desire to enter into conversation with the beholder. It still remained, however, to give ideal beauty to the figure, fulness to design, and harmony to colouring, a true method to aerial perspective, variety to composition, and freedom to the pencil, which on the whole was still timid. Every circumstance conspired to this melioration of the art in Florence as well as in other places. The taste for magnificent edifices had revived throughout Italy. Many of the finest churches, many public edifices, and ducal palaces, which still remain at Milan, Mantua, and Venice, in Urbino, Rimini, Pesaro, and Ferrara, were executed about this period; not to mention those buildings in Florence and in Rome, where magnificence contended with elegance. It became necessary to ornament them, and this produced that noble emulation among artists, that grand fermentation of ideas, which invariably advances the progress of art. The study of poetry, so analogous to that of painting, had increased to a degree which conferred on the whole age the epithet of Golden; a name which it certainly did not merit on the score of more severe studies. The design of the artists of that period, though something dry, was yet pure and correct, and afforded the best instruction to the succeeding age. It is very justly observed, that scholars can more easily give a certain fulness to the meagre outline of their models, than curtail the superfluity of a heavy contour. On this account, some professors of the art are inclined to believe, that it would be much more advantageous to habituate students in the beginning, to the precision characteristic of the fifteenth century, than to the exuberance introduced in after-times. Such circumstances produced the happiest era that distinguishes the annals of painting. The schools of Italy, owing to mutual imitation, before that period strongly resembled each other; but having then attained maturity, each began to display a marked and peculiar character.
That of the Florentine school I shall describe in the next Epoch; but I first propose to treat of several other arts analogous to that of painting, and in particular of engraving upon copper, the discovery of which is ascribed to Florence. To this the art is indebted for an accession of new aids; the work of an artist, before confined to a single spot, was diffused through the world, and gratified the eyes of thousands.
[61] "The number of artists of whom, by consulting old authors, I can collect nothing more than the time they lived, their name and occupation, and their death, (I speak of those who lived about the year 1300,) amounts in the city of Florence alone to nearly a hundred, without including those who have been discovered and noticed by some of our antiquarians; and exclusive of those we find mentioned in the old book of the Society of Painters." (See Baldinucci in Notizie del Gioggi.) The Florentine painters of this age, whose names have been produced by the Canon Moreni from the records of the diplomatic archive, may be seen in part the fourth of his Notizie Istoriche, p. 102. Others have been collected and communicated to me by the Abbate Vincenzo Follini, Librarian to the Magliabecchi collection, extracted from various MSS. of the same, besides those from the Novelle Litterarie of Florence, from the Delizie de' Letter. of the P. Ildefonso, C. S. and from the Viaggi of Targioni; works which will always be found to supply the brevity of the present history.
[62] Vasari.
[63] They are believed to be anterior to the year 1300 by the historian of the art of Painting at Friuli; but to this I cannot agree. The pictures bear a very great resemblance to the designs of Orcagna; or rather to the poetry of Dante, who, in the year above mentioned, feigns to have had his vision, and described it in the years immediately succeeding. In confirmation of this opinion, it must be remarked that the style is Florentine, and induces us to suppose that a painter of that school must have been there. See Lettera postuma del P. Cortinovis sopra le Antichità di Sesto, published in the Giornale Veneto, (or Memorie per servire all' Istoria Letter. e Civile) Semestre ii. p. 1. of the year 1800. It was reprinted at Udine in 1801, in octavo, with some excellent notes by the Cav. Antonio Bartolini, who has distinguished himself by other productions connected with bibliography and the fine arts.
[64] Vide Giuseppe Maria Mecatti, who has given an exact description of it.
[65] Vasari is by no means so bitter against the Venetian school as it is wished to make him appear. In regard to these pictures he declares, "that they are universally admitted, with justice, to be the best which were produced among many excellent masters, at different times, in that place." They are, therefore, preferred by him to the whole of the Florentine and Siennese paintings there exhibited; and his opinion is authorized by that of P. della Valle, who frequently differs from him. If it could be proved from history, as it may be reasonably conjectured, that Antonio was a painter when he came from Venice, and did not commence his art at Florence, he would merit the reputation of being the greatest artist of that school known to us; as well as of having conferred some benefit upon that of Florence, from the Venetian school. But this point is very doubtful.
[66] We cannot reconcile it to dates that Paolo Uccello was one of his scholars, having been born after the death of Antonio, if, indeed, there be not some error in regard to the chronology either of the master or of his pupil. Starnina might have been his pupil, as he is said to have been born in 1354; and, therefore, in 1370, he might possibly be one of his school. Yet it appears that Antonio had then renounced the easel. In his epitaph we find written:
Annis qui fueram pictor Juvenilibus, artis Me Medicæ reliquo tempore cœpit amor, &c.
(See Vasari ed. Senese, tom. ii. p. 297.)
[67] The old painters varied the manner of their superscriptions, even in the following ages, according to the taste of the Greeks. Sebastianus Venetus pingebat a. 1520; is written upon a St. Agatha in the Palazzo Pitti; and this corresponds to the ΕΠΟΙΕΙ, faciebat; by which the Greek sculptors wished to convey, that such work was not intended to exhibit their last effort; so that they were at liberty to improve it when they pleased. The subscription of Opus Belli is obvious, and similar ones, drawn from the ΕΡΓΟΝ, (for example,) ΛΥΣΡΡΟΥ which we see in Maffei. I recount in my fifth book as singular, the epigraph Sumus Rogerii manus; it is, however, derived from the Greeks, who, for instance, sometimes wrote ΧΕΙΡ. ΑΜΒΡΟΣΙΟΥ. ΜΟΝΑΧΟΥ, as I read in a Fabrianese church called Della Carità, where there is a picture of the General Judgment; the figures very small, and highly finished, upon a large tablet; with, I think, more figures than are seen in the Paradise of Tintoretto. ΧΕΙΡ ΒΙΤΟΡΕ, was written by Vittor Carpaccio, under his portrait cited in the index. I omit other forms better known. That adopted at Trevigi, Hieronymus Tarvisio, is very erudite; and it is imitated from the military latercoli, in which, with the same view, the soldier and his country are named. In short, where the words fecit or pinxit are not used, the best plan was that of giving the proper name in the genitive case at the foot of the picture, as the engravers of Greek gems were wont to do in inscriptions, as ΑΥΛΟΥ ΔΙΟΣΚΟΡΙΔΟΥ, &c.
[68] Pascoli, tom. i. p. 199.
[69] Vasari.
[70] Verona Illustrata, tom. iii. p. 277.
[71] Gloria is a name given in Italy to a representation of the celestial regions.
[72] Vasari.
