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TUSCAN WANDERWAYS newsletter vol.16
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HISTORY OF ART IN TUSCANY part one
To trace the history of Tuscan Art through the centuries, would be to
make a treatise on Art of the whole of Italy, so great has been its influence
upon the artistic movement in this country and so large a proportion of
it does it represent.
We do not attempt to submit a complete hand-book of history of Art; but
only to give an outline of the conception and transformation in Tuscany
of the artistic ideas, which in the period of its greatest splendour,
ruled the world. We have not thought it necessary to subdivide our subject
into architecture, sculpture and painting, as is usually done. Art, with
a people, is a single idea, and, no matter how diverse its outward forms
may be, it cannot be divided. Taste, or the ideas shown in the artistic
productions of a certain period, presides equally over all its forms;
therefore, each subdivision of the subject would necessarily involve repetitions
that we wish to avoid. We must first speak briefly of Italian Art in general,
from the Etruscan period to the first productions of Classic Tuscan Art
of the XIII century, as from that time only can Tuscan Art claim independent
existence.
History has fully demonstrated that in Tuscany more than in all the rest
of Italy, can one breathe the taste and sentiment of Art - in the limpid
atmosphere of the home of the Etruscans, who had their own matured Art
when the primitive populations of the peninsula hardly knew what the word
meant. Whether the Egyptians or Assyrians, Greeks or Phoenicians were
the inspirers of Etruscan Art (on which point the authorities do not agree),
it is certain that the people of Etruria astonished the world about a
thousand years before the Christian Era, with the splendour of their monuments,
the simple and original grace of their painting and sculpture and their
wonderful skill in clay-modelling and iron-working. Of that first artistic
period, so remote and the most glorious of Italy, there remains to us
that form of Architecture called the Tuscan Style, said to have been invented
and used by the Etruscan to modify the Doric Style, which then predominated
in Greece.
We will state at once, to avoid future repetition, that this same Tuscan
Style, whose characteristic features are a flat simplicity of line, and
an imposing heaviness of form, has been retained for centuries, despite
the vicissitudes of history, and even to-day the traditions of that style
are followed. All styles of art have succeeded it and the popular taste
has been influenced by invasions which left their traces in the monuments
of the country, and the Tuscan Style changed, modified, overcharged with
ornaments, degenerated in a hundred ways, gave place in details to other
schools and styles; but that the fundamental and general rules of Tuscan
architecture have remained unchanged through three thousand years of revolutions
and civil strife, is a phenomenon that no other country in the world can
present. The student can still find some remains of that primitive architecture
at Fiesole; and a visit to the Etruscan Museum of Florence will give him
the most ample information on the subject of Etruscan Art, which was suddenly
attacked and destroyed by the brutal Roman invasion.
At Fiesole are still to be seen the few existing remains
of Roman Art which ruled in Tuscany as in all other countries where Rome
held her sway; imposing her laws, ideas, civilisation and artistic taste
upon the conquered people. This absolute mastery of Latin Art, both in
Architecture and Sculpture was only in part modified with the appearance
of Christianity, which adapted to its needs and ends a great number of
the monuments erected by the Romans, without introducing into Art a new
idea or a new Style.
Not until the VI century did Byzantine Art succeed in entering Italy,
influencing first of all sacred architecture, introducing as its own characteristic
feature - the "Cupola". Splendid monuments of this Art still
remain in Italy, the most genuine and typical among them being the Church
of San Vitale in Ravenna (541-547), and the most wonderful that of San
Marco in Venice, built in the X century.
Some historians and critics hold that the Byzantine period in Art was
followed
by and interlaced with a Lombard period; we cannot agree with them. The
Lombards who ruled the North of Italy from the VI to the VIII century,
did not introduce with their invasions, any artistic ideas of their own;
but rather adopted the taste of their conquered enemies. The architectural
form of the monuments raised under the Lombard empire, is but a degeneration
of the old Roman style. The Church of San Frediano in Lucca can be taken
as an example.
Latin and Byzantine Art existed together on a parallel until the XI century;
when they were united to form a new style, by mixing the severe character
of Latin Art with the elegance and magnificence in decorations of Byzantine
or New- Greek Art.
This new style, known as Neo-Latin, enriched Italy in the XI and XIII
centuries with a great number of architectural monuments; and Tuscany,
which was already beginning to develop that great artistic genius, which
was going to place it at the head of the Italian and European Art movement,
was one of the places most adorned with precious works of Art. The Duomo
in Pisa (1063-1118), attributed to Buschetto, is one of the most marvellous
productions of the Neo-Latin style; and the same town possesses also two
other wonderful monuments of the same epoch, the Leaning Tower (1174),
by Buonanno da Pisa and the Baptistery (1153), by Diotisalvi; besides
the less important Church of San Paolo. The Cathedrals of Lucca and San
Sepolcro belong to the same style and are among the most noteworthy Tuscan
monuments.
During these periods of the history of Italian Art, Sculpture
and Painting served almost exclusively to decorate the monuments and were
limited to the reproduction of conventional types coarsely executed. The
liberty of the artist was unbounded; he could follow his own caprice in
producing grotesque, hideous, vulgar, often satirical conceptions intended
to represent vice, sin and the devil.
Painting was cultivated, and together with sculptors and architects, armies
of painters, mosaic workers and manuscript illuminators were constantly
employed by monarchs, nobles and religious orders. But from the magnificent
wideness of its ancient ideal, Art had come to be governed by the restricted
and monotonous regulations of Byzantine ideas. Rigid and symmetrical forms,
continually repeated types, dark complexions surrounded by bard drawing
on a gold back- ground, with grotesque ornamentations and inscriptions
in Greek letters, constitute all that Italians show us prior to the XIII
century.
But to effect the great revolution in the taste and ideas already formed
in the minds of Italian artists, especially in Tuscany, the Neo-Latin
Style had to be modified by the influence of a new school which introduced
forms hitherto unknown and originated a new order of ideas, a new civilisation
and an accumulation of conceptions, beliefs and habits, imported from
Germany with the Gothic Style. Thus the marvellous awakening, the great
Renaissance of the XIII century, dawned. The history of the invasion of
this new form of Art into Italy is curious and rather complicated, since,
while it produced the imposing forms of Classic Art peculiar to the Country,
it was mingled with this same Italian Art, which had felt its influence
for two centuries.
One must remark, however, the difficult progress of this
Gothic Style in Italy; and that it always remained subject to, and was
modified by the Neo-Latin, Byzantine and Tuscan traditions. Its tendency
to slender, pointed effects and minute ornamentation formed too sharp
a contrast to the horizontal lines and the solid massiveness of ancient
Architecture, and Italian taste did not readily accustom itself to bold
points made of stone nor to the perforation of stone like lace. Therefore,
whilst the pointed style reigned in Germany, England and in almost all
France, the Italian monuments of the XIII century, although showing the
influence of the new style, retain their fundamental characteristics of
an even proportion between width and height. This was not Italian Art
germanised, it was rather that Gothic Art had submitted to Italian ideas,
forming a new Style of ornamentation hut not a new kind of Architecture
and the impress was left on the details, rather than on the whole. The
windows, doors and niches of facades became pointed ; hut not seldom did
it happen that the interior of the churches kept their round arches, vaultings
and columns as well as flat cornices. End of part one.
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