'Pantheon Books German Illumination. Volume L, Carolingian. Volume I i..
Ottonian. 'By Adolph Goldschmidt. (£9 9s.)—Spanish Romanesque Sculpture. By A. Kingsley Porter. 2 Vols. (19 98.)—The Drawings of G. B. Tiepolo. By Motley Baron von Hadeln. 2 Vols.—Giovanni Plsano : His Life and Work. By Adolfo Venturi. (£6 68.)---Florentine Painting of the Trecento. By Pietro Toesco. (£6 6s. North Italian Painting of the Ginquecento : Piedmont, Liguria, Lombardy, Emilia. By Corrado Ricid. (£4 l 4s. 6d. ) (The Pegasus Press, Paris.) THESE splendid books are fashioned on the same model, but not.too rigidly. In all of them the plates are the thing : they are admirably reproduced, and include details, in many cases specially photographed for the work. The plates again are comfortably associated—generally by a running rubric— with the text, which is concise and scholarly. The learning and research reposing behind the relatively brief letterpress are indicated in the Notes, which in Mr. Kingsley Porter's volumes run to over sixty pages without being excessive. Each work has its adequate tables and index. All of them are exa mples of the book beautiful yet serviceable.
The division of miniatures as " Carolingian " and " Ottonian " in Dr. Goldschmidt's two volumes must not be regarded too strictly. The beginnings of the periods are clearly marked by the work of Charlemagne at the end of the eighth century and the revival of learning in the monasteries toward the close of the reign of Otto I., but at the end the line of demarcation is less marked, as the influence of certain schools continues for several decades. But the distinction serves, and it closes the survey with the eleventh century. The earliest of the miniatures Dr. Goldschmidt connects with Treves and Salzburg, and an Anglo-Saxon and Irish influence, itself derived from the 'East and Italy. In the Carolingian we find two main schools developing in the ninth and tenth centuries, between which the other methods of figure design and drawing of the style fluctuate. One is the Ada school, so called because of its stylistic associations with the manuscript preserved at Treves, a present from Ada, who is supposed to have been a sister of Charlemagne. The other, the Palace school, derives its name more remotely from the Gospels preserved in Vienna together with the Imperial insignia, and supposed to have come into existence in the neighbourhood of the palace of Aix-la-Chapelle. The latter is a pictorial style of painting approaching the antique ; in the Ada group the Syrian influence is evident, and there are other sources in the ornamentation, including Irish ; and Dr. Goldschmidt discusses their localization and charac- teristics very fully. In his Ottonian volume he reaches a period when we can speak of a German art and of a German style, and in the history of this art the most prominent place is assigned to the scriptorium in the monastery of Reichenau, to the productions emanating from which and its radiating influence the author gives much space. The first volume is illustrated with eighty-eight plates, and the second with 112.
A page or two on Spanish illumination occur in the course of Mr. Kingsley Porter's erudite argument for the tradition of sculpture, far from having been interrupted from the sixth to the eleventh centuries, continuing from Antiquity to Ito-, manesque times, and it is to work in stone before 1100 that
the first of his taro valorises, With (most -of) its sixty4wo plates, is devoted. His second, with a hundred or so plates, deals with the comparatively well-chartered waters of- the twelfth century, though its most interesting chapter, on the wooden image of the Volto Santo of Lucca, suggesting for it a Catalan origin, has to do with a monument of eleventh century art. The whole work is a contribution of packed, exact scholarship to extremely difficult problems.
The two volumes of Drawings by G. B. Tiepolo are the nsore welcome that examples so finely reproduced as here are rarely available. The selection, some 200 in number, illustrates the amazing resources as designer and draughtsman of one whose claim to be the greatest artist of his Century is easily main-
tained. his been made from• widely dispersed material, but was notably depried access to the all .important Sartori° collection,: sent by the Austrian authorities during the. War for sate custody. from Trieste to Laibach, " where it is still unaccountably detained to-day by the Jugo-Siav Govern- ment." We hear also of the jealousy of a distinguished collector of the old school, to whom the idea was intolerable that the objects of his collector's zeal should be made accessible by reproduction to a wider public. Fortunately, drawings in :Pen with wash so brilliantly represented in his cabinet can be studied adequately elsewhere—those of the former Orloff col- Jection are cases in point—while the Print Room at Stuttgart and the collection ofDr. Hans Wendhend at Lugano, for example, supply examples in chalk and red chalk, studies most of them ',for the frescoes at Wilrzburg. The brief Introduction, which leaves this splendid series of plates to speak for themselves, remarks on the curious distribution of the :drawings, leaving 'a niggardly 'supply among the old leading collections, the Uffizi, the Louvre; the. Albertina, the British Museum, and the like—the reflection of a lack of appreciation of Tiepolo's powers by his contemporaries as well as of nineteenth century taste.
In his volume on Giovanni Pisani), Professor Adolfo Venturi for the first time treats exhaustively of the work of this artist, *which can- be regarded as the most perfect expression of 'Italian sculpture during the latter part of the t century and the beginning of the fourteenth. There are page or two on his life, about which the documents little light, and fifty on his art, in close relation with the plates, details many of them. Giovanni was the son Nicola D'Apulia, who represents the final fruition of R art, and carried forward his work, and here we have illuminating book on the two men, father and son, w genius is consecrated in one of the most interesting pia in Italy, the Piazza del Duomo at Pisa.
There remain among these Pantheon Books two volumes a two periods of Italian Art, Florentine Painting of the MCC% and North Italian Painting of the Cinquecento. Professcs Toesco's necessarily resolves itself into a study of the art Giotto, which is illustrated in a full half of the 119 pla and the painters in relationship with him, while ru through it are pointers to an individuality, the very nature the Florentine genius, which marked Florentine art for three hundred years from the beginning of the fourteenth century The author emphasizes the importance of the frescoes on Life of St. Francis at Assisi to an understanding of Giotto's development. The delicate and gracious Luini, Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, called " Sodoma," and Gaudenzio Ferran, more varied and of greater dramatic power than the first, MOM fertile in invention and of a greater skill in composition than the second, are the chief figures in Signor Ricci's volume, until we come to Correggio, free, joyous, full of fancy, express. ing the physical exuberance of Emilia and the pleasure-loving and open-hearted nature of its people, to whom he devotes a dozen glowing pages. This volume is illustrated with eighty. four plates of the admirable quality of the others.
Previous page
