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Pre‐Renaissance Franciscan and Tuscan Humanism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

John Navone SJ
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The thirteenth century saw the rejuvenation of the Italian Church by the order of St. Francis. The Franciscans contributed to the new humanism that is identified with the Renaissance and expressed in the Tuscan painters of Florence (Cimabue and Giotto di Bondone) and of Siena (Duccio, Simone Martini and the Lorenzetti brothers). In the Upper Church of San Francesco, in Assisi where Cimabue and Torriti worked in fresco, the new humanism appears in the “Legend of the St. Francis Cycle.” In this work, life-sized human figures, conveying human emotions, made their first appearance in European painting. In the frescoes of the Scrovegni chapel at Padua and in Santa Croce in Florence, Giotto evoked a whole new range of feeling and expression. His immediate followers at Florence, Bernardo Daddi, Taddeo Gaddi, and Maso di Banco, for all their narrative invention and human intimacy, were dwarfed by his genius. But at Siena the school of Duccio di Buoninsegna developed its own more lyrical and illustrative style, with jewel-like colouring and linear grace. If Giotto gave painted figures humanity, Duccio established them in recognizable settings, Simone Martini invested them with poetry, while Ambrogio Lorenzetti set them in their complete physical environment. It was at this time that Florence and Siena produced the tentative beginnings of portraiture and of landscape in painting. The Tuscan painters reflect the Franciscan joy and delight in the goodness and beauty of the world, the Franciscan appreciation of nature as the resplendent reflection of its Creator, and the Franciscan esteem and affection for the poor and ordinary people.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 75 , Issue 882 , May 1994 , pp. 266 - 278
Copyright
Copyright © 1994 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 Pullan, Brian, A History of Early Renaissance Italy: From the Middle Thirteenth to the Mid‐Fifteenth Century (New York, 1972), 166, 168Google Scholar.

2 Lamer, John, Culture and Society in Italy 1290–1420 (New York, 1971), 9–10Google Scholar.

3 Frank, and Getlein, Dorothy, Christianity in Art (Milwaukee, 1959), 74Google Scholar. See also Carli, Enzo, Sienese Painting (Greenwich, 1956Google Scholar). Carli, Enzo. Giotto and His Contemporaries (New York, 1958)Google Scholar

4 See Myers, Bemard S., Art and Civilization (New York, 1957)Google Scholar, ch. 14, “From Castle to Commune: The Rise of Gothic Art,” 298–343. Peter Kidson, in The Medieval World, p. 166, affirms that “It was perhaps through Simone Martini more than anyone else that Italian Gothic began to exercise a reciprocal influence on its French sources”.

5 John Lamer (Culture and Society in Italy, 5) notes that Martini's Guidoriccio da Fogliano at Siena is the first surviving painting of a layman without any religious significance. Brian Pullan (A History of Early Renaissance Italy, 195) comments that Martini portrayed Siena's mercenary captain, Guidoriccio, in the year of his great victory over Castruccio Castracane, lord of Lucca. Guidoriccio, a symbol of the strength of the commune abroad, was seen riding — the first equestrian painting in history — before the little towns of Montemassi and Sassoforte, which he had “liberated”.

6 John Julius Norwich observes in his text for Charlie Waite's Italian Landscapes (London, 1990)Google Scholar that there is one sort of landscape which can be instantaneously recognized as Italian. It is, he believes, typically Tuscan: “Not too flat, of course, but not mountainous either, just green, rolling hills, some of them quite steep, a few topped with little towns, each with is church and attendant campanile. In one of the valleys between there runs a winding river, crossed by an occasional hump‐backed bridge. To each side of it, the fields are planted with olive and vine; others have been left for pasture, in which cattle or sheep can be added to according to taste. Here and there, apparently at random but in fact most carefully positioned, sometimes in lines, sometimes in clusters, but more often outlined all alone against the cloud‐streaked sky, our eye falls on that most quintessential of Italian trees, the cypress. The picture is complete.” p. 10.

7 The three major achievements of the Gothic period were these: (1) The integration of figures with the architectural or landscape backgrounds of the scene that they enact: (2) the introduction of emotional attitudes in the depicted figures; (3) the introduction of three‐dimensional buildings, more particularly interiors. See Kidson, Peter, The Medieval World (London, 1967), 164Google Scholar.

8 John Lamer, Culture and Society in Italy., 42–43. The German Henry Thode sustained in his book Saint Francis and the Origins of Renaissance Art in Italy (Berlin, 1835) that St Francis and his movement paved the way for the Renaissance. Francis, according to Thode, dramatized the Christian religion and played a decisive role in the development of the “Laudi” and the “Mysteres”. He popularized moralizing anecdotes, the exempla, and references in painting to anecdotes and contemporary life. He is said to have rediscovered nature and introduced portraiture and landscape into iconography. From Francis are said to have come realism and narrative in art. See Jacques Le Goff in M.W. Sheehan, O.F.M., St. Francis of Assisi (1982), 15. Although there is much truth to Thode's claim, he tends to overlook how Francis reflects his time and place in the halcyon days of communal Italy. As early as 1215, for example, Paliotto de Berardenga depicts, in the art gallery at Siena, the history of the Cross in his six small aneodotal panels surrounding the reigning Chris About the turn of the thirteenth century, the figure of Christ on painted crucifixes underwent a transition from the Christ in glory to that of the suffering Christ; the Virgin in Majesty gave way to the Virgin Mother, the iconography of the saints discarded the steretyped figures and symbolic attributes in favour of biographically authentic truth and features.

9 Ibid., 51.

10 Moleta, Vincent, From St. Francis to Giotto (Chicago, 1983)Google Scholar, 1, quoted in Sorrell, Roger D., St. Francis of Assisi and Nature (Oxford, 1988), 143Google Scholar.

11 Stubblebline, H., Assisi and the Rise of Vernacular Art (New York, 1985), 88fGoogle Scholar., quoted in R. D. Sorrell, St. Francis of Assisi and Nature. 143.

12 Ozanam, F., The Franciscan Poets in Italy of the Thirteenth Century, tr. Nellen, A.E. and Craig, N.C. (London, 1914), 78Google Scholar.

13 Heiler, F., “Saint Francis of Assisi and the Catholic Church,” in Sheehan, Maureen W. O.F.M., Ed., St. Francis of Assisi: Essays in Commemoration, 1982. (St. Bonaventure, NY, 1982), 115Google Scholar.