The Miniature Melchizedek and Abraham Exemplifies the Refined Taste of Parisian Art of the

Lexicon of Art and Artists

	History of Architecture and Sculpture


	CONTENTS:
	PART I THE ANCIENT WORLD PREHISTORIC Fine art EGYPTIAN Art ANCIENT Well-nigh EASTERN Art AEGEAN Art GREEK Art ETRUSCAN Art ROMAN Art EARLY CHRISTIAN AND BYZANTINE ART Function TWO THE Centre AGES EARLY MEDIEVAL ART ROMANESQUE Art GOTHIC Art Office Iii THE RENAISSANCE THROUGH THE ROCOCO Belatedly GOTHIC THE Early on RENAISSANCE IN Italian republic THE HIGH RENAISSANCE IN Italian republic MANNERISM AND OTHER TRENDS THE RENAISSANCE IN THE Due north THE BAROQUE IN Italia AND Espana THE BAROQUE IN FLANDERS AND HOLLAND THE Baroque THE ROCOCO Office FOUR THE Modern Earth NEOCLASSICISM AND ROMANTICISM REALISM AND IMPRESSIONISM Postal service-IMPRESSIONISM, SYMBOLISM, AND Fine art NOUVEAU PART 5 TWENTIETH-CENTURY TWENTIETH-CENTURY SCULPTURE TWENTIETH-CENTURY Compages INDEX FIGURES

CHAPTER Three

GOTHIC ART

ARCHITECTURE - Function 1 , ii , 3 , four , v , half dozen , seven , eight , ix , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 SCULPTURE - Part 1 , 2 , iii , iv , 5 , 6 , vii , viii , ix , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , xiv STAINED GLASS - Part one , 2 PAINTING - Part one , 2

PAINTING

France

VILLARD DE HONNECOURT.

Only architects and stonemasons knew how to deal with this problem, and it was their methods that the stained-drinking glass workers borrowed in mapping out their ain compositions. Gothic architectural design, as we recall from our discussion of the choir of St.-Denis (run into figs.
443 and 444), uses a system of geometric relationships to establish numerical harmony. The same rules could be used to command the design of stained-glass windows, through which shines the Light Divine, or even of an individual figure.We gain some insight into this procedure from the drawings in a notebook compiled about 1240 by the architect Villard de Honnecourt. What we encounter in the Wheel of Fortune ( fig. 511) is not the last version of the pattern merely the scaffolding of circles and triangles on which the image is to be constructed. The pervasiveness of these geometric schemes is well illustrated by another cartoon from the same notebook, the Front end View of a Lion (fig. 512). According to the inscription. Villard has portrayed the creature from life, but a closer wait at the figure volition convince u.s.a. that he was able to practice so but after he had laid down a geometric design: a circle for the face up (the dot betwixt the optics is its middle) and a 2d, larger circle for the torso. To Villard, and so, drawing from the meant something far dissimilar from what it does to us: it meant filling in an abstract framework with details based on direct observation. If we now turn back once more to the firmly fatigued, simplified outlines of the label, we cannot help wondering to what extent they, too, reverberate a geometric scaffolding of some sort.

The period 1200-1250 might be termed the golden age of stained glass. Later on that, as architectural activity declined and the demand for stained drinking glass began to slacken, manuscript illumination gradually recaptured its former position of leadership. By and then, however, miniature painting had been thoroughly affected by the influence of both stained glass and stone sculpture, the creative pacemakers of the first half of the century.

511. VILLARD DE HONNECOURT. Wheel oh Fortune. �. 1240. Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris
512. VILLARD DE HONNECOURT. Forepart View of a Lion. � 1240. Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris

ILLUMINATED MANUSCRIPTS.

The resulting change of mode can exist seen in figure 513, from a psalter done about 1260 for Male monarch Louis IX (St. Louis) of French republic. I he scene illustrates I Samuel eleven:2, in which Nahash the Ammonite threatens the Jews at Jabesh. We notice first of all the careful symmetry of the framework, which consists of flat, ornamented panels very much similar those in the Iohel window, and of an architectural setting remarkably like to the choir screen by the Naumburg Main (run into fig. 494). The latter recalls the canopies above the heads of jamb statues (encounter fig. 487) and the arched twin niches enclosing the relief of Melchizedek and Abraham at Reims (fig. 490).

Confronting this emphatically two-dimensional background, the figures are "relieved" past smooth and adept modeling. But their sculptural quality stops brusk at the outer contours, which arc defined by heavy dark lines rather like the lead strips in stained-glass windows. The figures themselves show all the characteristics of the elegant style originated about xx years earlier past the sculptors of the royal courtroom: svelte gestures, swaying poses, smiling faces, neatly waved strands of hair (compare the Proclamation angel in effigy 489 and Melchizedek in figure 490). Our miniature thus exemplifies the subtle and refined sense of taste that made the court fine art of Paris the standard for all Europe. Of the expressive free energy of Romanesque painting nosotros find no trace (figs. 373 and 375).

Until the thirteenth century, the production of illuminated manuscripts had been centered in the scriptoria of monasteries. Now, along with a great many other activities once the special preserve of monasteries, it shifted e'er more than to urban workshops organized past laymen, the ancestors of the publishing houses of today. Here again the workshops of sculptors and stained-glass painters may accept set up the blueprint.
Some members of this new, secular breed of illuminator are known to us past proper noun, such as Master Honore of Paris, who in 1295 did the miniatures in the Prayer Book of Philip the Fair. Our sample (fig. 514) shows him working in a style derived from the Psalter of St. Louis. Significantly, however, the framework no longer dominates the limerick. The figures have get larger, and their relieflike modeling is more emphatic. They are even permitted to overlap the frame, a device that helps to detach them from the flat pattern of the background and thus introduces a sure, though very express, spatial range into the moving-picture show.

513. Nahash the Ammonite T hreatening the Jews at Jahesh, from the Psalter of St. Louis, � . 1260. Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris

514. MASTER HONORE. David and Goliath,
from the Prayer Volume of Philip the Fair. 1295.
Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris

Italy

We must now plough our attention to Italian painting, which at the finish of the thirteenth century produced an explosion of creative energy as spectacular, and equally far-reaching in its impact on the time to come, as the rise of the Gothic cathedral in French republic. A single glance at Giotto 's Lamentation (fig. 522) will convince u.s.a. that we are faced with a truly revolutionary evolution. How, nosotros wonder, could a piece of work of such intense dramatic power be conceived by a gimmicky of Main Honore? What were the conditions that made information technology possible? Oddly enough, every bit nosotros enquire into the background of Giotto's fine art, we discover that it arose from the same "former-fashioned" attitudes we met in Italian Gothic architecture and sculpture.

Medieval Italia, although strongly influenced by Northern art from Carolingian times on, had always maintained close contact with Byzantine culture. As a issue, console painting, mosaic, and murals�mediums that had never taken firm root north of the Alps�were kept alive on Italian soil. Indeed, a new wave of influences from Byzantine art, which enjoyed a major resurgence during the thirteenth century, overwhelmed the lingering Romanesque elements in Italian painting at the very time when stained glass became the ascendant pictorial fine art in France.

There is a certain irony in the fact that this neo-Byzantine style�or "Greek manner," as the Italians chosen it�made its appearance soon after the conquest of Constantinople past the armies of the Fourth Crusade in 1204. (1 thinks of the way Greek fine art had once captured the sense of taste of the victorious Romans of old.) Be that as information technology may, the Greek manner prevailed almost until the cease of the thirteenth century, so that Italian painters were able to absorb the Byzantine tradition far more than thoroughly than ever before. During this same period, we call back, Italian architects and sculptors followed a very dissimilar course: untouched by the Greek manner, they were assimilating the Gothic style. Eventually, toward 1300, Gothic influence spilled over into painting every bit well, and the interaction of this chemical element with the neo-Byzantine produced the revolutionary new style of which Giotto is the greatest exponent.

TEMPERA.

Altarpieces of the Gothic era were painted on wood panel in tempera, an egg-based medium that dries quickly to course an extremely tough surface. The grooming of the console was a circuitous, time-consuming process. Kickoff information technology was planed and coated with a mixture of plaster and glue known as gesso, which was sometimes reinforced with linen. In one case the design had been drawn, the background was almost invariably filled in with gold leafage over red sizing. Then the underpainting, generally a dark-green earth paint (terra verde), was added. The image itself was executed in multiple layers of thin tempera with very fine brushes, a painstaking process that placed a premium on neatness, since few corrections were possible.

Amidst the painters of the Greek fashion, the Florentine master Cimabue (c. 1250-later on 1300), who may have been Giotto 'south teacher, enjoyed special fame. His huge altar console, Madonna Enthroned (fig. 515), rivals the finest Byzantine icons or mosaics (compare figs. 339 and 345). What distinguishes it from them is mainly a greater severity of design and expression, which befits its huge size. Panels on such a awe-inspiring scale had never been attempted in the East.
Equally united nations-Byzantine is the picture'south gabled shape and the way the throne of inlaid woods seems to echo it. The geometric inlays, like the throne'southward architectural style, remind us of the Florence Baptistery (see fig. 421).
vxv. C IMABUE. Madonna Enthroned.
� . 1280-ninety.
Tempera on panel, 12 '7 1/2" 10 seven'4" (3.9 x 2.two thou).
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

DUCCIO .

Meet besides Collection: Duccio di Buonisegna

The Madonna Enthroned (fig. 516), painted a quarter century later by Duccio di Buonisegna (c. 1255-earlier 1319) for the main altar of Siena Cathedral, was honored by being called the Maesta (majesty) to identify the Virgin'southward office hither as the Queen of I leaven surrounded by her celestial courtroom of saints and angels. At kickoff glance, the picture may seem much like Cimabue's, since both follow the same basic scheme. Yet the differences are important. They reflect not but two contrasting personalities and contrasting local tastes�the gentleness of Duccio is feature of Siena�merely also the rapid evolution of fashion.

In Duccio 's easily, the Greek manner has get unfrozen. The rigid, angular draperies have given way to an undulating softness. The abstract shading-in-reverse with lines of gilded is reduced to a minimum. The bodies, faces, and hands are beginning to swell with a subtle 3-dimensional life. Clearly, the heritage of Hellenistic-Roman illusionism that had always been part of the Byzantine tradition, however dormant or submerged, is asserting itself over again. But there is also a one-half-hidden Gothic chemical element hither. Nosotros sense information technology in the fluency of the drapery, the highly-seasoned naturalness of the Infant Christ, and the tender glances by which the figures communicate with each other. The chief source of this Gothic influence must have been Giovanni Pisano, who was in Siena from 1285 to 1295 as the sculptor-builder in charge of the cathedral facade.

516. DUCCIO . Madonna Enthroned, center of the Maesta Altar. 1308-11.
Tempera on panel, height half dozen' 10 1/2" (2.ane thou).
Museo dell'Opera del Duomo, Siena

Apart from the Madonna, the Maesta includes many small compartments with scenes from the lives of Christ and the Virgin. In these panels, the about mature works of Duccio 's career, the cross-fertilization of Gothic and Byzantine elements has given rise to a evolution of fundamental importance: a new kind of motion-picture show space. The Announcement of the Death of the Virgin (fig. 517) shows us something we have never seen earlier in the history of painting: two figures enclosed by an architectural interior.

Aboriginal painters and their Byzantine successors were quite unable to achieve this space. Their architectural settings always stay behind the figures, so that their indoor scenes tend to wait every bit if they were taking place in an open-air theater, on a stage without a roof. Duccio's figures, in contrast, inhabit a space that is created and defined by the architecture, as if the artist had carved a niche into his console. Perhaps we will recognize the origin of this spatial framework: it derives from the architectural "housing" of Gothic sculpture (compare especially figs. 490 and 494). Northern Gothic painters, too, had tried to reproduce these architectural settings, but they could practise so simply by flattening them out completely (every bit in the Psalter of St. Louis, fig. 513). The Italian painters of Duccio's generation, on the other hand, trained as they were in the Greek style, had acquired enough of the devices of Hellenistic-Roman illusionism (encounter fig. 288) to permit them render such a framework without draining information technology of its iii-dimensional qualities.

Even in the outdoor scenes on the back of the Maesta, such as Christ Entering Jerusalem (fig. 518), the architecture keeps its space-creating function. The diagonal movement into depth is conveyed non by the figures, which have the same scale throughout, but past the walls on either side of the route leading to the city, by the gate that frames the oversupply, and by the structures across. Whatever the shortcomings of Duccio 'southward perspective, his architecture demonstrates its capacity to comprise and enclose, and for that reason seems more intelligible than similar vistas in ancient art (compare fig. 289).

51 seven. DUCCIO . Annunciation of the Death of the Virgin, from the Maesta Altar

518. DUCCIO . Christ Entering Jerusalem, from the dorsum of the Maesta Altar. 1308-eleven.
Tempera on panel, xl 1/2 x 21 1/8" (103 10 53.7 cm). Museo dell'Opera del Duomo, Siena

G IOTTO. CAVALLINI.

Turning from Duccio to Giotto (1267?�1336/7), we meet an creative person of far bolder and more dramatic atmosphere. Ten to 15 years younger, Giotto was less shut to the Greek manner from the start, despite his probable apprenticeship under Cimabue. As a Florentine, he fell heir to Cimabue'south sense of monumental scale, which fabricated him a wall painter by instinct, rather than a console painter. The fine art of Giotto is nevertheless so daringly original that its sources are far more hard to trace than those of Duccio's manner. Apart from his Florentine background as represented by the Greek way of Cimabue, the young Giotto seems to accept been familiar with the work of neo-Byzantine masters of Rome, such every bit Cimabue's contemporary Pietro Cavallini (documented 1272� 1303), who expert both mosaic and fresco.

Cavallini 's style is an astonishing blend of Byzantine, Roman, and Early Christian elements. The figures in his Last Judgment (fig. 519) are in the best upwards-to-date manner of the Second Aureate Age (compare the Anastasis in fig. 347), but he has modeled them in a soft daylight that can only have come from exposure to antique wall painting (see fig. 293). The result is an nigh sculptural monumentality that is remarkably classical. Indeed, these saints take the same calm air and gentle gravity establish on the Sarcophagus of Junius Bassus (fig. 314), simply with the relaxed naturalness of the Gothic.

519. PIETRO CAVALLINI. Seated Apostles, from The Last Judgment, �. 1290.
Fresco. Sta. Cecilia in Trastevere, Rome
Cavallini
set an of import case for Giotto. In Rome Giotto, also, must have become acquainted with Early on Christian and ancient Roman mural ornamentation. Classical sculpture also left an impression on him. More primal than any of these, however, was the influence of the Pisanos�Nicola, and especially Giovanni�the founders of Italian Gothic sculpture. They were the primary intermediaries through whom Giotto first came in contact with the world of Northern Gothic art. And the latter remains the nearly important of all the elements that entered into Giotto's style. Without the noesis, direct or indirect, of Northern works such as those illustrated in figures 488 or 495, he could never accept achieved the emotional impact that distinguishes his piece of work from that of Cavallini and others.

Of Giotto 'south surviving murals, those in the Loonshit Chapel in Padua, done in 1305-6, are the best preserved equally well as the nigh feature. The decorations are devoted principally to scenes from the life of Christ, laid in a carefully arranged plan consisting of three tiers of narrative scenes (fig. 520) and culminating in the Last Judgment at the westward end of the chapel.

520. Interior, Arena (Scrovegni) Chapel, Padua

Giotto depicts many of the same subjects that we find on the reverse of Duccio'southward Maesta, including Christ Entering Jerusalem (fig. 521). The two versions accept many elements in mutual, since they both ultimately derive from the aforementioned Byzantine source. Just where Duccio has enriched the traditional scheme, spatially equally well as in narrative particular, Giotto subjects information technology to a radical simplification. The action proceeds parallel to the film plane. Landscape, compages, and figures have been reduced to the essential minimum. The austerity of Giotto'due south fine art is further emphasized by the sober medium of fresco painting, with its limited range and intensity of tones. Past way of contrast, Duccio's motion-picture show, which is executed in egg tempera on gold footing, has a jewellike brilliance and sparkling colors. Yet Giotto's work has by far the more powerful impact of the two. It makes united states feel so close to the event that we have a sense of existence participants rather than afar observers.

How does the creative person achieve this extraordinary result? He does then, first of all, by having the entire scene take place in the foreground. Fifty-fifty more important, he presents it in such a way that the beholder's centre-level falls inside the lower half of the picture. Thus nosotros can imagine ourselves standing on the same ground airplane every bit these painted figures, even though we see them from well beneath, whereas Duccio makes us survey the scene from above in "bird's-eye" perspective. The consequences of this choice of viewpoint are truly epoch-making. Choice implies conscious awareness�in this example, sensation of a human relationship in infinite between the beholder and the moving picture�and Giotto may well merits to be the first to have established such a human relationship. Duccio, certainly, does not notwithstanding excogitate his picture infinite equally continuous with the beholder's space. Hence we accept the sensation of vaguely floating above the scene, rather than of knowing where nosotros stand. Fifty-fifty aboriginal painting at its most illusionistic provides no more than a pseudo-continuity in this respect (encounter figs. 288 and 289). Giotto, on the other hand, tells us where nosotros stand. Above all, he also endows his forms with a three-dimensional reality so forceful that they seem as solid and tangible equally sculpture in the round.

With Giotto information technology is the figures, rather than the architectural framework, that create the motion-picture show space. Equally a event, this infinite is more than limited than Duccio's�its depth extends no further than the combined volumes of the overlapping bodies in the picture�but within its limits it is very much more persuasive. To Giotto's contemporaries, the tactile quality of his art must have seemed a near-miracle. It was this quality that made them praise him equally equal, or fifty-fifty superior, to the greatest of the ancient painters, because his forms looked and then lifelike that they could exist mistaken for reality itself. Equally significant are the stories linking Giotto with the claim that painting is superior to sculpture. This was non an idle boast, every bit it turned out, for Giotto does indeed mark the start of what might exist chosen "the era of painting" in Western art. The symbolic turning indicate is the year 1334, when he was appointed the head of the Florence Cathedral workshop, an honor and responsibility hitherto reserved for architects or sculptors.

Giotto 's aim was non simply to transplant Gothic statuary into painting. Past creating a radically new kind of picture space, he had too sharpened his awareness of the picture surface. When we await at a work past Duccio (or his ancient and medieval predecessors), we tend to do then in installments, as it were.

Our glance travels from detail to particular at a leisurely step until we accept surveyed the unabridged surface area. Giotto, on the contrary, invites us to encounter the whole at one glance. His big, uncomplicated forms, the stiff group of his figures, the limited depth of his "stage," all these factors aid endow his scenes with an inner coherence such equally we have never found before. Notice how dramatically the massed verticals of the "block" of apostles on the left are contrasted with the upward slope formed by the welcoming crowd on the correct, and how Christ, alone in the centre, bridges the gulf between the ii groups. The more we study the composition, the more we come to realize its majestic compactness and clarity. Thus the artist has rephrased the traditional pattern of Christ's Entry into Jerusalem to stress the solemnity of the effect equally the triumphal procession of the Prince of Peace.

Giotto 's accomplishment as a main of blueprint does not fully emerge from any single piece of work. Only if nosotros examine a number of scenes from the Padua fresco bike practise we understand how perfectly the composition in each case is attuned to the emotional content of the subject. The tragic mood of The Lamentation (fig. 522) is brought home to united states of america past the formal rhythm of the design as much as by the gestures and expressions of the participants. The very low center of gravity, and the hunched, bending figures communicate the somber quality of the scene and agitate our compassion even earlier we have grasped the specific meaning of the outcome depicted. With extraordinary boldness, Giotto sets off the frozen grief of the human mourners against the frantic movement of the weeping angels amidst the clouds, as if the figures on the ground were restrained by their collective duty to maintain the stability of the composition while the angels, minor and weightless as birds, do not share this burden.

The touch on of the drama is heightened by the severely elementary setting. The descending slope of the colina acts every bit a unifying element and at the same fourth dimension directs our glance toward the heads of Christ and the Virgin, which are the focal betoken of the scene. Even the tree has a twin function. Its barrenness and isolation suggest that all of nature somehow shares in the Saviour's expiry. Nevertheless it too invites usa to ponder a more precise symbolic message: information technology alludes (as does Dante in a passage in the Divine Comedy) to the Tree of Cognition, which the sin of Adam and Eve had caused to wither and which was to exist restored to life through the sacrificial death of Christ.

521. G IOTTO. Christ Entering Jerusalem. 1305-6. Fresco. Loonshit (Scrovegni) Chapel, Padua
522. 1000 IOTTO. The Lamentation . 1305-6. Fresco. Arena (Scrovegni) Chapel, Padua
523. G IOTTO. Madonna Enthroned, �. 1310. Tempera on panel, x'eight" x half-dozen'viii" (3.iii x 2 one thousand). Galleria degli Uffizi, FlorenceWhat we accept said of the Padua frescoes applies equally to the Madonna Enthroned (fig. 523), the nearly of import amidst the minor number of panel paintings by Giotto. Washed virtually the same fourth dimension equally Duccio's Maestd, it illustrates in one case over again the divergence between Florence and Siena. Its architectural severity clearly derives from Cimabue (see fig. 515). The figures, however, take the same overpowering sense of weight and volume nosotros saw in the frescoes in the Arena Chapel, and the picture infinite is just as persuasive�so much so, in fact, that the gilt halos look like foreign bodies in it.

The throne, of a design based on Italian Gothic compages, has now become a nichelike structure that encloses the Madonna on three sides and thus "insulates" her from the gold background. Its lavish ornamentation includes one feature of special interest: the colored marble surfaces of the base of operations and of the quatrefoil inside the gable. Such brand-believe stone textures had been highly developed by aboriginal painters (see figs. 288 and 289), but the tradition had died out in Early Christian times. Its sudden reappearance here offers physical evidence of Giotto's familiarity with any ancient murals could still be seen in medieval Rome.

At that place are few artists in the entire history of art who equal the stature of Giotto as a radical innovator. His very greatness, however, tended to dwarf the next generation of Florentine painters, which produced simply followers rather than new leaders. Their contemporaries in Siena were more fortunate in this respect, since Duccio never had the same overpowering bear on. Every bit a consequence, information technology was they, not the Florentines, who took the next decisive step in the evolution of Italian Gothic painting.
Simone Martini
(c. 1284� 1344), who painted the tiny but intense The Road to Calvary (fig. 524) about 1340, may well claim to be the most distinguished of Duccio's disciples. He spent the last years of his life in Avignon, the town in southern France that served as the residence-in-exile of the popes during most of the fourteenth century. Our panel, originally part of a small altar, was probably washed at that place.
In its sparkling colors, and particularly in the architectural background, it notwithstanding echoes the art of Duccio (see fig. 518). The vigorous modeling of the figures, on the other hand, equally well as their dramatic gestures and expressions, betray the influence of Giotto. While Simone Martini is non much concerned with spatial clarity, he proves to be an extraordinarily acute observer. The sheer variety of costumes and physical types and the wealth of human incident create a sense of down-to-globe reality very different from both the lyricism of Duccio and the grandeur of Giotto.
524. SIMONE M ARTINI. The Road to Calvary.
�. 1340. Tempera on console, (25 x 15,5 cm)
Musee du Louvre, Paris

THE LORENZETTI BROTHERS. Pietro Lorenzetti and Ambrogio Lorenzetti See likewise Collection: Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti

This closeness to everyday life as well appears in the work of the brothers Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti (both died 1348?), but on a more monumental scale and coupled with a not bad interest in problems of space. The boldest spatial experiment is Pietro's triptych of 1342, the Birth of the Virgin (fig. 525), where the painted compages has been correlated with the real architecture of the frame in such a way that the two are seen as a single system. Moreover, the vaulted chamber where the nascence takes identify occupies two panels. It continues unbroken behind the column that divides the center from the right wing. The left wing represents an anteroom which leads to a large and merely partially glimpsed architectural space suggesting the interior of a Gothic church. What Pietro Lorenzetti accomplished here is the effect of a development that began three decades earlier in the work of Duccio (compare fig. 518): the conquest of pictorial space. Just now, all the same, does the painting surface assume the quality of a transparent window through which�non on which�we perceive the same kind of space nosotros know from daily feel. Duccio's work alone is not sufficient to explain Pietro's amazing breakthrough. It became possible, rather, through a combination of the architectural picture space of Duccio and the sculptural picture space of Giotto.

525. PIETRO LORENZETTI. Nascence of the Virgin. 1342.
Tempera on console, (1.9 10 1.8 m). Museo dell'Opera del Duomo, Siena

The same procedure enabled Ambrogio Lorenzetti to unfold a comprehensive view of the unabridged town before our eyes in his frescoes of 1338-40 in the Siena city hall (fig. 526). We are struck by the distance that separates this precisely articulated "portrait" of Siena from Duccio's Jerusalem (fig. 518). Ambrogio'south mural forms part of an elaborate allegorical program depicting the contrast of skillful and bad regime. To the right on the far wall of effigy 526, we see the Commune of Siena guided by Faith, Hope, and Charity and flanked by a host of other symbolic figures.

526. AMBROGIO LORENZETTI. The District of Siena (left),
Adept Government in the City and portion of Expert Government in the Country (right).
1338-twoscore. Frescoes in the Sala della Pace. Palazzo Pubblico, Siena

The artist, in order to bear witness the life of a well-ordered city-state, had to fill the streets and houses with teeming activity (fig. 527). The bustling crowd gives the architectural vista its hitting reality by introducing the human scale. On the correct, outside the urban center walls, the Good Government fresco provides a view of the Sienese countryside, fringed past distant mountains (fig. 528). It is a true mural�the first since ancient Roman times�full of sweeping depth notwithstanding distinguished from its classical predecessors (such equally fig. 290) by an ingrained orderliness, which lends it a domesticated air. Here the presence of people is not accidental. They have taken total possession of nature, terracing the hillsides with vineyards, patterning the valleys with the geometry of fields and pastures. In such a setting, Ambrogio observes the peasants at their seasonal labors, recording a rural Tuscan scene and then characteristic that information technology has hardly changed during the by 600 years.

52 seven. AMBROGIO LORENZETTI. Adept Government in the City. Fresco, width of entire wall 46' (14 thousand). Palazzo Pubblico, Siena
52 eight. AMBROGIO LORENZETTI. Good Government in the Country. Palazzo Pubblico, Siena

THE Black DEATH.

The get-go four decades of the fourteenth century in Florence and Siena had been a menstruation of political stability and economic expansion as well as of great creative accomplishment. In the 1340s both cities suffered a serial of catastrophes whose echoes were to be felt for many years. Banks and merchants went bankrupt past the score, internal upheavals shook the regime, there were repeated crop failures, and in 1348 the epidemic of bubonic plague�the Black Death�that spread throughout Europe wiped out more than half their urban population. The popular reaction to these calamitous events was mixed. Many people regarded them equally signs of divine wrath, warnings to a sinful humanity to forsake the pleasures of this earth; in such people the Black Death engendered a mood of otherworldly exaltation. To others, such every bit the gay company in Boccaccio'south Decameron, the fear of sudden death merely intensified the desire to relish life while there was yet fourth dimension. These alien attitudes are reflected in the pictorial theme of the Triumph of Decease.

TRAINI.

The most impressive version of this field of study is an enormous fresco, attributed to the Pisan main Francesco Traini (documented � 1321-1363), in the Camposanto, the cemetery edifice next to Pisa Cathedral. In a especially dramatic detail (fig. 529), the elegantly costumed men and women on horseback have suddenly come upon 3 decomposable corpses in open coffins. Fifty-fifty the animals are terrified by the sight and smell of rotting flesh. Simply the hermit, having renounced all earthly pleasures, points out the lesson of the scene. Just will the living accept the lesson, or will they, like the characters of Boccaccio, turn away from the shocking spectacle more determined than ever to pursue their hedonistic means? The artist's own sympathies seem curiously divided. His style, far from being otherworldly, recalls the realism of Ambrogio Lorenzetti, although the forms are harsher and more expressive.

In a fire that occurred in 1944, Traini 's fresco was badly damaged and had to be detached from the wall in social club to salvage what was left of information technology. This process exposed the starting time, rough coat of plaster underneath, on which the artist had sketched out his composition (fig. 530). These drawings, of the same size as the fresco itself, are amazingly free and sweeping. They reveal Traini'due south personal fashion more directly than the painted version, which was carried out with the aid of assistants. Because they are done in red, these underdrawings are called sinopie (an Italian word derived from ancient Sinope, in Asia Pocket-size, which was famous equally a source of brick-reddish world pigment).

529. FRANCESCO TRAINI. The Triumph of Death (portion), �. 1325-50. Fresco. Camposanto, Pisa
530. FRANCESCO TRAINI. Sinopia drawing for The Triumph of Expiry (detail). Camposanto, Pisa

FRESCO PAINTING.

Sinopie serve to innovate us to the standard technique of painting frescoes in the fourteenth century. After the first coat of plaster (arriccio or arrricciato) had dried, the wall was divided into squares using a ruler or chalk lines tied to nails. The design was then brushed in with a sparse ocher pigment, and the outline developed further in charcoal, with the details being added last in sinopia. During the Renaissance, sinopie were replaced by cartoons: sheets of heavy newspaper or cardboard (cartone) on which the design was drawn in the studio. The design was then pricked with small holes and transferred to the wall by dusting ("pouncing") it with chalk. In the High Renaissance, however, the contours were often just pressed through the paper with a stylus. Be that as information technology may, each department of the wall was covered with just enough fresh plaster (intonaco) to final the current session, in order for the water-based paints to sink in. (Some insoluble pigments could just be applied a secco to dry plaster.) Each day's work progressed in this manner. Since the work had to be done on a scaffold, it was carried out from the top downward, ordinarily in horizontal strips. Needless to say, fresco painting was a slow procedure requiring numerous assistants for big projects.

Traini still retains a strong link with the great masters of the 2nd quarter of the century.
More characteristic of Tuscan painting after the Black Death are the painters who reached maturity around the 1350s. None of them can compare with the earlier artists whose work we have discussed. Their style, in comparison, seems dry and formula-ridden.

Nonetheless they were capable, at their best, of expressing the somber mood of the time with memorable intensity. The Pieta of 1365 (fig. 531) by Giovanni da Milano (documented 1346-1369) has all the emotional appeal of a German language Andachtsbild (compare fig. 497), although the heritage of Giotto tin exist clearly felt even here.
531. GIOVANNI DA MILANO. Pieta.
1365.
Oil on panel, (122 x 57.five cm).
Galleria deU'Accademia, Florence