaken the minds of our Eastern people to the true extent of our interest in the Pacific. Owing to the active operations of European powers in absorbing Polynesian groups, there VOL. XXXVII.-125. remain but three principal groups of islands respecting which this Government may concern itself actively without grave complications. These are Hawaii, Samoa, and Tonga; and with the Government of each of these groups the United States has now entered into treaty stipulations. A glance at the map will show that all these island groups are situated in longitude east of the extreme north-western possessions of the United States, and all of them are east of the 180th meridian, and therefore within the Western Hemisphere. Taking the two latter groups together the distance from the equator varies little from that of Hawaii, and between Hawaii and Samoa in the line of longitude there are no islands of importance. The position of Samoa, with respect to lower Mexico and the Isthmian coast, is relatively the same as that of Hawaii with respect to the California coast. Hawaii and Samoa are equally distant from the Isthmus; Samoa being in the direct line of trade to Australia, and the course from the Isthmus to China lying equally distant between the two groups. The necessity for our insisting upon and even guaranteeing the neutrality of the Isthmus of Panama, with respect to any canals being constructed, is a conceded point in American diplomacy. It has been frequently asserted that the importance of the Sandwich Islands |