chapter XVII

, Fra Damiano of Bergamo, a pupil of the same Venetian

school from which proceeded Fra Giovanni of Verona, executed at S. Domenico in Bologna a series of works in tarsia that represent the furthest development in a pictorial direction that the craft ever attained.

[Illustration:

PLATE XVI

EXAMPLE OF TARSIA WORK

S. Zenobi, by Giuliano da Majano, in Opera del Duomo, Florence ]

Of this display however Dr Scherer aptly writes (p. 80) that, ‘whoever demands from wood an effect similar to that of a picture, sets it in ignorance of its nature to tasks that are beyond its capabilities, and constrains material and technique to exaggerated efforts which are contradictory to their character. This is the fundamental error that clings to all the works of the much-belauded Fra Damiano and is calculated seriously to obscure his greatness.’ The development of tarsia work was in the direction of pictorial effects. Though purely decorative patterns of a geometrical or conventional kind were always used, they tended as the art advanced to be confined to borders and subsidiary parts of a design, while the principal fields were pictorially treated. The introduction of perspectives naturally led to the accentuation of the third dimension of objects, and in still-life compositions modelling and shading were deemed essential. The human figure, the use of which increased greatly as the fifteenth century advanced, was given its plastic roundness which it was assuming in the contemporary frescoes. Conventional leafage, etc., was no longer treated for the effect of a mere flat pattern. In the latter part of the century the figure work of Giuliano da Majano shows how far in this direction the art could be carried while still preserving its sincerity as a mosaic of natural woods. In this work the utmost advantage is taken of the varieties shown by woods in colour and texture, without dependence on artificial colouring matters, and those pictorial refinements over which Vasari sings his usual paean, but which really prefigure the decline of the art. A close examination of a specimen of Giuliano’s inlays of about 1470–80, such as the S. Zenobi now in the Opera del Duomo at Florence (see Plate XVI), shows extraordinary skill and patience in the laborious work. The outlines are marked by thin strips of black wood; the staff which the Saint holds in his hand, though it is not half-an-inch broad, is modelled in light and shade with no fewer than six parallel strips of wood varying in light and dark. The hands are carefully modelled in inlays. The mouth of the figure on the right of the Saint has one piece for the upper lip and a lighter piece for the lower in which the two lights on the lobes are let in with separate pieces. The shadow between the lips and the light on the lower edge of the lower lip are inserted with strips of dark and light tinted wood. In one of the most interesting works of the da Majano brothers, the two portrait figures of Dante and Petrarch, on the door leading into the Sala d’ Udienza in the Palazzo Vecchio at Florence, the face of the older poet is deeply furrowed, and in order to prevent the inlaid streaks appearing too hard and ‘liney’ they are made up of an infinite number of little morsels of wood the size and shape of millet grains, each one glued down into its place. Such work impresses the spectator by its sincerity and earnestness as well as by its technical mastery.

The use of artificial colouring matters, over and above the burning which was the first device employed to give an effect of shading in special places, destroys for us this aspect of sincerity. The material is no longer allowed to express itself in its own character, and taste revolts from the work as it does from tapestry in which pigments have been used to give details for which stitches should in the theory of the work suffice. The case is different from that of the coloured wax medallions noticed ante, p. 188 f., where the scale is so small, and the detailed representation of nature so essential a part of the work, that waxes coloured in the piece could hardly be made to avail.

THE STAINED GLASS WINDOW.

[§ 101, _Stained Glass Windows, their Origin and History_, ante, p. 265.]

This is not a specially Italian form of the decorative art, but belongs rather to France and north-western Europe. A proof of this may be found in the fact that in 1436 the Florentines have to send for a worker in glass from Lübeck in Germany to make windows for their Duomo (Gaye, _Carteggio_, II, 441 f.), while at the beginning of the next century Pope Julius II summons French _verriers_ to supply coloured windows for the Vatican (see ante, p. 266, note). The art was differently regarded north and south of the Alps, and Vasari in his account of it gives, in § 102, the tradition of the northern schools, but lets us see at the same time, in § 101, how the Italians were accustomed to envisage the craft.

There is accordingly in his treatment a confusion between two distinct ideals of the art, one traditional and northern, the other congenial to an Italian painter of the sixteenth century. According to the first ideal of the art, that on which it was founded and nurtured north of the Alps, it depended for its effect upon coloured glass, that is upon the varied tints of pieces of glass stained in the mass with metallic oxides, and called by the moderns ‘pot-metal.’ These different coloured pieces were so arranged and so treated as to give the appearance of figures or ornaments, and to this extent the effect was pictorial, but such a window would depend for its beauty far more on the sumptuous display of coloured light than on any delineation of figures or objects.

The sort of window which would present itself to the Italian of the Renaissance, as representing his ideal of the art, is rather a transparent picture painted on glass, in which delineation is the chief part of the effect. This is the view that Vasari has in mind, when, in § 101, he insists on transparency in the glass employed. The old glass worker of Chartres or the Sainte Chapelle would hardly have known what to do with transparent uncoloured glass, for this, save in pearl borders, was not an element with which he worked. Vasari however starts with the idea of clear glass and imagines it coloured in such a way as to produce a transparent picture. There were two methods for this colouring. The only satisfactory one was to paint in transparent enamel colours which were afterwards burnt in on to the glass. This was a process specially developed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Flanders, whence it was probably introduced into Italy.

The other method was to employ transparent pigments, such as were used for ordinary painting, and to fix them on the glass by means of gum or varnish. This method is of course a mere _pis aller_ to which no self-respecting worker in glass would like to have recourse, and must be regarded as merely a cheap imitation of true glass-painting in enamel colours. That is to say, it did not _precede_, as Vasari suggests in § 101, but followed as an imitation, the development of true enamel painting. That the two processes were in use in Italy in Vasari’s time is shown by a contract printed by Gaye, _Carteggio_, II, 446, in which certain windows to be executed at Arezzo in 1478 are to be ‘_cotte al fuoco_,’ ‘burned in the fire,’ and not merely to have the colours ‘_messi a olio_,’ ‘laid on in oil paint.’

The earlier glass workers of the palmy days of the craft, from the twelfth to the fourteenth century, in France, England, Flanders, or Germany, aimed at different effects altogether, and their technique is explained by Vasari in § 102, (ante, p. 268), where the whole character of the work envisaged differs from the painted work previously in contemplation. As is indicated in a footnote to the text, the description of the work, which starts it will be noticed with ‘bits of red, yellow, blue, and white glass,’ not with a clear pane, is almost exactly what we find in Theophilus, though a little less simple, and represents the early tradition of the mediaeval masters. Their work was the development of an Early Christian technique. Coloured glass, which it must be remembered is really easier to procure than glass perfectly clear, was first used in little rounds or squares for insertion in the holes pierced in marble or plaster slabs that filled window openings. Such window fillings are to be seen in mosques and Byzantine churches. The next stage was a mosaic of pieces of coloured glass arranged on a certain scheme and perhaps displaying geometrical patterns. No specimens of early windows of this kind seem to have survived, but they are referred to in contemporary documents, as in the _Liber Pontificalis_, where it is said that Leo III, 795–816, in Old St. Peter’s, ‘fenestras de apsida ex vitro diversis coloribus conclusit.’ It is not clear whether such mosaics, or something more pictorial, is referred to by Abbot Gozbert of Tegernsee about the year 1000 A.D. as ‘_discoloria picturarum vitra_,’ but about this same epoch we find it stated of Archbishop Adalberon of Reims, who died in 989 A.D., that he supplied his church with ‘_fenestris diversas continentibus historias_,’ which certainly implies something more than the kaleidoscope effect of a mere conjunction of coloured pieces. Theophilus, whose treatment of the process shows that it was fully established at the time of his writing, say about 1100 A.D., makes it clear wherein the innovation consisted. The new invention was that of a pigment, of a brown colour when fused, with which could be painted any details or shading required for representing the forms of objects. A mere patch of pale flesh-coloured glass the shape of a face would tell nothing, but when the features, the locks of the hair, and the like, were painted in with this pigment then the patch became a human countenance. In the same way a piece of red or blue glass with some lines and shading on it became a garment, and so on with the representation in a simple and summary fashion of the objects necessary to constitute the sort of pictorial representation suitable to the technique. The coloured glass remained throughout the essential element in the effect. All the finest glass windows of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were executed with these simple media. The later history of the art shows as usual a progressive advance in the importance of the pictorial element, till by the sixteenth century coloured glass is scarcely needed, and the pictorial effect desired may be gained by fusing pigments on to clear glass, in the way Vasari contemplates in § 101 (ante, p. 267).

Of this Italian stained glass of the Renaissance period very good examples are to be seen in the Laurentian Library at Florence, and a specimen is shown on Plate XVII.

[Illustration:

PLATE XVII

PAINTED GLASS WINDOW IN THE LAURENTIAN LIBRARY, FLORENCE ]

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