The same remarks hold good for painting and sculpture, of which we still have today some exceptionally fine examples left by the artists of the second period; such are the works executed in the Carmine by Masaccio, including the figure of a naked man shivering with cold, as well as other lifelike and vigorous pictures. But as a whole they did not achieve the perfection of the third period, about which I shall write later on, for the moment concentrating on the second. Now the sculptors, first of all, departed a long way from the style of the first artists, making so many great improvements that little was left for the third generation to accomplish. Their style was more graceful, more lifelike, more pure; and they possessed a better sense of design and proportion. As a result the statues they made began to seem almost alive, unlike the figures of the artists of the first period whose statues were plainly just statues and nothing more. We shall see the difference when discussing the works produced during this period of stylistic renewal in the second part of the Lives. The figures of Jacopo of Siena, for example, show more movement, grace, design, and careful workmanship; Filippo’s show a more exact investigation of anatomy, better proportions, and fine judgement; and their pupils’ work exhibits the same qualities. The greatest progress, however, was made by Lorenzo Ghiberti when he worked on the doors of San Giovanni; for the invention, the stylistic purity and design that he displayed made his figures seem to move and breathe. Although Donatello was a contemporary of these artists, I was uncertain whether I should not place him among the artists of the third period, seeing that his works are the equal of those of the fine artists of the ancient world. Anyhow, in this context he may be said to have set the standard for the rest, since in himself he possessed all the qualities shared among the others. He imparted movement to his figures, giving them such vivacity and animation that they are worthy to rank both, as I said, with the work of the ancient world and also with that of the modern.
During this period painting progressed in the same way as sculpture. The superb Masaccio completely freed himself of Giotto’s style and adopted a new manner for his heads, his draperies, buildings, and nudes, his colours and foreshortenings. He thus brought into existence the modern style which, beginning during his period, has been employed by all our artists until the present day, enriched and embellished from time to time by new inventions, adornments, and grace. Examples of this will be given in the individual biographies which will reveal the appearance of a new style of colouring and foreshortening, of attitudes that are true to life, a far more accurate interpretation of emotions and physical gestures, and the constant endeavour to reproduce nature more realistically, with facial expressions so beautifully true to life that the men portrayed appear before us just as they were seen by the painter himself.
In this way the artists tried to reproduce neither more nor less than what they saw in nature, and as a result their work began to show more careful observation and understanding. This encouraged them to lay down definite rules for perspective and to make their foreshortenings in the exact form of natural relief, proceeding to the observation of light and shade, shadows, and other problems. They endeavoured to compose their pictures with greater regard for real appearances, attempting to make their landscapes more realistic, along with the trees, the grass, the flowers, the air, the clouds, and the other phenomena of nature. They did this so successfully that the arts were brought to the flower of their youth, holding out the promise that in the near future they would enter the golden age.
And now with God’s help I shall start writing the life of Jacopo della Quercia of Siena, and then the lives of the other architects and sculptors until we come to Masaccio, the first of the painters to improve design, when we shall see how greatly he was responsible for the rebirth of painting. I have chosen Jacopo as a worthy beginning for the second part of the Lives and I shall group the artists who follow by style, showing in each life-story the problems presented by the beautiful, challenging, and noble arts of design.
LIFE OF PAOLO UCCELLO
Florentine painter, 1396/7–1475
THE most captivating and imaginative painter to have lived since Giotto would certainly have been Paolo Uccello, if only he had spent as much time on human figures and animals as he spent, and wasted, on the finer points of perspective. Such details may be attractive and ingenious, but anyone who studies them excessively is squandering time and energy, choking his mind with difficult problems, and, often enough, turning a fertile and spontaneous talent into something sterile and laboured. Artists who devote more attention to perspective than to figures develop a dry and angular style because of their anxiety to examine things too minutely; and, moreover, they usually end up solitary, eccentric, melancholy, and poor, as indeed did Paolo Uccello himself. He was endowed by nature with a discriminating and subtle mind, but he found pleasure only in exploring certain difficult, or rather impossible, problems of perspective, which, although fanciful and attractive, hindered him so much when he came to paint figures that the older he grew the worse he did them.
It is undeniable that anyone who does violence to his nature by fanatical studies may polish one facet of his genius but cannot produce work with the facility and grace associated with artists who can put each stroke in its place temperately and with a calm and judicious intelligence. The latter shun the subtleties that tend to burden an artist’s work with a kind of hesitant, dry, laboured, and bad personal style, attracting pity more than admiration. For an artist’s creative intelligence can truly express itself only when prompted by his intellect and when he is in a state of inspired rapture; it is then that he abundantly demonstrates his God-given powers and sublime ideas.
Now Paolo was always tackling the most difficult artistic problems and never allowing himself a moment’s respite; eventually he perfected a method for drawing perspectives from the ground-plans of houses and the profiles of buildings, carrying them right up to the summits of the cornices and roofs, by means of intersecting lines which he converged towards a centre point, having first determined the eye-level, either high or low just as he wanted. He was so painstaking that he discovered a method and rule for standing his figures firmly on the plane of the floor while foreshortening them bit by bit, and making them recede and diminish in proportion; formerly this had been done without any set method. He also discovered the way to turn the intersections and arches of vaulted roofs, to foreshorten floors by converging the beams, and to design columns in perspective in such a way that even if there were an acute angle in the wall on which they were painted they seemed to be in a straight line. Because of all these researches he came to live a hermit’s life, hardly knowing anyone and shut away out of sight in his house for weeks and months at a time.
The work he did was challenging and attractive, but if he had spent the same amount of time on the study of figures (which he could in fact draw well enough) he would eventually have come to do them perfectly. However, all his time was given over to these puzzles, and so throughout his life he was more poor than famous. He used to show Donatello, the sculptor, who was a close friend of his, the mazzocchi1 that he had drawn with their points and surfaces shown from various angles in perspective, and spheres showing seventy-two facets like diamonds, with shavings twisted round sticks on every facet and other oddities, on which he wasted all his time. And Donatello would often say:
Ah Paolo, this perspective of yours makes you neglect what we know for what we don’t know. These things are no use except for marquetry – that’s the kind of work where you need shavings with spirals and circles and squares and things like that.
Paolo’s first pictures were in fresco in an oblong niche painted in perspective at the hospital of Lelmo, and they showed St Anthony the Abbot, standing between SS. Cosmas and Damian. In the Annalena Convent he did two figures; and in Santa Trinità, over the left door inside the church, he painted in fresco scenes from the life of St Francis, showing the saint receiving the stigmata, supporting the Church on his shoulders, and embracing St Dominic. He
also did some paintings in Santa Maria Maggiore, for a chapel next to the side door leading to San Giovanni which contains the panel painting and predella by Masaccio. There Uccello painted a fresco of the Annunciation in which he showed a building which deserves our attention; this work was an original achievement, for it was the first in a good style showing artists how, with grace and proportion, lines can be made to recede to a vanishing point, and how a small and restricted space on a flat surface may be extended so that it appears distant and large. When artists achieve this effect and then with judgement and grace use colouring to add shadows and lights in the right place they deceive the eye so surely that the painting seems to be in actual relief. But this did not satisfy Uccello, who wanted to show how to solve even greater problems; and this he did in some columns foreshortened in perspective which curve round and break the salient angle of the vaulting where the four evangelists are. This was held to be a fine and difficult achievement, and indeed Paolo displayed great ability and ingenuity in this part of his work.
Uccello also did some work in terra verde and colour in the cloister of San Miniato outside Florence.1 He painted scenes from the lives of the Fathers of the Church, in which he ignored the rule of consistency in colouring, for he made the fields blue, the cities red, and the buildings in various colours as he felt inclined. He was wrong to do so, because something which is meant to represent stone cannot and should not be coloured with another tint. It is said that while Paolo was at work on this painting the abbot gave him for his meals hardly anything but cheese. Paolo grew sick of this, but being a mild-mannered man he merely decided not to go there any more. The abbot sent to look for him, but whenever Paolo heard the friars asking for him he arranged not to be at home. And if he happened to meet a pair of them in Florence he took to his heels as fast as he could in the opposite direction. Seeing this, two of them who were more curious than the rest (and could run faster) caught him up one day and demanded why he never returned to finish the work he had started and why he always ran away when he caught sight of a friar. Paolo said:
You’ve brought me to such a sorry state that I not only run away from the sight of you, I can’t even go where there are carpenters working. This is all the fault of your dim-witted abbot. What with his cheese pies and his cheese soups, he’s stuffed me so full of cheese that I’m frightened they’ll use me to make glue. If he went on any more I wouldn’t be Paolo Uccello, I’d be pure cheese.
The friars roared with laughter and went and told the abbot what Uccello said; and then the abbot persuaded him to come back and gave him something else for his meals.
Subsequently, Paolo painted for the Pugliesi Chapel of San Girolamo in the church of the Carmine the altarpiece of SS. Cosmas and Damian. In the house of the Medici he painted in tempera on canvas several scenes of animals. He always loved painting animals, and in order to do them well he studied them very carefully, even keeping his house full of pictures of birds, cats, dogs, and every kind of strange beast whose likeness he could obtain, since he was too poor to keep the animals themselves. Because he loved birds most of all he was called Paolo Uccello, Paolo of the Birds. Included among the animal paintings that he kept in his house was one showing lions fighting among themselves with such terrible vigour and fury that they seemed alive. There was a remarkable picture of a serpent fighting a lion, showing the serpent’s fury as it threshed about and spat poison from its mouth and eyes and a peasant girl near by looking after an ox which is drawn in marvellous foreshortening. The sketch for this, by Paolo himself, is in our book of drawings, as is another showing the peasant girl just about to flee panic-stricken from the lion and the serpent. The same scene shows some very life-like shepherds and a landscape that was considered very beautiful when it was done. On other canvases Uccello depicted some contemporary men-at-arms on horseback, several of them drawn from life.
Several scenes were then commissioned from Paolo for the cloister of Santa Maria Novella. The first of these, at the entrance from the church into the cloister, represent the creation of the animal kingdom, and contain an endless variety of creatures found on land, in the sea, or in the air. In these Uccello showed how delightfully imaginative he was and how, as I mentioned, he loved painting animals to perfection; for example, one can see the tremendous nobility of his lions as they endeavour to rend each other and the swiftness and timidity of his stags and bucks. He also painted the birds and fishes with very realistic feathers and scales. And he showed the creation of the first man and woman, and their fall, painting this subject with great care, and in a beautiful and accomplished style. He took great pleasure in this work in colouring the trees, something which was not often done well at that time; and he was the first of the old painters to be acclaimed for his landscapes, which he executed far more skilfully than previous artists had done, although he was surpassed by those who came later. And this was because, despite all his efforts, Paolo could never impart the softness and harmony that we find in the oil paintings of our own time. He was content to go on following the rules of perspective and drawing and foreshortening his subjects exactly as he saw them, painting everything in view, the meadows, the ploughed fields, the furrows, and the other details of country life, in that dry and hard style of his. If he had been selective and included in his work only the subjects lending themselves to painting, they would have been absolutely perfect. When he had finished all this, he did some more painting below two scenes by other artists in the same cloister. Lower down, he painted the Flood and Noah’s Ark; and here, taking great pains and with great care and skill, he reproduced the dead bodies, the tempest, the fury of the wind, the flashes of lightning, the rooting up of trees, and the terror of men, in a manner that defies description. He portrayed a dead body, foreshortened, with a crow pecking out its eyes, and a drowned child, whose body, sodden with water, is arched up grotesquely. He also conveyed in his painting many kinds of human emotion. In two men fighting each other on horseback one can see, for example, utter disregard of the deluge; and the utmost fear of death is seen in the expressions of a man and a woman who have given up hope of saving themselves because the buffalo, which they are astride, is sinking under the water. This painting was so excellent in every way that it won Uccello very considerable fame. His figures were foreshortened according to the lines of perspective, and there are various things which he depicted, such as the mazzocchi worn by some of the men, that were most beautifully done. Under this scene Uccello depicted the drunkenness of Noah and the irreverence of Ham his son (introducing the portrait of his friend Dello, a Florentine painter and sculptor); and he showed Noah’s other sons, Shem and Japhet, covering up their father’s shame. He also painted in this scene a foreshortened cask, curving on every side, which was greatly admired, and a pergola covered with vines whose trellis-work recedes towards the vanishing point. But here Uccello made a mistake, because the lines of the plane on which the figures are standing recede parallel to those of the pergola, whereas the cask does not follow the same lines. I have often wondered how such an accurate and careful painter could have made such a remarkable error. Uccello also painted in Santa Maria Novella the sacrifice of Noah, showing the open ark drawn in perspective with the ranges of perches in the upper part for the birds, which are depicted, in perspective, as they fly away in their various families. In the air above the sacrifice which Noah and his sons are offering appears the figure of God the Father; and of all the figures painted by Uccello in that work this was the most difficult, for it is flying towards the wall with the head foreshortened, and it is so forceful that it seems to be in relief, and to be bursting through it. As well as this, Noah has around him innumerable beautifully painted animals. Altogether, in short, Uccello imbued the entire work with such softness and grace that it is overwhelmingly superior to everything else that he did, and has therefore won great praise ever since.
Lives of the Artists Page 10