The Painter's Art [pp. 313-324]

THE PA INTER'S ART.
ceived with well-proportioned forms built upon a substantial
framework of anatomical truth.
To Nicola Pisano succeeded his brother Andrea, who advanced the art still further. He ornamented the church of San
Giovanni, at Florence, with statues and reliefs, and he it was who
executed the oldest of those beautiful bronze doors of the Baptistery, which served as a model for all that is excellent, difficult, or beautiful in those made subsequently by Ghiberti.
From the Pisan school, and from Sienna as well, the new
impulse rapidly spread. The only indications, in painting, of
these early tendencies toward a better style of art are to be
found in the works of certain miniature-painters, illuminators
of missas, chiefly monks, who became somewhat skilled in the
use of color.
The advance in sculpture was followed by improvements in
mosaic, a process of art in which glass and stones of various
colors are employed for pictorial purposes. The walls, ceilings,
and pavements of early cathedrals were chiefly decorated by this
means, which afterwards gave place to fresco for mural decoration.
With the birth of Cimabue, in I240, a new epoch was in store
for painting, for he it was who first unfolded the true powers of
this art which arrived at perfection in the sixteenth century, and
which placed painting at the head of the arts as an expressive
language of sensible forms. With Cimabue and his Florentine
successors painting rapidly developed as a fine art. Cimabue
rapidly outgrew his Greek instructors; he discarded their practice of adhering stupidly to traditional types without in any
way endeavoring to better or perfect them. By consulting
nature he attempted to vary his forms and to give expression
to his heads.
At this time pictorial art was chiefly confined to mural
paintings in fresco. Panels were sometimes used for altar-pieces,
prepared with a surface of gypsum, which practice was continued until the invention of oil-painting, by John Van Eyck,
in I4Io-Cimabue was born about a century and a half previous
to this. The process of painting on a surface of lime, which afforded a smooth, white, absorbent ground, was termed tempera;
the colors were applied with gums. The process commonly
3I5