THE UFFIZI: THE FIRST FIVE ROOMS

Cimabue and Giotto The Primitives Fra Lippo Lippi Filippino Lippi Leonardo da Vinci and Verrocchio.

LET us now enter the first room on the left, after either climbing the stairs or mounting in the lift.

The first large picture on the left of the first room, No. 834, the Cimabue, marks the transition from Byzantine art to Italian art. Giovanni Cimabue, who was to be, the forerunner of the new art, was born about 1240. At that time there was plenty of painting in Italy, but it was Greek, the work, of artists at Constantinople (Byzantium), the centre of Christianity in the eastern half of the Roman Empire and the fount of ecclesiastical energy, and it was crude in workmanship, existing purely as an accessory of worship. Cimabue, of whom, I may say, almost nothing definite is known, and upon whom the delightful but casual old Vasari is the earliest authority, as Dante was his first eulogist, carried on the Byzantine tradition, but breathed a little life into it. In his picture here we see him feeling his way from the unemotional painted symbols of the Faith to humanity itself. One can understand this large panel being carried (as we know the similar one at S. Maria Novella was) in procession and worshiped, but it is nearer to the icon of the Russian peasant of today than to a Raphael. The Madonna is above life; the Child is a little man. This was painted, say in 1280, as an altar-piece for the Badia of S. Trinita at Florence.

Next came Giotto, Cimabue's pupil, born about 1267, whom we have met already as an architect, philosopher, and innovator ; and in his picture at the end of this room, No. 8344, we see life really awakening. The Madonna is vivifying; the Child is nearer childhood; we can believe that here are veins with blood in them. Moreover, whereas Cimabue's angels brought masonry, these bring flowers. It is crude, no doubt, but it is enough : the new art, which was to counterfeit and even extend nature, has really begun; the mystery and glory of painting are assured and the door opened for Botticelli.

But much had to happen first, particularly the mastery of the laws of perspective, and it was not (as we have seen) until Ghiberti had got to work on his first doors, and Brunelleschi was studying architecture, and Uccello sitting up all night at his desk, that painting as we know it painting of men and women "in the round" could be done, and it was left for a youth who was not born until Giotto had been dead sixty-four years to do this first as a master one Tommaso di Ser Giovanni Guido da Castel San Giovanni, known as Masaccio, or Big Tom. The three great names then in the evolution of Italian painting, a subject to which I return in Chapter XXIV, on the Carmine, are Cimabue, Giotto, Masaccio.

We pass on in this first room from Cimabue's pupil Giotto, to Giotto's followers, Taddeo Gaddi and Bernardo Daddi, and Daddi's follower Spinello Aretino, and the long dependent and interdependent line of painters. For the most part they painted altar-pieces, these early craftsmen, the Church being the principal patron of art. Their works are many of them faded and so elementary as to have but an antiquarian interest; but think of the excitement in those days when the picture was at last ready, and, gay in its gold, was erected in the chapel! Among what is so purely ecclesiastical and formal there is, however, in this room, one real picture, as distinguished from church adornment, and that is No. 454, attributed to Giotto, in which there is composition, drama, and colour a really beautiful and sincerely felt "Deposition."

In the second room we are back to pure ecclesiasticism again, the principal work being a "Coronation of the Virgin" by Lorenzo Monaco, almost rivaling Fra Angelico in gaiety. Here also is another altar-piece with a subtle quality of its own the early Annunciation by Simone Martini of Siena (1285-1344) and Lippo Memmi, his brother (d. 1357), in which the angel speaks his golden words across the picture through a vase of lilies, and the Virgin shrinkingly receives them. It is all very primitive, but it has great attraction, and it is interesting to think that the picture must be six hundred years of age. 'This Simone was a pupil of Giotto and the painter of a portrait of Petrarch's Laura, now preserved in the Laurentian library, which earned him two sonnets of eulogy.

In the third room we find a battle by Paolo Uccello, but it is not so fine as that in our own National Gallery. Opposite is a lucid and very attractive group by Domenico Veneziano, a harmony of pale pinks, greens and blues. Here also are those early experimentalists, Masaccio and Alessio Baldovinetti, both trying so hard and making grave and beautiful things, if crude. A little unknown painter's "Virgin and Child" should be looked at. But Ignoto almost always paints well!

The fourth room has five Lippo Lippis, which is an interesting circumstance when we remember that that dissolute brother was the greatest influence on Botticelli; for Botticelli draws near. The largest of the Lippis is the Coronation of the Virgin with its many lilies a picture which one must delight in, so happy and crowded is it, but which never seems to me quite what it should be. The most fascinating part of it is the figures in the little medallions : two perfect pieces of colour and design. The kneeling monk on the right is Lippo Lippi himself. Next it is the Madonna Adoring No. 8353--with herself so luminous and the background so dark. The pendant No. 8350 is less remarkable. But there still remains one that is copied in every picture shop in Florence: No. 1598, a Madonna and two Children. Few pictures are so beset by delighted observers, but apart from the perfection of it as an early painting, leaving nothing to later dexterity, its appeal to me is weak. The Madonna (whose head-dress, as so often in Lippo Lippi, foreshadows Botticelli) and the landscape equally delight ; the children almost repel, and the decorative furniture in the corner quite repels. The picture is interesting also for its colour, which is unlike anything else in the gallery, the green of the Madonna's dress being especially lovely and distinguished, and vulgarizing the Ghirlandaios which hang near. The best of these is No. 881, but it is too hot throughout, and would indeed be almost displeasing but for the irradiation of the Virgin's face. Of the other Ghirlandaios No. 1619 is a charming thing, and the little Mother and her happy Child, whose big toe is being so reverently adored by the ancient mage, are very near real simple life. This artist, we shall see, always paints healthy, honest babies. The seaport in the distance is charming too. But it is all overheated.