 Chapter 1 Introduction to the Book of Art for Young People This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Readers Note To view the 16 beautiful full-color illustrations that accompany this text, please visit the online e-text at www.gutenberg.org slash e-text slash 17395 The Book of Art for Young People by Agnes Ethel Conway and Sir Martin Conway Chapter 1 Introduction Almost the pleasantest thing in the world is to be told a splendid story by a really nice person. There is not the least occasion for the story to be true. Indeed, I think the untrue stories are the best, those in which we meet delightful beasts and things that talk 20 times better than most human beings ever do, and where extraordinary events happen in the kind of places that are not at all like our world of every day. It is so fine to be taken into a country where it is always summer and the birds are always singing and the flowers always blowing and where people get what they want by just wishing for it and are not told that this or that isn't good for them and that they'll know better than to want it when they're grown up and all that kind of thing which is so annoying and so often happening in this obstinate crisscross world where the days come and go in such an orderly fashion. But if I might choose the person to tell me the kind of story I like to listen to and hear told to me over and over again, it would be someone who could draw pictures for me while talking, pictures like those of Tenniel in Alice and Wonderland and through the Looking Glass. How much better we know Alice herself and the White Knight and the Mad Hatter and all the rest of them from the pictures than even from the story itself. But my storyteller should not only draw the pictures while he talked but he should paint them too. I want to see the sky blue and the grass green and I want red cloaks and blue bonnets and pink cheeks and all the bright colors and some gold and silver too and not merely black and white, though black and white drawings would be better than nothing so long as they showed me what the people and beasts and dragons and things were like. I could put up with even rather bad drawings if only they were vivid. Don't you know how good a bad drawing sometimes seems? I have a friend who can make the loveliest folks and the funniest beasts and the quaintest houses and trees and he really can't draw a bit and the curious thing is that if he could draw better I should not like his folks and beasts half as much as I do the lopsided, crooked, crazy looking people he produces. And then he has such quaint things to tell about them and while he talks he seems to make them live so that I can hardly believe they are not real people for all their unlikeness to anyone you ever saw. Now the old pictures you see in the picture galleries are just like that only the people that painted them didn't invent the stories but merely illustrated stories which, at the time those painters lived, everyone knew. Some of the stories were true and some were just a kind of fairy tale and it didn't matter to the painters and it doesn't matter to us which was true and which wasn't. The only thing that matters is whether the story is a good one and whether the picture is a nice one. There is a delightful old picture painted on a wall a way off at Assisi in Italy which shows St. Francis preaching to a lot of birds and the birds are all listening to him and looking pleased the way birds do look pleased when they find a good fat worm or fresh crumbs. Now St. Francis was a real man and such a dear person too but I don't suppose half the stories told about him were really true yet we can pretend they were and that's just what the painter helps us to do. Don't you know all the games that begin with let's pretend? Well, that's art. Art is pretending or most of it is. Pictures take us into a world of make-believe a world of imagination or everything is or should be in the right place and in the right light and of the right color where all the people are nicely dressed to match one another and are not standing in one another's way and not interrupting one another or forgetting to help play the game. That's the difference between pictures and photographs. A photograph is almost always wrong somewhere something is out of place or something is there which ought to be away or the light is wrong or if it's colored the colors are just not in keeping with one another. If it's a landscape the trees are where we don't want them they hide what we want to see or they don't hide the very thing we want hidden then the clouds are in the wrong place and a wind ruffles the water just where we want to see something reflected that's the way things actually happen in the real world but in the world of let's pretend in the world of art they don't happen so there everything happens right and everybody does not so much what they should that might sometimes be dull but exactly what we want them to do which is so very much better that is the world of your art and my art unfortunately all the pictures in the galleries weren't painted just for you and me but you'll find if you look for them plenty that were and the rest don't matter those were painted no doubt for someone else but if you could find the someone else for whom they were painted the someone else whose world of let's pretend was just these pictures that don't belong to your world and if they could tell you about their world of let's pretend ten to one you'd find it just as good a world as your own and you'd soon learn to pretend that way too well the purpose of this book is to take you into a number of worlds of let's pretend most of which I dare say will be new to you and perhaps you will find some of them quite delightful places I'm sure you can't help liking Saint Jerome's cell when you come to it it's not a bit like any room we can find anywhere in the world today but wouldn't it be joyful if we could what a good time we could have there with the tame lion not a bit like any lion in the zoo but none the worse for that and the jolly bird and all Saint Jerome's little things I should like to climb on to his platform and sit in his chair and turn over his books although I don't believe they'd be interesting to read but they'd certainly be pretty to look at if you and I were there though we should soon be out of way behind looking round the corner and finding all sorts of odd places that unfortunately can't all get into the picture only we know they're there down yonder corridor and from what the painter shows us we can invent the rest for ourselves one of the troubles of a painter is that he can't paint every detail of things as they are in nature when you first see it is just a little yellow spot when you hold it in your hand you find it made up of petals around a tiny center with little things in it if you take a magnifying glass you can see all its details multiplied if you put a tiny bit of it under a microscope 10,000 more little details come out and so it might go on as long as you went on magnifying now a picture can't be like that it just has to show you the general look of things as you see them from an ordinary distance but there comes in another kind of trouble how do you see things we don't all see the same things in the same way your mother's face looks very different to you from its look to a mere person passing in the street your own room has a totally different aspect to you from what it bears to a casual visitor the things you specially love have a way of standing out and seeming prominent to you but not of course to anyone else there are other differences in the look of the same things to different people which you have perhaps noticed some people are more sensitive to colors than others some are much more sensitive to brightness and shadow some will notice one kind of object in a view or some detail in a face far more emphatically than others girls are quicker to take note of the color of eyes hair, skin, clothes, and so forth than boys a woman who merely sees another woman for a moment will be able to describe her and her dress far more accurately than a man a man will be noticing other things his picture, if he painted one would make those other things prominent so it is with everything that we see none of us sees more than certain features in what the eye rests upon and if we are artists it is only those features that we should paint we can't possibly paint every detail of everything that comes into the picture we must make a choice and of course we choose the features and details that please us best now the purpose of painting anything at all is to paint the beauty of the thing if you see something that strikes you as ugly you don't instinctively want to paint it but when you see an effective beauty you feel that it would be very nice indeed to have a picture showing that beauty so a picture is not really the representation of a thing but the representation of the beauty of the thing some people can see beauty almost everywhere they are conscious of beauty all day long they want to surround themselves with beauty to make all their acts beautiful to shed beauty all about them those are the really artistic souls the gift of such perfect instinct for beauty comes by nature to a few it can be cultivated by almost all that cultivation of all sorts of beauty in life is what many people call civilization the real art of living to see beauty everywhere in nature is not so very difficult it is all about us where the work of uncivilized man has not come in to destroy it artists are people who by nature and by education have acquired the power to see beauty in what they look at and then to set it down on paper or canvas or in some other material so that other people can see it too it seems strange that at one time the beauty of natural landscape was hardly perceived by anyone at all people lived in the beautiful country and scarcely knew that it was beautiful then came the time when the beauty of landscape began to be felt by the nicest people they began to put it into their poetry and to talk and write about it and to display it in landscape pictures it was through poems and pictures which they read and saw that the general run of folks first learned to look for beauty in nature I have no doubt that Turner's wonderful sunsets made plenty of people look at sunsets and rejoice in the intricacy and splendor of their glory for the first time in their lives well what Turner and other painters of his generation did for landscape had had to be done for men and women in earlier days by earlier generations of artists the Greeks were the first in their sculpture to show the wonderful beauty of the human form till their day people had not recognized what to us now seems obvious no doubt they had thought one person pretty and another handsome but they had not known that the human figure was essentially a glorious thing till the Greek sculptors showed them another thing painters have taught the world is the beauty of atmosphere formerly no one seems to have noticed how atmosphere affects every object that is seen through it the painters had to show us that it is so after we had seen the effect of atmosphere in pictures we began to be able to see for ourselves in nature and thus a whole group of new pleasures in views of nature was opened up to us away back in the Middle Ages 600 or more years ago folks had far less educated eyes than we possess today they looked at nature more simply than we do and saw less in it so they were satisfied with pictures that omitted a great many features that we cannot do without but painting does not only concern itself with representing the world we actually see and the people that our eyes actually behold it concerns itself quite as much with the world of fancy, of make-believe indeed most painters when they look at an actual scene let their fancy play about it so that presently what they see and what they fancy get mixed up together and their pictures are a mixture of fancy and effect and no one can tell where the one ends and the other begins the fancies of people are very different at different times and you can't understand the pictures of old days unless you can share the fancies of the old painters to do that you must know something about the way they lived and the things they believed and what they hoped for and what they were afraid of here, for instance, is a very funny fact solemnly recorded in an old account book a certain count of Savoy owned the beautiful castle of Chilin which you have perhaps seen on the shores of the lake of Geneva but he could not be happy because he and the people about him thought that in a hole in the rock under one of the cellars a basilisk lived a very terrible dragon and they all went in fear of it so the count paid a brave mason a large sum of money and the payment is solemnly set down in his account book to break away into this hole and turn the basilisk out and I have no doubt that he and his people were greatly pleased when the hole was made and no basilisk was found folks who believed in dragons as sincerely as that must have gone in terror in many places where we should go with no particular emotion a picture of a dragon to them would mean much more than it would to us so if we are really to understand old pictures we must begin by understanding the fancies of the artists who painted them and of the people they were painted for you see how much study that means for anyone who wants to understand all the art of all the world we shall not pretend to lead you on any such great quest as that but ask you to look at just a few old pictures that have been found charming by a great many people of several generations and to try and see whether they do not charm you as well you must never of course pretend to like what you don't like that is too silly we can't all like the same things still there are certain pictures that most nice people like a few of these we have selected to be reproduced in this book for you to look at and to help you realize who painted them and the kind of people they were painted for my daughter has written the chapters that follow I hope you will find them entertaining and still more that you will like the pictures and so learn to enjoy the many others that have come down to us from the past and are among the world's most precious possessions today end of chapter one read by Kara Schellenberg on March 16th, 2008 in San Diego, California chapter two the 13th century in Europe this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org the book of art for young people by Agnes Ethel Conway and Sir Martin Conway chapter two the 13th century in Europe before we give our whole attention to the first picture of which the original was painted in England in 1377 let us imagine ourselves in the year 1200 making a rapid tour through the chief countries of Europe to see for ourselves how the people lived the first thing that will strike us on our journey is the contrast between the grandeur of the churches and public buildings and the insignificance of most of the houses some of the finest churches in England built in the style of architecture called Norman one or more of which you may have seen date before the year 1200 as for example Durham Cathedral and the Naves of Norwich, Elly and Peterborough cathedrals the great churches abroad were also beautiful and more elaborately decorated in the north with sculpture and painting in the south with marble and mosaic the towns competed one with another in erecting them finer and larger and in decorating them as magnificently as they could this was done because the church was a place which the people used for many other purposes besides Sunday services in the 12th, 13th and 14th centuries the parish church on weekdays as well as on Sundays was a very useful and agreeable place to most of the parishioners the holy days or saints days holidays indeed were times of rejoicing and festivity and the church processions and services were pleasant events in the lives of many who had few entertainments and who for the most part could neither read nor write printing was not yet invented at least not in Europe and as every book had to be written out by hand copies of books were rare and only owned by the few who could read them so that stories were mostly handed down by word of mouth the same being told by mother to child for many generations the favorites were stories of the saints and martyrs of the Catholic church for of course we are speaking now of times long before the Reformation the Old Testament stories and all the stories of the life of Christ and his apostles were well known too and just as we never tire of reading our favorite books over and over again our forefathers of 1200 wanted to see on the walls of their churches representations of the stories which they could not read their daily thoughts were more occupied with the infant Christ the saints and the angels than ours generally are they thought of themselves as under the protection of some saint who would plead with God the Father for them if they asked him for God himself seemed too high or remote to be appealed to always directly he was approached with awe the saints the virgin and the infant Christ with love we must realize this difference before we can well understand a picture painted in the 12th 13th or 14th centuries nor can we look at one without feeling that the artist and the people for whom he painted so loved the holy personages they thought about them always not only at stated times and on Sundays and never tired of looking at pictures of them and their doings it is sometimes said that only Catholics can understand medieval art because they feel towards the saints as the old painters did but it is possible for anyone to realize how in those far off days the people felt and it is this that we must try to do the religious fervor of the middle ages was not a sign of great virtue among all the people some were far more cruel, savage and unrestrained than we are today very wicked men even became powerful dignitaries in the church but it was the church that fostered the impulses of pity and charity in a fierce age and some of the saints of the 13th centuries such as St. Francis of Assisi and St. Catherine of Siena are still held to be among the most beautiful characters the world has ever known the churches of the 11th and 12th centuries in Florence were lined with marble and a great picture frequently stood above the altar it is difficult to realize today that the processes which we call oil and watercolour painting were not then invented and that no shops existed to sell canvases and paints ready for use the artist painted upon a wooden panel which he had himself to make plain flat and cut to the size he needed in order to get a surface upon which he could paint he covered the panel with a thin coating of plaster which it was difficult to lay on absolutely flat upon the plaster he drew the outline of the figures he was going to paint and filled in the background with a thin layer of gold leaf such as is today used for gilding frames after the background had been put in it was impossible to correct the outline of the figures and the labor of preparing the wooden panel and of laying the gold was so great that an artist would naturally not make risky attempts towards something new lest he should spoil his work in the Jerusalem chamber of Westminster Abbey there is a 13th century altar piece of this kind and you can see the strips of vellum that were used to cover the joints of the different pieces of wood under the panel beneath the layer of plaster which has now to a great extent peeled off the people liked to see their old testament stories and the stories from the life of Christ painted over and over again they had become fond of the versions of the tales which they had known and seen painted when they were young and did not wish them changed so that the range of subjects was not large the same were repeated and because of the painter's fear of making mistakes it was natural that some figures should be repeated too thus whatever the subject pictured a tradition was formed in each locality for the grouping and general arrangement of the figures and the most authoritative tradition for such typical groupings was preserved in Constantinople or Byzantium from which city the Byzantine school of painting takes its name before 1200 Byzantium had been a centre of residence and the civilising influence of trade for 18 centuries it had been the capital of the Roman Empire and less civilised peoples from the north had never conquered the town destroying the Greek and Roman traditions as happened elsewhere in Europe you have read how the Romans had to withdraw their armies from England to defend Rome against the attacks of the Goths from the north and then how Britain was settled by Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Danes who destroyed most of the Roman civilisation a similar though much less complete destruction took place in Italy a little later when Goths and Lombards who were remotely akin to the Angles and Saxons overwhelmed Roman culture but next to Constantinople Rome had the best continuous tradition of art for the fine monuments of the great imperial days still existed in the city in Byzantium the original Greek population struggled on and continued to paint and make mosaics and erect fine buildings till the Turks conquered them in 1453 the Byzantines were wealthy and made exquisite objects in gold precious stones and ivory while they were painting better than any other people in Europe they too reproduced the same subjects and the same figures over and over again only the figures were more graceful than those of the local Italian English and French artists who in varying degrees at different times tried to paint Byzantine or Greek artists but without quite the same success so long as there was no need for an artist to paint anything but the old well established subjects and so long as people desired them to be painted in the old conventional manner there was little reason why any painter should try to be original and paint what was not wanted but in the 13th century a great change took place let us here refresh our memories of what we may have read that delightful saint Francis of Assisi he was born in 1182 the son of a well-to-do nobleman in the little town of Assisi in Umbria and as a lad became inflamed with the ideal of the religious life but instead of entering one of the existing monastic orders where he would have been protected he gave away every possession he had in the world and adopted poverty as his watchword clad in an old brown habit he walked from place to place preaching charity obedience and renunciation of all worldly goods he lived on what was given to him to eat from day to day he nursed the lepers and the sick ever described as a most lovable person he won by his preaching the hearts of people of all classes from the king of France to the humblest peasant he wrote beautiful hymns in praise of the sun the moon and the stars the great love for every living thing the birds were said to have flocked around him because they loved him and we read that he talked to them and called them his little sisters an old writer tells this story in good faith when Saint Francis spake words to them the birds began all of them to open their beaks and spread their wings and reverently bend their heads down to the ground and by their acts and by their songs did show that the holy father gave them joy and was reading great wherever he preached he made converts who married holy poverty as Saint Francis expressed it gave up everything they had and lived his preaching and roaming life Saint Francis himself had no idea of forming a monastic order he wished to live a holy life in the world and show others how to do the same and for years he and his companions worked among the poor earning their daily bread when they could and when they could not begging for it gradually however ambitions stirred in the hearts of some of the followers of Francis and against the will of their leader they made themselves into the order of Franciscan friars collected gifts of money and began to build churches and monastic buildings at first the buildings were said to belong to the pope who allowed the Franciscans to use them since they might not own property but after the death of Saint Francis the order of churches throughout the length and breadth of Italy not of marble and mosaic but of brick since brick was cheaper but the brick walls were plastered and upon the wet plaster there were painted scenes from the life of Saint Francis side by side with the old Christian and saintly legends this sudden demand for painted churches with paintings of new subjects stirred the painters of the day to alter their old style when an artist was asked to paint a large picture of Saint Francis preaching to the birds he had to look at real birds and he had to study a real man in the attitude of preaching there was no scene that had ever been painted from the life of Christ or of any saint in which a man preached to a bird so that the artist was driven to paint from nature instead of copying former pictures let us now read what a painter who lived in the 16th century Vasari by name wrote about the rise of painting some learned people nowadays say that Vasari was wrong in many of the stories he told but after all he lived much nearer than we do to the times he wrote about and it is safer to believe what he tells us than what modern students surmise except when they are able to cite other old authorities to which Vasari did not have access the endless flood of misfortunes which overwhelmed unhappy Italy not only ruined everything worthy of the name of a building but also extinguished the race of artists a far more serious matter then as it pleased God there was born in the year 1240 in the city of Florence Giovanni surname Chimabue to shed the first light on the art of painting instead of paying attention to his lessons Chimabue spent the whole day drawing men, horses, houses and various other fancies on his books and odd sheets like one who felt himself compelled to do so by nature fortune proved favourable to his natural inclination for some Greek artists were summoned to Florence by the government of the city for no other purpose than the revival of painting in their midst since the art was not so much debased as altogether lost in this way Chimabue made a beginning in the art which attracted him for he often played the truant and spent the whole day in watching the master's work thus it came about that his father the artists considered him so fitted to be a painter that if he devoted himself to the profession he might look for honourable success in it and to his great satisfaction his father procured him employment with the painters thus by dint of continual practice and with the assistance of his natural talent he far surpassed the manner of his teachers for they had never cared to make any progress and had executed their works not in the good manner of ancient Greece but in the rude modern style of that time Chimabue drew from nature to the best of his powers although it was a novelty to do so in those days and he made the draperies garments and other things somewhat more life like natural and soft than the Greeks had done who had taught one another a rough awkward and commonplace style for a great number of years not by means of study but as a matter of custom without ever dreaming of improving their designs by beauty or by any invention of worth if you were to see a picture by Chimabue there is one in the National Gallery which resembles his work so closely that it is sometimes said to be his you would think less highly than Vasari of the life like quality of his art though there is something dignified and stately in the picture of the virgin and child with angels that he painted for the church of St. Francis at Assisi another story is told by Vasari of a picture by Chimabue which tradition asserts to be the great Madonna still in the church of Santa Maria Novella at Florence Chimabue painted a picture of our lady for the church of Santa Maria Novella the figure was of a larger size than any which had been executed up to that time and the people of that day who had never seen anything better considered the work so marvellous that they carried it to the church from Chimabue's house in a stately procession with great rejoicing while Chimabue himself was highly rewarded and honored it is reported and some records of the old painters relate that while Chimabue was painting this picture in some gardens near the gate of Santa Piero the old king Charles of Anjou passed through Florence among the many entertainments prepared for him by the men of the city they brought him to see the picture of Chimabue as it had not then been seen by anyone all the men and women of Florence flocked thither in a crowd with the greatest rejoicings so that those who lived in the neighborhood called the place the joyful suburb because of the rejoicing there this name it ever afterwards retained being in the course of time enclosed within the walls of the city for this story we may thank Vasari because it helps us to realize the love the people of Florence felt for the pictures in their churches and the reverence in which they held a priest who could paint a more beautiful picture of the virgin and child than any they had seen before it is difficult to think of the population of a town today walking in procession to honor the painter of a fine picture but a picture of the Madonna was a very precious thing indeed to a Florentine of the 13th century and we may try to imagine ourselves walking joyfully in that Florentine procession so as the better to understand Florentine art he repeated this legend about Cimabue because he was the master of Giotto who is called the father of modern painting the story is that Cimabue one day came upon the boy Giotto who was a shepherd and found him drawing a sheep with a pointed piece of stone upon a smooth surface of rock he was so much struck with the drawing that he took the boy home and taught him and soon he in his turn far surpassed his master in order to appreciate Giotto he needed to go to Assisi, Florence or Padua for in each place he has painted a series of wall paintings in the great double church of Assisi built by the Franciscans over the grave of St. Francis within a few years of his death Giotto has illustrated the whole story of his life an isolated reproduction of one scene would give you no idea of their power in many respects he was an innovator and by the end of his life he was broken away completely from the Byzantine school of painting he composed each one of the scenes from the life of St. Francis in an original and dramatic manner and so vividly that a person unacquainted with the story would know what was going on standing in the nave of the upper church you are able to contrast the speaking scenes of the lives of people upon earth with the faded glories of Greek winged angels and noble Madonna's with Greek faces in the Byzantine style when the church was at its newest before Giotto was born these looked down upon us still from the east end of the church Giotto died in 1337 and for the next 50 years painters in Italy did little but imitate him scenes from the life of St. Francis and incidents from the legends of other saints remained in vogue but they were not treated in original fashion by succeeding artists who tried to paint as Giotto might have painted and so far from surpassing him he was never even equal by his followers we need not burden our memories with the names of these Giotto-esque artists and now after this glimpse of an almost vanished world we will turn our attention to England and to the first picture of our choice 19th 2008 in San Diego California Chapter 3 Richard II this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org the book of art for young people by Agnes Ethel Conway and Sir Martin Conway Chapter 3 Richard II our first picture is a portrait of Richard II on his coronation day in the year 1377 when he was ten years old it is the earliest one selected and the eyes of those who see it for the first time will surely look surprised the jewel-like effect of the sapphire-winged angels and coral-robed Richard against the golden background is not at all what we are accustomed to see nowadays it may take some time and a little patience before we can cast ourselves back to the year 1377 and look at the picture with the eyes of the person who painted it let us begin with a search for his purpose and meaning at least the picture is a diptych that is to say it is a painting done upon two wings or shutters hinged so as to allow of their being closed together you have no doubt been wondering why I called it a portrait for the picture is far from being what today would commonly be described as such Richard himself is not even the most conspicuous figure and he is kneeling and praying to the virgin what should we think if any living sovereign ordering a state portrait had himself portrayed surrounded on one side by his predecessors on the throne and on the other side by the virgin and child and angels but in the 14th century it was nothing strange that the virgin and child the angels, John the Baptist Edward the Confessor Edmund the Martyr should be thus depicted when we have realized that it was usual for a royal patron to command and an artist to paint such an assemblage of personages as though all of them were then living and in one another's presence we have learned something significant and impressive about a way of thinking in the middle ages Richard II thought of himself as the successor of a long line of kings appointed by the divine power to rule a small portion of the divine territories so what more natural than that he as the newly reigning sovereign should have his portrait painted surrounded by his holiest predecessors upon the throne and in the act of dedicating his kingdom to the virgin Mary in an account given of his coronation we read that after the ceremony in Westminster Abbey Richard went to the shrine of Our Lady at Pew nearby where he made a special offering to Our Lady eleven angels each wearing the king's badge one for each of the eleven years of his young life what form this offering of angels took we know not they may have been little wooden figures or coins with an angel stamped upon them but it is reasonable to connect the offering with this very picture of Our Lady and the Angels the king's special badges were the white heart and the collar of broom pods embroidered all over his magnificent red robe the white heart is pinned in the form of a jewel beneath his collar and each of the eleven angels bears the badge upon her shoulder and the collar of broom pods around her neck one of the king's angels gives the royal standard of England with the cross of Saint George on it to the infant Christ in token of Richard's dedication of his kingdom to the virgin and child Edward III died at the summer 1377 and Richard succeeded him in his 11th year having been born on January 6th 1367 it is necessary to note the exact day of the year when these events took place for it can have importance in determining the saint whom a personage chiefly honored as patron and protector in this instance Saint John the Baptist whose feast occurs on June 23 near to the day of Richard's accession he stands as patron saint of the young king next to him is King Edward the Confessor the founder of Westminster Abbey who was canonized for his sanctity and who points to Richard II as his spiritual successor upon the throne in medieval art the saints are distinguished by their emblems which often have an association with the grim way in which they met their death or with some other prominent feature in their legend here Edward holds up a ring whereof a pretty story is told Edward once took it off his finger to give it to a beggar because he had no money with him but the beggar was no other than John the Evangelist in disguise and two years later he sent the ring back to the king with the message that in six months Edward would be in the joy of heaven with him William Caxton the first English printer relates in his life of King Edward that when he heard the message he was full of joy and let fall tears from his eyes giving praise and thanksgiving to Almighty God Saint Edmund who stands next to Edward the Confessor is the other saintly king of England after whom the town of Barry Saint Edmunds takes its name he was shot to death with arrows by the Danes because he would not give up Christianity if I could show you several suitably chosen pictures at once you would recognize in the arrangement of the three kings here two standing one kneeling before the virgin and child a plain resemblance to the typical treatment of a well known subject the adoration of the Magi you remember how when the three wise men of the east always thought of in the middle ages as kings had followed the star which led them to the manger where Christ was born they brought him gold and frankincense and myrrh as offerings this beautiful story was a favorite one in the middle ages often represented in sculpture and painting one king always kneels before the virgin and child presenting his gift whilst the other two stand behind with theirs in their hands the standing kings and the kneeling Richard in our picture are grouped in just the same relation to the divine infant as the three Magi the imitation of the type is clear there was a special reason for this in that the birthday of Richard fell upon January 6 the feast of the epiphany when the wise men did homage to the babe the picture by reminding us of the three wise men commemorated the birthday of the king as well as his coronation the two chief dates of his life you have some idea now of the train of thought which this 14th century painter endeavored to express in his picture commemorative of the coronation of a king a medieval coronation was a very solemn ceremony indeed and the picture had to be a serious expression of the great traditions of the throne of England suggested by the figures of saint Edward and saint Edmund and of hope for future good to the realm to ensue from the blessings of the virgin and child upon the young king religious feeling is dominant in this picture and if from it you could turn to others of like date you would find the same to be true meaning was the main thing thought of when Giotto painted his scenes from the life of saint Francis his first aim was that the stories should be well told and easily grasped by all who looked at them their beauty was of less importance this difference between the aim of art in the middle ages and in our own day is fundamental if you begin by picking to pieces the pictures of the 13th and 14th centuries because the drawing is bad the colouring crude grouping unnatural you might as well never look at them at all putting faults and old fashions aside to think of the meaning of the picture we shall often be rewarded by finding a soul within and the work may affect us powerfully not withstanding its simple forms and few strong colours nevertheless after the painter had planned his picture so as to convey its message and meaning he did try to make it beautiful to look upon and he often succeeded in the 13th and 14th centuries it was beauty of outline and a pleasant patching together of bright colours for which the painter strove both in pictures and in manuscripts if you think of this picture for a moment as a coloured pattern you will see how pretty it is the blue wings against the gold background make a hedge for the angel faces and look extremely well if the figure of Richard II seems flat if you feel as though he were cut out or cardboard and had no thickness then turn your mind to consider only the outline of the figure it is very graceful artists in the 13th century sometimes made their figures over long if they thought that a sweep of graceful line would look well in a certain position in their picture the drapery was bent into impossible curves if so they fell into a pretty pattern in the 14th century beauty of outlines still prevailed even when they contained plain masses of brilliant colour so pure and gem-like that the pictures almost came to look like stained glass windows in fact probably the constant sight of stained glass windows in the churches greatly influenced the painter's way of work the contrast of diverse colours placed next one another was more startling than we find in later painting whilst an effort was made to finish every detail as though it were to be looked at in this picture which we are now learning how to see the virgin was shown to be standing in a meadow of flowers a modern artist knows how to paint the general effect of many flowers growing out of grass but the medieval painter had not the skill to do that he had not learnt to look at the effect of a mass of flowers as a whole nor could he have rendered such an effect with the colours and processes he possessed he knew what one flower looked like and thought that many must be a continued repetition of one but it was impossible to paint a great number of flowers close together each finished in detail so he chose instead to paint a few as completely as he could and leave the rest to the imagination of the spectator that was his way of making a selection from nature thus he hoped to suggest the idea of a flowery meadow since he could not hope to render the look of it likewise all the details of the dresses are minutely painted the robes of Richard and of Edmund the martyr are beautiful examples of the careful and painstaking work characteristic of the middle ages no medieval painter spared himself trouble although he had not mastered the art of drawing the figure he had learnt how to paint jewellery and stuffs beautifully and delighted in doing it the drawing of the figures you can see are perfect yet nothing could be sweeter in feeling than the bevy of girl angels with roses in their hair surrounding the virgin most of them are not unlike English girls of the present day and the critics who say that this picture must have been painted by a Frenchman may be asked where he is likely to have found these English models for his angels possibly the face of Richard himself may have been painted from life for the features correspond enough with the large full face portrait of him in Westminster Abbey and with the sculptured figure upon his tomb he certainly does not look like a child of ten for his state robes and crown give him a grown-up appearance but if you regard the face carefully you can see that it is still that of a child the gold background in the original shines out brilliantly for after the gold was laid on it was polished with an agate which gives it a burnished effect and then the little patterns were carefully punched so as not to pierce the gold and thereby expose the white ground beneath there is a jewel like quality in the color such as you can see in manuscripts of the time and it is possible that the painter may have learned his art as an illuminator of manuscripts artists in those days seldom can find themselves to one kind of work we do not know this man's name and are not even certain whether he was French or English before as in the time of Richard painting had been mainly a decorative art and the object of making pictures was to adorn the pages of a book or the walls and vaults of a building the most vital artistic energies of western Europe in the 13th century had gone into the building of the great cathedrals and abbeys which are today the glory of that period most medieval paintings that still exist in England are decorative wall paintings of this kind and only traces of a few remain in many country places you can see poor and faded vestiges of painting which adorned church walls in the 13th century and occasionally you may come upon a bit by some chance better preserved these old wall paintings were done upon the dry plaster the discovery or rather the revival of fresco painting that is of painting done upon the wet surface of freshly plastered walls a more durable process was made in Italy and did not penetrate to England Richard II was not the only art loving king of his time you have read of John king of France who was taken prisoner at the battle of Poitiers by the black prince father of Richard during his captivity he lived in considerable state in London at the Savoy Palace which occupied the site of the present Savoy hotel in the Strand he brought his own painter from France with him who painted his portrait which still exists in Paris this king John was the father of four remarkable sons Charles V king of France with whom Edward III and the black prince fought the latter part of the Hundred Years War Philip the Bold Duke of Burgundy John Duke of Berry and Louis Duke of Anjou in this list are names of remarkable men and great art patrons about whom you may someday read interesting things numerous lovely objects still in existence were made for them and would not have been made at all if they had not been the men they were it was only just becoming possible in the 14th century for a prince to be an art patron that required money and hitherto even princes had rarely been rich the increasing wealth of England, France and Flanders at this time was based upon the wool industry and the manufacture and commerce to which it gave rise the Lord Chancellor in the House of Lords to this day sits on a wool sack which is a reminder of the time when the wool sacks of England were the chief source of the wealth of English traders after the black death an awful plague that swept through Europe in 1349 that part of the land of England was given up to sheep grazing because the population had diminished and it took fewer people to look after sheep than it did to till the soil although this had been an evil in the beginning it became afterwards a benefit for English wool was sold at an excellent price to the merchants of Flanders who worked it up into cloth and in their turn sold that all over Europe with big profits the larger merchants who regulated the traffic were prosperous and so too the landowners and princes whose property thus increased in value the four sons of King John became very wealthy men Philip the Bold Duke of Burgundy by marrying the heiress of the Count of Flanders acquired the Flemish territory and the wealth obtained from the wool trade and manufacture there Barry and Anjou were great provinces in France yielding a large revenue to dukes each of these princes employed several artists to illuminate books for him in the most splendid way they built magnificent chateaus and had tapestries and paintings made to decorate their walls they employed many sculptors and goldsmiths and all gave each other as presents works of art executed by their favorite artists in the British Museum there is a splendid gold and enamel cup that John, Duke of Barry was to be made for his brother King Charles V to see it would give you a good idea of the costliness and elaboration of the finest work of that day the courts of these four brothers were centers of artistic production in all kinds sculpture, metalwork tapestries, illuminated manuscripts and pictures and there was a strong spirit of rivalry among the artists to see who could make the loveliest things among the patrons as to which could secure the best artists in his service these four princes gave an important impulse to the production of beautiful things in France, Burgundy and Flanders but it is needless to burden you with the artist's names in the 14th century an artist was a workman who existed to do well the work that was desired of him he was not an independent man with ideas of his own by painting what he thought beautiful without reference to the ideas of a buyer of course if people prefer and buy good things when they see them good things will be likely to be made but if those with money to spend have no taste and buy bad things or order ugly things to be made then the men who had it in them to be great artists may die unnoticed because the beautiful things they could have made are not called for today many people spend nothing upon art and a few spend a great deal let us hope we may not see too much of the money spent in creating a demand for what is bad rather than for what is beautiful it was not unusual in the 14th century for a man to be at one and the same time painter, illuminator sculptor, metal worker and designer of any object that might be called for one of these many gifted men a good sculptor and a painter of some exquisite miniatures is sometimes supposed to have been the painter of our picture of Richard II in the absence of any signature or any definite record it is impossible to say who painted it but it is unnecessary to assume that it must have been painted by a French artist since we know that at the end of the 14th century there were very good painters in England it was by no means an exception not to sign a picture in those days for the artists had not begun to think of themselves as individuals entitled to public fame hand workers of the 14th century mostly belonged to a corporation or guild composed of all the other workers at the same trade in the same town and to this rule artists were no exception each man received a recognized price for his work and the officers of the guild saw to it that he obtained that price and that he worked on wood and durable materials there were certain advantages in this but it involved some loss of freedom in the artist since all had to conform to the rules of the guild this system was characteristic of the middle ages and arose from the fact that in those troubleous times every isolated person needed protection and was content to merge his individuality in some society in order to obtain it the guilds made for peace and established competition so that a guildsman may have been less tempted to hurry over or scamp his task the result was much honest careful work such as you see in the original of this picture we are told by those who know best that there has never been a time when the actual workmanship of the general run of craftsmen was better than in the middle ages this picture of Richard II has not faded or cracked or fallen off the panel and it seems as though we may hope it never will for it was well made and what is even more important it seems always to have been well cared for if only the nice things that are produced were all well cared for how many more of them there would be in the world End of Chapter 3 Read by Kara Schellenberg www.kray.org on March 18th, 2008 in San Diego, California Chapter 4 The Van Eyck's This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org The Book of Art for Young People by Agnes Ethel Conway and Sir Martin Conway Chapter 4 The Van Eyck's Before passing to Hubert Van Eyck the painter of the original of our next picture compare carefully the picture of Richard II and this of the three Marys looking first at one and then at the other the subject of the visit of the Marys to the sepulcher is of course well known to you but let us read the beautiful passage from St. Matthew telling of it that we may see how faithfully in every detail it was followed by Hubert Van Eyck In the end of the Sabbath as it began to dawn toward the first day came Mary Magdalene and the other Mary to see the sepulcher and behold there was a great earthquake for the angel of the Lord descended from heaven and came and rolled back the stone from the door and sat upon it. His countenance was like lightning and his raiment white as snow and for fear of him the keepers did shake and became as dead men Surely this would be thought a beautiful picture had it been painted at any time but when you compare it with the Richard II diptych does it not seem to you as though a long era divided the two yet one was painted less than fifty years after the other it is the attitude of mind of the painter that makes the difference In the diptych although the portrait of Richard himself was a likeness the setting was imaginary and symbolic the artist wished to tell in his picture how all the kings who succeed one another upon the throne of England alike depend upon the protection of heaven and how Richard in his turn acknowledged that dependence and pledged his loyalty to the blessed virgin and her holy child that picture was intended to take the mind of the spectator away from the everyday world and suggest grave thought and such was likewise in the main the purpose of all paintings in the Middle Ages but we are now leaving the Middle Ages behind and approaching the world nearer to our own Hubert van Eyck in attempting to depict the event at the sepulcher as it might actually have occurred outside the walls of the city of Jerusalem was doing something quite novel in his day his picture might almost be called a Bible illustration it is at least painted in the same practical spirit as that of a man painting an illustration for any other book it is not a picture meant to help anyone to pray or meditate it does not express any religious idea it was intended to be the veracious representation of an actual event shown as and when and how it happened true to the facts so far as Hubert knew them he has dressed the Marys in robes with wrought borders of Hebrew characters imitated from embroidered stuffs such as at that time were imported into Europe from the east the dresses are not accurate copies of eastern dresses Hubert would scarcely have known what those were like but was doing his best to paint costumes that should look oriental Mary Magdalene wears a turban and the keeper on the right has a strange peaked cap with Hebrew letters on it Hebrew scholars have done their best to read the inscriptions on these clothes but we must infer that Hubert only copied the letters without knowing it has not been possible to make any sense of them in the foreground are masses of flowers most carefully painted and so accurately drawn that botanists have been able to identify them all several do not grow in the north of Europe the town at the back is something like Jerusalem as it looked in Hubert van Eyck's own day a few of the buildings can be identified still and a general view of Jerusalem taken in 1486 years after the death of Hubert bears some resemblance to the town in this picture the city is painted in miniature much as it would look if you saw it from near at hand every tower, house and window is there you can even count the battlements the great building with the dome in the middle of the picture is the mosque of Omar which occupies the supposed site of Solomon's temple some people have thought that perhaps Hubert van Eyck and his brother John actually went to the east many men made pilgrimages in those days and almost every year parties of Christian pilgrims went to Jerusalem it was a rough and even a dangerous journey but not at all impossible for a patient traveler Dr. Hewlin who has made wonderful discoveries about the early Flemish painters found a mention in an old 16th century list of a portrait of an Irish king or prince by van Eyck painted in 1414 or perhaps 1418 if he painted a portrait of an oriental prince he may have visited one oriental country at least or at any rate the south of Spain probably enough during that journey he made studies of the Cyprus stone pine date palm, olive, orange and palmetto which occur in his pictures they grow in the south of Spain and other Mediterranean regions but not in the cold north where Hubert spent most of his days it is difficult at first to realize what an innovation it was for Hubert van Eyck to paint such a landscape in the Richard II diptych there is just a suggestion of brown earth for the saints to stand upon but the rest of the background is of gold as was the common practice at the time the great innovator in some of his pictures had attempted to paint landscape backgrounds in his fresco of Saint Francis preaching to the birds there is a tree for them to perch on but it seems more like a garden vegetable than a tree even his buildings look as though they might fall together any moment like a pack of cards Hubert not only gives landscape a larger place than it ever had in any great picture before but he paints it with such skill and apparent confidence that we should never dream he was doing it almost for the first time Saint Matthew says as it began to dawn towards the first day of the week came Mary Magdalene and the other Mary to see the sepulcher even in this point Hubert wished to be accurate the rising sun is hidden behind the rocks on the left side of the picture for it was not until years later that any painter ventured to paint the sun in the heavens from the hidden orb strike the castles on the hills with shafts of light the town remains in shadow while the sky is lit up with floods of glory an effect such as this must have been very carefully studied from nature Hubert was evidently one who looked at the world with observant eyes and found it beautiful when he had flowers to paint he painted the whole plant accurately not the blossoms individually like the painter of Richard II he liked fine stuffs embroideries jewels and glittering armor he was no visionary trying to free himself from the earth and live in contemplation of the angels and saints in paradise like so many of the 13th and 14th century artists in this new delightful interest in the world as it is he reflected the tendency of his day the fifty years that had elapsed between the painting of Richard II's portrait and the work of the fan Ikes had seen a great development of trade and industry in Flanders Hubert was born perhaps about 1365 at Maas Ike from which he takes his name Maas Ike was a little town on the banks of the river Maas near the frontier of the present Holland and Belgium he may have spent most of his life in Ghent the town officials of which city paid him a visit in 1425 to see his work and gave six to his apprentices in memory of their visit where he learnt his art where he worked before he came to Ghent we do not know for certain but there is reason to think that he was employed for a while in Holland by the Count John, his brother concerning whom more facts have been gathered is said to have been twenty years younger than Hubert he was a painter too and worked in the employ of Philip the Good Duke of Burgundy and Count of Flanders the grandson of Philip the Bold who was one of those four sons of King John of France mentioned in our last chapter Philip the Good continued the traditions of his family and was in his time a great art patron his grandfather had fostered an important school of sculpture in Flanders and Burgundy which culminated in the superb statues still existing at Dijon like his brother the Duke of Barry he had given work to a number of miniature painters the Count of Holland also employed some wonderful miniature painters to beautify a manuscript for him this manuscript and one made for the Duke of Barry were among the finest ever painted so far as the pictures in them are concerned the Count of Holland's book used to be in the library at Turin where it was burnt a few years ago so we can see it no more but the fortunate ones who did see it thought that the pictures in it were actually painted by the fan Ikes when they were young the Duke of Barry's finest book is at Chantilly and is well known both this and the Turin book contained the loveliest early landscapes a little earlier in date than this landscape in the Three Marie's picture so you see why it is said that the illuminators first invented beautiful landscape painting and that landscapes were painted in books before they were painted as pictures to hang on walls the practical spirit in which one Ike worked exactly matched the sensible matter-of-fact Flemish character the Flemings even in pictures of the Madonna wanted the Virgin to wear a gown made of the richest stuff that could be woven truthfully painted with jewels of the finest Flemish workmanship and they liked to see a landscape behind her studied from their own native surroundings no man could try to paint things as they looked in the way Hubert did without making great progress in drawing if you compare the drawing of the angel appearing to the Marie's with any of the angels wearing the badge of Richard II you will see how much more lifelike is the angel of Hubert the painter of Richard II was not happy with his figures unless they were standing up or kneeling in profile but Hubert van Ike can draw them with tolerable success lying down or sitting huddled he can also combine a group in a natural manner the absence of formal arrangement in the picture of the Marie's is quite new in medieval art the painter of Richard II had known very little about perspective the science of drawing things as they look from one point of view has no doubt been taught to all of you you know certain rules about vanishing points and can apply them in your drawing but you would have found it very hard to invent perspective without being taught I can remember drawing a matchbox by the light of nature and very queer it contrived to become medieval artists were in exactly that same case the artists of the ancient world had discovered some of the laws of perspective but the secret was lost and artists in the middle ages had to discover them all over again Hubert van Ike made a great stride toward the attainment of this knowledge when you look at the picture the perspective does not strike you as glaringly wrong though there was still much that remained covered by later men as we shall see in our next chapter the brothers van Ike were first and foremost good workmen few other painters in the whole of the world's history have aimed at anything like the same finish of detail in the original of this picture the oriental pot which the green Mary holds in her hand is a perfect marvel of workmanship there is no detail so small but that when you look into it there is a fresh wonder a story is told of how Hubert van Ike painted a picture upon which he had lavished his usual painstaking care but when he put it in the sun to dry the panel cracked down the middle after this disappointment Hubert went to work and invented a new substance with which colors are made liquid a medium as it is called which when mixed with color dried hard and quickly it was possible to paint with the new medium of detail then before and the Flemish artists universally adopted it while very little was remembered about the facts of Hubert van Ike's life his name was always associated with the discovery of a new method of painting and on that account held in great honor the three Marie's is in many respects the most attractive of the pictures ascribed to Hubert but his most famous work was a larger picture or assemblage of pictures framed together the adoration of the Lamb in Saint Baven's church at Ghent it is an altar piece a painting set up over an altar in a church or chapel to aid the devotions of those worshiping there many of the panels of the Ghent altar piece are now in the museums of Berlin and Brussels they belonged to the wings or shutters which were made to close over the central parts and which used also to be painted outside and inside with devotional or related subjects the four great central panels on which the shutters used to close are still at Ghent the subject of the adoration of the Lamb was taken from revelations where before the Lamb has opened the seals of the book Saint John says and every creature which is in heaven and on the earth and under the earth and such as are in the sea and all that are in them heard I saying blessing and honor and glory and power be unto him that sitteth upon the throne and unto the Lamb forever and ever Hubert has figured this verse by assembling as in one time and place representatives of Christendom they who worship are the prophets apostles popes martyrs and virgins on each side of the central panel the just judges the soldiers of Christ the hermits and the pilgrims advance to join the throng around the Lamb most beautiful of all is the crowd of virgin martyrs bearing palms moving over the green grass illustrated with flowers to adore the Lamb of God the redeemer of the world above God the Father the Virgin Mother and Saint John the Baptist with crowns of wonderful workmanship are thrown to mid-quires of singing and playing angels on either hand the picture does not illustrate the description of the adoration of the Lamb in the fifth chapter of revelations so faithfully as the picture of the three Marie's illustrated Saint Matthew the Lamb has not seven horns and seven eyes and the four beasts and 24 elders are not falling down before it and adoring the Lamb is an ordinary sheep and the picture is a symbolic expression of the Catholic faith founded upon a biblical text but not what could be described as a Bible illustration people in the Middle Ages liked to embody their faith in a visible form and we are told that theologians frequently drew up schemes of doctrine which painters did their best to translate into pictures and sculptors into sculpture such works of art were for instruction rather than beauty though some also served well the purpose of decoration Joseph White who ordered the picture and whose portrait with that of his wife is painted on the shutters no doubt explained exactly what he wanted and Hubert sought to please him but although the design of the central panel was old fashioned like Hubert was able to do what he liked with the landscape and with the individual figures they are real men and women with varieties of expression such as had not been painted before and the landscape is even more beautiful than the one at the back of the three Marie's snow mountains rise in the distance and beautiful cypresses and palms of all kinds clothe the green slopes behind the Lamb there are flowers in the grass for pebbles in the brook behind you can see the cathedrals of Utrecht and Cologne St. John's of Maestricht and more churches and houses besides and the walls of a town and wide stretches of green country Hubert van Eyck died in 1426 and the picture was finished by his younger brother John of whose life though more is known than of Hubert's we need not hear repeat details many of his pictures still exist all of them for us are his portraits he was not the first man to paint good portraits but few artists have ever painted better likenesses it seems evident that the people in his pictures are as like as they can stare with no wrinkle or scratch left out portraits in earlier days than these were seldom painted for their own sake alone a pious man who wanted to present an altar piece or a stained glass window would modestly have his own image introduced in a corner by degrees such portraits grew in size and scale and the neighboring saints diminished till at last the saints were left out and the portraits did alone then it came about that such a picture was hung in its owner's house rather than in a church one of the best portraits John van Eyck ever painted is at Bruges the likeness of his wife the panel was discovered about 50 years ago in the marketplace of Bruges where an old woman was using the back of it to skin eels on but so soundly had the picture been painted that even this ill usage did not ruin it the lady was a very plain Flemish woman with no beauty of feature or expression but John has revealed her character so vividly that to look at her likeness is to know her it is indeed a long leap to the second of fifty years before with its representation of the outline of a youth to this ample realization of a mature woman's character John lived till 1441 and had some pupils and many imitators one of these Roger van der Weyden by name spread his influence far and wide throughout the whole of the Netherlands France and Germany how important this influence was in the history of art we shall see later many of the imitators of John learned his accuracy and thoroughness of workmanship but none of them attained his deep insight into character during the next fifty years many and beautiful were the pictures produced throughout Flanders all of them have a jewel like brilliance of color approaching in brightness the hues of the Richard II diptych the landscape backgrounds are charming miniatures of towns by the side of rivers with spanning bridges the painting of textures is exquisite but the Flemish phase placid plump and fair hair prevails throughout in the pictures of paradise where the saints and angels play with the infant Christ we still feel chained to the earth because the figures and faces are the unidealized images of those one might have met in the streets of Bruges and Ghent this is not a criticism on the artists the merit of their work is unchallenged and how could they paint physical beauty by them scarce ever seen yet when all has been said in praise of the Flemish school the brothers van Eyck the founders of it remain its greatest representatives and their work is still regarded with that high and almost universal veneration which is the tribute of the greatest achievement end of chapter 4 read by Kara Schellenberg on March 18th 2008 in San Diego California chapter 5 the renaissance this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org the book of art for young people by Agnes Ethel Conway and Sir Martin Conway paintings discussed in this chapter are Saint Jerome in his study by Antonello da Messina and The Nativity by Sandro Botticelli chapter 5 the renaissance who is this old gentleman in our next picture reading so quietly and steadily does he not look absorbed in his book certainly the peacock, the bird and the cat do not worry him or each other and there is still another animal in the distance a lion can you see him he is walking down the cloister pavement with his foot lifted as though it were hurt the story is that this particular lion limped into the monastery in which this old man lived and while all the other monks fled in terror this monk saw that the lion's four paw was hurt he raised it up found what was the matter and pulled out the thorn and ever afterwards the lion lived peacefully in the monastery with him now whenever you see a lion in a picture with an old monk you see Saint Jerome he was a learned Christian father who lived some 1500 years ago yet his works are still read spoken and heard every day throughout the world he it was who made the standard Latin version of the scriptures the services in Roman Catholic churches in all countries are held in Latin to this day and Saint Jerome's translation of the Bible called the Vulgate is the version still in use here you see Saint Jerome depicted sitting in his own study reading to prepare himself for his great undertaking and what a study it is you must go to the National Gallery to enjoy all the details for the original painting is only 18 inches high by 14 inches broad and the books and writing materials are so tiny that some are inevitably lost in this beautiful photograph the study is really a part of a monastery assigned to Saint Jerome himself his books, manuscripts and other such possessions he has a pot of flowers and a dwarf tree and a towel to dry his hands on and a beautiful chair at his desk he has taken off his dusty shoes and left them at the foot of the steps the painter of this picture must have had in his mind a very happy idea of Saint Jerome others have sometimes painted him as they thought he looked when living in a horrible desert as he did for four years at the time this picture was painted about the year 1470 Saint Jerome in his study was a more usual subject for painters than Saint Jerome in the desert one reason of this was that in Italy in the latter half of the 15th century Saint Jerome was considered the patron saint of scholars and for the first time since the fall of the Roman Empire scholars were perhaps the most influential people of the day of course you all know something about the terrible revival of learning in the 15th century which started in Italy spread northward and reached England in the reign of Henry VIII before the 15th century Italians seemed to have been indifferent to the monuments around them of ancient civilization suddenly they were fired with a passion for antiquity they learned Greek and began to take a keen interest in the doings of the Greeks and Romans who in many ways had lived a life so far superior to their own artists studied the old statues which taught them the beauty of the human figure the reacquired wisdom of the ancients by degrees broke down the medieval barriers there was born a spirit of enterprise into the world of thought as well as into the world of fact which revolutionized life and art the period which witnessed this great mental change is well known as the renaissance or rebirth when you first looked at this picture you must have thought it very different from the two earlier ones such a subject could only have been painted thus in an age when men admired the scholar's life though the figure is called that of Saint Jerome there is really nothing typically saintly about him he is only serious the subjects chosen by painters of the renaissance were no longer almost solely religious but began to be selected from the world of everyday life when the subject was taken from Christian legend it was now generally treated as an event happening in the actual world of the painter's own day the manner in which this picture is painted is still more suggestive of change than the subject itself our artist knew a great deal about the new science of perspective for instance one might almost think that pleased with his new knowledge he had multiplied the number of objects on the shelves so as to show how well he had gotten them medieval painters had not troubled about perspective and were more concerned as we have seen to make a pretty pattern of shapes and colors for their pictures the Van Eyck's as we noticed only acquired the beginnings of an understanding of it and were very proud of their new knowledge it was in Italy that all the rules were at last brought to light the renaissance period in Italy may be considered as lasting from to 1550 the pioneer artists who mastered perspective and worked at the human figure till they could draw it correctly in any attitude lived in the first 75 years of the 15th century they were the breakers of stone and hewers of wood who prepared the way for the greater artists of the end of the century but in the process of learning many of them painted very lovely things the painter of our picture lived within those 75 years he was probably a certain Antonello of Messina that same town in Sicily recently wrecked by earthquakes of his life little is known he seems to have worked chiefly in Venice where there was a fine school of painting during the renaissance period his senior Giovanni Bellini one of the early great painters of Venice some of whose pictures are in the National Gallery taught him much it is also said that Antonello went to the Netherlands and there learned the method of laying paint on panel invented by the Van Eyck's modern students say he did not but that he picked up his way of painting in Italy certainly he and other Venetians and Italians about this time improved their technical methods as the Van Eyck's had done and this picture is an early example of that more brilliant fashion of painting there is here a Flemish love of detail the Italian painters had been more accustomed to painting upon walls than the Flemings for the latter had soon discovered that a damp northern climate was not favorable to the preservation of wall paintings fresco does not admit of much detail as each day's work has to be finished in the day before the plaster dries thus a long tradition of fresco painting had accustomed the Italian painters to a broad method of treatment which they maintained to a certain extent even in their panel pictures but in our St. Jerome we see a wealth of detail unsurpassed even by John Van Eyck one needs a magnifying glass to see everything there is to be seen in the landscape through the window on the left besides the city with its towers and walls and the mountains behind there is a river in the foreground where two little people are sitting in a boat observe every tiny stone in the pavement and every open page of the books on the shelves here too spread in the handling hold the book far away from you so that the detail of the picture vanishes and only the broad masses of the composition stand out you still have what is essential the picture is one in which Italian feeling and sentiment blend with Flemish technique and love of little things there has always been something of a mystery about the picture and you must not be surprised some day if you hear it asserted that Antonello did not paint it at all such changes in the attributions of unsigned paintings are not uncommon one of the greatest pioneer artists of the 15th century was Andrea Mantegna of Padua in the north of Italy more than any other painter of his day he devoted himself to the study of ancient sculpture even to the extent of sometimes painting in monochrome to imitate the actual marble paintings by him which look like sculptured reliefs are in the National Gallery and at Hampton Court is a series of cartoons representing the triumph of Julius Caesar in which the conception and the handling are throughout inspired by old Roman bar reliefs in other pictures of his the figures look as though cast of bronze for he was likewise influenced by the sculptors of his own day particularly by the Florentine Donatello one of the geniuses of the early Renaissance Mantegna's studies of form and sculpture made him an excellent draftsman strangely enough it was this very severe artist who was perhaps the first to depict the charm of babyhood often he draws his babes wrapped in swaddling clothes with their little fingers in their mouths or else in the act of crying with their eyes screwed up tight and their mouths wide open such a combination of hard sculpture-esque modeling as the feeling has a charm of its own we have now just one more picture of a sacred subject to look at one of the last that still retains much of the old beautiful religious spirit of the Middle Ages the painter of it Sandro Botticelli a Florentine in whom were blended the piety of the Middle Ages and the intellectual life of the Renaissance was a very interesting man who's like we shall not find among the painters of his own or later days he was born in 1446 in Florence the city in Italy most alive to the new ideas and the new learning its governing family, the Medici of whom you have doubtless read surrounded themselves with a brilliant society of accomplished men and adorned their palaces with the finest works of art that could be produced in their time the best artists from the surrounding country were attracted to Florence in the hope of working for the family who were ever ready to employ a man of artistic gifts in such an atmosphere an original and alert person like Botticelli could not fail to keep step with the foremost of his day his fertile fancy was charmed by the revived stories of Greek mythology and for a time he gave himself up to the painting of pagan subjects such as the birth of Venus from the sea and the lovely allegory of spring with Venus, Cupid and the three graces he was one of the early artists to break through the old wall of religious convention painting frankly mythological subjects and he did them in an exquisite manner all his own the true spirit of beauty dwelt within him and all that he painted and designed was graceful in form and beautiful in color if, for instance, you look closely into the designs of the necks of dresses in his pictures you will find them delightful to copy and far superior to the ordinary designs for such things made today in his love of beauty and his keen appreciation of the new possibilities of painting he was a true child of the Renaissance though he had not the joyous nature so characteristic of the time moreover, as I have said he retained the old sweet religious spirit and clothed it with new forms of beauty in his sacred paintings there is something pathetic about many of these the virgin while she nurses the infant Christ seems to foresee all the sorrow in store for her and but little of the joy the girl angels who nestle around her in so many of his pictures have faces of exquisite beauty but in most of them notwithstanding the fact that they are evidently painted from Florentine girls of the time Botticelli has infused his own personal note of sadness at the end of the fifteenth century when Botticelli was beginning to grow old great events took place in Florence despite the revival of learning we are told by historians that the church was becoming corrupt and the people more pleasure loving and less interested in the religious life then it was that Savonarola a friar in one of the convents of Florence all on fire with enthusiasm for purity and goodness and to awaken the hearts of the people with his burning eloquence and his denunciations of their worldliness and the deadness of the church he prophesied a great outpouring of the wrath of God and in particular that the church would be purified and renewed after a quick and terrible punishment the passion the conviction the eloquence of Savonarola for a time carried the people of Florence away and Botticelli with them but he became one of the mourners as the preacher's followers were called at this time many persons burnt in great bonfires of vanities all the pretty trinkets that they possessed but when the prophecies did not literally come true and the people began to be weary of Savonarola's vehemence we read that a reaction set in which afforded a chance for his enemies within the church whom he had lashed with his tongue from the pulpit of the cathedral they contrived to have him tried for heresy and burnt in the marketplace of Florence in the midst of the people who so shortly before had hung on every word that fell from his lips this tragedy entirely overwhelmed Botticelli who thenceforward almost abandoned painting and gave up his last years to the practices of the religious life it was at this time, says Mr. Horn and under the influence of these emotions in the year 1500 when he was sixty years of age that he painted the picture here reproduced as an illustration to the prophecies of Savonarola and a tribute to his memory Savonarola had been want to use the descriptions in the book of revelations of the woes that were to fall upon the earth before the building of the new Jerusalem to illustrate his prophecy of the scourge that was to come upon Italy before the church became purified from the wickedness of the times at the top of the picture is written in Greek I, Sandro, painted this picture at the end of the year 1500 during the troubles of Italy in the half-year after the first year of the loosing of the devil for three and a half years in accordance with the fulfillment of the eleventh chapter of the revelations of St. John then shall the devil be chained to the second chapter and we shall see him trodden down as in the picture the devil which was loosed for three and a half years stood for the stage of wickedness through which Botticelli believed that Florence was passing in 1500 in the bottom corners of the picture you can see minute little devils running away discomforted otherwise all is pure joy and peace symbolic of the gladness to come upon Italy when life is difficult I dream of how the angels dance in heaven of how the angels dance and sing in gardens of eternal spring because their sins have been forgiven and never more for them shall be the terrors of mortality when life is difficult I dream of how the angels dance in heaven by Lady Alfred Douglas that is what Botticelli dreamed he saw the beautiful angels in green, white and red dancing with joy because of the birth of their saviour and into their hands he put scrolls upon which were written glory to God in the highest the rest of the verse peace and goodwill towards men is on the scrolls of the shepherds brought by the angel to behold the babe lying in the manger the three men embraced with such eagerness and joy by the three angels in the foreground are Savonarola and his two chief companions burnt with him suffering upon earth have found reward and happiness in heaven such is the meaning of this beautiful little picture as spiritual in idea as any of the paintings of the 13th and 14th centuries but while the earlier painters had striven with inadequate powers to express the religious feeling that was in them Botticelli's skill matched his thought his drawing of the angels in their Greek dresses is very lovely and one scarce nose in any picture a group surpassing that of the three little ones upon the roof of the manger nor will you soon see a lovelier virgin's face than hers Botticelli had great power of showing the expression in a face and the movement in a figure here the movements may seem overstrained a fault which grew upon him in his old age the angel with the two shepherds on the right has come skimming over the ground and points emphatically at the babe and the angel in front embraces Savonarola with vehemence the artists of the early Renaissance had learned with so much trouble to draw figures in motion that their pleasure in their newly acquired skills sometimes made them err by exaggeration as their predecessors by stiffness the way in which Botticelli treated this subject of the nativity of Christ is, as you see, very different from the way in which Hubert van Eyck painted the three Marie's at the sepulcher we saw how the latter pictured the event as actually taking place outside Jerusalem to Botticelli the nativity of Christ was emblematic of a new and happier life for people in Florence with the church regenerated and purified as Christ would have wished it to be to him the nativity was a symbol of purity so he painted the picture as a commentary on the event not as an illustration of the biblical text the angels rejoice in heaven as the shepherds upon earth the devils flee away discomforted and Savonarola and his companions obtain peace after the tribulations of life such was the message of Botticelli in the picture here reproduced End of Chapter 5 Read by Kara Schellenberg on March 20, 2008 in San Diego, California Chapter 6 Raphael This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org The Book of Art for Young People by Agnes Ethel Conway and Sir Martin Conway The painting discussed in this chapter is The Night's Dream by Raphael Chapter 6 Raphael The picture is very small, only 7 inches square, yet I hope it will instantly appeal to you The name of the artist, Raphael is perhaps the most familiar of all the names of the old masters mainly, it may be, because he was the painter of the Sistine Madonna the best known and best loved of Madonna's When Raphael drew and painted this picture of The Night's Dream about the year 1500 he was himself like a young knight of his short and brilliant career As a boy he was handsome, gifted, charming His nature is said to have been as lovely as his gifts were great and he passed his short life in a triumphant progress from city to city and court to court, always working hard and always painting so beautifully that he won the admiration of artists princes and popes His father, Giovanni Santi was a painter living in the town of Urbino in central Italy Raphael, when quite young, went to Perugia to study with the painter Perugino a native of that town Perugia stands upon a high hill like the hill in the background of the picture of The Night's Dream, only higher for from it you can overlook the wide Umbrian plain as far as Assisi the home of St. Francis which lies on the slope of the next mountain that beautiful Umbrian landscape in which all the towns look like castles perched upon the top of steep hills with wide undulating ground between occurs frequently in the pictures of Perugino and often in those of his pupil Raphael If you have once seen the view from Perugia for yourself, you will realize how strongly it took hold of the imagination of the young painter Raphael had a most impressionable mind it was part of his genius that from every painter with whom he came in contact he imbibed the best almost without knowing it The artists of his day, Michelangelo Leonardo da Vinci and the other great men were each severally employed in working out once and for all some particular problem in connection with their art Michelangelo, a giant in intellect, painter, sculptor architect and poet studied the human body as it had not been studied since the days of ancient Greece His sculptured figures on the tombs of the Medici of Florence ranked second only to those of the greatest Greek sculptors and his ceiling in the Sistine Chapel is composed of a series of masterpieces of figure painting He devoted himself largely in his sculpture and his painting to the representation of the naked human body and made it futile in his successors to plead ignorance as an excuse for bad drawing As a colorist he was not preeminent and his few panel pictures are for the most part unfinished Leonardo da Vinci, the older contemporary of Raphael, first in Florence and afterwards in the north of Italy left a colossal reputation and but few pictures for in his search after perfection he became dissatisfied with what he had done and is said to have destroyed one masterpiece after another For him the great interest in the aspect of man and woman was not so much the form of the body as the expression of the face What was fantastic and weird fascinated him At Windsor are designs he made for the construction of an imaginary beast with gigantic claws He once owned a lizard and made wings for it with quicksilver inside them so that they quivered when the lizard crawled He put a dragon's mask over its head and the result was ghastly The tale gives us a sidelight on this extraordinary personage When you are led to read more about him you will feel the fascination of his strong yet perplexing personality The faces in his pictures are wonderful faces with a fugitive mocking smile and a seeming burden of strange thought By mastery of the most subtle gradations of light his heads have an appearance of solidity new in painting till Raphael and some of his contemporaries learnt the secret from Leonardo Here to fore Italian painters had been contented to bathe their pictures in a flood of diffused light and experimented also with effects of strong light and shade on the face His landscape backgrounds are in almost unearthly cold gray and include the strangest forms of rock and mountain His investigations into several of the scientific problems connected with art led to results which affected in an important degree the work of many later artists If Raphael had less originality than Michelangelo or Leonardo If Leonardo was the first artist to obtain complete mastery over the expression of the face and Michelangelo over the drawing of the figure Raphael was able to profit at once by whatever they accomplished Yet never was he a mere imitator for all that he absorbed became tinged with a magical charm in his fertile brain a charm so personal that his work can hardly be mistaken for that of any other artist Our picture of a knight's dream was probably painted while Raphael was under the influence of a master named Timoteo Viti whose works you are not likely to know or much care about when you see them It was just after he had painted it that he came into Perugino's hands Although the knight's dream is so small and Raphael was but a boy when he painted it the picture has the true romantic air characteristic of the joyful years of the early Renaissance He does not seem to have felt the conflict between the old religious ideal and the new pursuit of worldly beauty as Botticelli felt it Yet he chose the competition of these two ideals as the subject of this picture The knight, clothed in bright armor and gay raiment, bearing no relation at all to the clothes worn in 1500 rests upon his shield beneath the slight shade of a very slender tree In his dream there appear to him two figures both of whom claim his nightly life One, a young and lovely girl in a bright-colored dress with flowers in her hair tempts him to embrace a life of mirth of jest and youthful jollity quips and cranks and wanton wiles nods and becks and wreathed smiles The other resembles the same poets pensive nun, devout and pure sober, steadfast and demure She holds sword and book symbols of stern action and wise accomplishment Which the knight will choose we are not told perhaps because Raphael himself never had to make the choice He was too gifted and too fond of work to be tempted from it by anything whatever Always joyous and always successful he was able to paint any subject sacred, profane, ancient or modern so long as it was a happy one He was too busy and too gay to feel pain and sorrow he felt them and to paint sad subjects to him the visible world was good and beautiful and the invisible world lovely and happy likewise His Madonna's are placid or smiling mothers The fat and darling babies they hold are indeed divine but not awesome Yet the extraordinary sweetness of expression, nobility of form and beauty of coloring in the Madonna's make you almost hold your breath when you look at them In the night stream there is a simple beauty in the pose and grouping of the figures You can hardly fancy three figures better arranged for the purpose of the subject There is something inevitable about them which is the highest praise due to a mastery of design in the art of composition Raphael's surpassing gift was in fitting beautiful figures into any given space so that it seems as though the space had been made to fit the figures to fit the space You could never put his round Madonna's into a square frame The figures would look as wrong as in a round frame they look right If you were to cut off a bit of the foreground in any of his pictures and add the extra piece to the sky you would make the whole look wrong whereas perhaps you might add on a piece of sky to Hubert van Eyck's Three Marie's without spoiling the effect The coloring of the picture too is jewel like and lovely but the uncolored drawing is itself full of charm The grace of line which was to distinguish all the works of his mature years is already manifest in this effort of his boyhood It seems to foretell the sweep of the Virgin's drapery in the Sistine Madonna and the delightful maze of curves flowing together and away again and returning upon themselves which outline the face, the arms hands and draperies of St. Catherine in the National Gallery You will find it well worth a little trouble to look long and closely at one of Raphael's well-known Madonna's till you clearly see how the composition of all the parts of it is formed by the play of long and graceful curves You can see from the drawing of the Night's Dream which is hung quite near the painting in the National Gallery how carefully Raphael thought out the detail of the picture before he began to paint He seems even to have been afraid he might not be able to draw it again so perfectly therefore he placed the drawing over the panel and pricked it through The marks of the pin are quite clear and it brings one nearer this great artist to follow closely the process of his work It makes the young boy genius of 1500 almost seem akin to the struggling boy and girl artists of the present time From Perugia Raphael went to Florence where he painted a number of his most beautiful Madonna's Then in 1508 he was called to Rome by Pope Julius II to decorate some rooms in the Vatican Palace The Renaissance Popes were possessed of so great wealth and spent it to such purpose that its spending influenced the art of their age Many of the rooms in the Vatican had been decorated by Botticelli and other good artists of the previous half-century but already the new Pope considered their work out of date and was placed by Michelangelo and Raphael For nine years Raphael worked at the decoration of the palace always being pressed, hurried and even worried by two successive Popes who employed him The wall spaces which he had to fill were often awkwardly broken up with windows and doors but he easily overcame whatever difficulties were encountered To succeed, apparently, without struggle was a peculiar gift granted to Raphael above any other artist of his day The frescoes painted by him in the Vatican illustrated subjects from Greek philosophy and medieval church history as well as from the Old and New Testament As an illustrator of sacred writ he never attempted that verisimilitude in eastern surroundings to which Hubert van Eyck leaned neither was he satisfied with the dress of his own day in which other painters were want to cloth their sacred characters The historical sense which has driven some modern artists to much antiquarian research to discover exactly what Peter and Paul must have worn did not exist before the 19th century Raphael felt, nevertheless that the clothes of the Renaissance were hardly suitable for Noah and Abraham so he invented a costume of his own founded upon Roman dress but different from oriental or contemporary clothes The scripture illustrations of Raphael most familiar to you may probably be his cartoon designs for tapestry in the South Kensington Museum which were bought by Charles I In these you can see what is meant about the clothes but you will not be surprised at them because the same have been adopted by the majority of Bible illustrators ever since the days of Raphael His pictures became so popular that it was thought whatever he did must be right The dress was a mere detail in his work but it was easy to copy and it has been copied persistently from that day to this It is curious to think that the long white robes which Christ wears in the illustrations of our present day Sunday school books and other religious publications are all due to imitation of Raphael's designs The first room he finished for Julius II was so rich in effect and beautiful in color that the pope could scarcely wait for more rooms as fine Raphael had to call in a number of assistants to enable him to cover the walls fast enough to please the pope and the quality of the work began to deteriorate The uneven merit of his frescoes foretold the consequence of overwork despite his matchless facility and power But in his panel pictures when he was not hurried his work continued to improve until he reached his crowning achievement in the Sistine Madonna painted three years before his death Raphael was 37 and when he died in 1520 and very far from coming to the end of his powers of learning Each picture that he painted revealed to him new difficulties to conquer and new experiments to try in his art We seem compelled to think that had he lived and labored for another score of years the history of painting in Italy might have been different In Rome and Florence no successor attempted to improve upon his work His pupils and assistants were more numerous than those of any other painter but when they had obtained some of his facility of drawing and painting they were contented None of them had Raphael's genius yet all wished to paint like him so that for the following 50 years Rome and Florence and southern Italy were flooded with inferior Raphael-esque paintings which tended to become more slip-shot in execution as time went on and more devoid of any personal note It was just as though his imitators had learnt to write beautifully and then had had little to say Leonardo da Vinci died a few months before Raphael Several of his pupils were artists of ability and lived to carry on his traditions of painting in the north of Italy Leonardo himself had been so erratic produced so little and so few of his pictures survived that many know him best in his pupils' work in the copies and engravings of his great Last Supper a picture that became an almost total wreck upon the walls of the refectory in Milan for which it was painted His influence upon his contemporaries at Milan was very great so that during some years hardly a picture was painted there which did not show a likeness to the work of Leonardo He had created a type of female beauty all his own The face will impress itself upon your memory the first time you see it a picture by Leonardo or in one by a pupil You can see it in the National Gallery in the great Madonna of the Rocks and in the magnificent drawing at Burlington House It is not a very beautiful face but it haunts the memory and the Milanese artists of Leonardo's day never threw off their recollection of it With far less power than Leonardo one of his imitators Bernardino Luini painted pictures in simplicity that almost everyone finds them delightful If you could see his picture of the angels bearing St. Catherine, robed in red through the air to her last resting place upon the hill you would feel the beauty and peace of his gentle nature revealed in his art But the spell of Leonardo vanished with the death of those who had known him in life The last of his pupils died in 1550 and with him the Leonardo School of Painting came to an end There is one more painter belonging to the full renaissance too famous to remain entirely unmentioned This is Correggio a painter affected also by the pictures of Raphael and Leonardo but individual in his vision and his work He passed his life in Parma in the north of Italy inheriting a north Italian tradition and hearing only echoes of the world beyond His canvases are thronged with fair shapes and dancing children ethereally soft and lovely But it is in his native town that the angels soar aloft with the virgin in the dome of the cathedral and the children frolic on the walls of the convent These are his masterpieces you would like best In 1550 the impetus given to painting in Italy by the renaissance was drawing to an end The great central epoch may be said to have terminated in Tuscany a few years after the deaths of Leonardo and Raphael in 1520 But we have said nothing yet of Venice where, in 1520 artists whose visions and whose record of them were to be as wonderful as those of Botticelli and Raphael were as yet sleeping in their cradles End of Chapter 6 Read by Kara Schellenberg on March 21st, 2008 in San Diego, California