Andrea Orcagna

“ Giotto died in 1336, but he left behind him to continue his work, Taddeo Gaddi, Giottino, Stefano, Andrea Orcagna, and Simon Memmi, who were{288} each destined to open out some new path in art. In the Campo Santo at Pisa we may see how great was the power of the genius of these masters, especially of Andrea Orcagna (1329-1389) , who has there represented, with an equal measure of beauty and of sombre and terrible energy, the “Dream of Life,” facing the “Triumph of Death.” ”

“ The time of his birth is not known; he died before 1361. His works are pleasing, and he especially excelled in drapery. They are not numerous, and are seen in the churches of Pisa.
But by far the most important pupil of Andrea Pisano, and, indeed, the most important Tuscan master of the end of the fourteenth century, was Andrea Arcagnuolo di Cione, commonly called Andrea Orcagna (1329-1376?) . ”

“ Francesco Talenti chose Ambrogio Lenzi, a Lombard, and Frate Filippo Riniero of S. Croce. Andrea Orcagna chose Niccolò di Beltramo, also a Lombard, and Francesco di Neri. These could not decide, and Piero di Migliore the goldsmith was taken as umpire, the parties binding themselves to abide by his decision. Giovanni di 330 Lapo Ghino and Francesco Talenti were ordered to make new designs. At length, on July 28, Orcagna's plan was chosen.
Talenti's office was no sinecure; we often find him disputing with other Masters. Indeed, the lodge greatly lacked unity. Disintegration was beginning. ”

“ It was Orcagna's habit to sign his sculpture "Andrea di Cione, painter," and his paintings "Andrea di Cione, sculptor," and thus point his versatility. By this tabernacle, by his Pisan fresco, and by the designs of the Loggia de' Lanzi and the Bigallo (which are usually given to him) , he takes his place among the most interesting and various of the forerunners of the Renaissance.
Within Or San Michele you learn the secret of the stoned-up windows which one sees with regret from without. Each, or nearly each, has an altar against it. ”

“ Rarely is a man of parts excellent in one pursuit without being able easily to learn any other, and above all any one of those that are akin to his original profession, and proceed, as it were, from one and the same source, as did the Florentine Orcagna, who was painter, sculptor, architect, and poet, as it will be told below. Born in Florence, he began while still a child to give attention to sculpture under Andrea Pisano, and pursued it for some years ”

“ And because, as it has been said, Andrea delighted in making verses and various forms of poetry, when already old he wrote some sonnets to Burchiello, then a youth; and finally, being sixty years of age, he finished the course of his life in 1389, and was borne with honour from his dwelling, which was in the Via Vecchia de' Corazzai, to his tomb.
There were many men able in sculpture and in architecture at the same time as Orcagna, of whom the names are not known, but their works are to be seen, and these are worthy of nothing but praise and commendation. ”

“ Orcagna first studied painting under his elder brother Nardo (short for Bernardo) , who was enrolled in the "company of St. Luke." But this was only one branch of Andrea's art-education. He matriculated in the Masonic Guild (Arte dei maestri di pietra e legname) , in the books of which it is written—"Andrea Cioni, called Archangel, a painter of the parish of S. Michele Visdomini, took his oath and promises in the said guild, Magister Neri 333 Fioravanti being his sponsor, in 1352, sixth indication, October 29." ”

“ Thomas Aquinas.—Strozzi Chapel, Santa Maria Novella.
Outside of Giotto’s bottega arose the rare continuers of his tradition. Such an artist flourished about the middle of the century in the person of Andrea di Cione, better known by his nickname of Orcagna. He was more of a sculptor and architect than a painter, a man of dignity and force, a poet and thinker. Although not a pupil of Giotto, he studied that master’s work admiringly, and sought to reproduce its massiveness. ”

“ The air is filled with angels and demons, some of whom receive the souls of the dead.
A second picture is The Last Judgment, and a third Hell, the resemblance between which and the great altar-piece in the Strozzi Chapel in Santa Maria Novella at Florence, painted by Andrea Orcagna in 1357, was formerly considered proof of the same authorship. They17 are now attributed to an unknown disciple of Pietro Lorenzetti, who was painting in Siena between 1306 and 1348, and is assumed to have been a pupil of Duccio. ”

“ Andrea Pisano had two sons, Nino and Tommaso—both, especially the former, sculptors of considerable ability Nino was very successful in his statues of the Madonna and Child, which are full of human feeling and soft loveliness-a perfect embodiment of the Catholic ideal of the Divine Mother. Andrea's chief pupil was Andrea di Cione, better known as Orcagna (q.v.) ”

“ It has long been the custom to attribute to Orcagna some of the most important frescoes in the Campo Santo at Pisa; but it is so doubtful whether he worked there that I shall not speak of them. His father was a goldsmith, and Orcagna first studied his father’s craft; he was also an architect, sculptor, mosaist, and poet, as well as a painter. He made an advance in color and in the painting of atmosphere that gives him high rank as a painter; as a sculptor, his tabernacle in the Church of Or San Michele speaks his praise. ”

“ Where he felt that thoughtfulness and beauty could properly be introduced, as in his circles of saints and prophets, no painter of the Middle Ages is so grand. I can give you no better proof of this, than the one fact that Michael Angelo borrowed from him openly—borrowed from him in the principal work which he ever executed, the Last Judgment, and borrowed from him the principal figure in that work. But it is just because Orcagna was so firmly and unscrupulously true, that he had the power of being so great when he chose. ”

“ Pupils of Orcagna named by Vasari are Bernardo Nello, a Pisan, Tommaso di Marco, a Florentine, and, chief of all, Francesco Traini, whose grand painting on panel of St Thomas Aquinas enthroned with the arch-heretics at his feet still hangs in the church for which it was painted—Sta Caterina at Pisa. Orcagna had, in addition to the two daughters mentioned above, a son named Cione, who was a painter of but little eminence. Some sonnets attributed to Orcagna exist in MS. in the Strozzi and Magliabecchian libraries in Florence. ”

“ The painter aims at no very delicate meanings, but he drives certain gross ones home so effectively that for a parallel to his process one must look to the art of the actor, the emphasising “point”—making mime. Some of his female figures are superb—they represent creatures of a formidable temperament.
There are charming women, however, on the other side of the cloister—in the beautiful frescoes of Benozzo Gozzoli. If Orcagna’s work was appointed to survive the ravage of time it is a happy chance that it should be balanced by a group of performances of such a different temper. ”

“ But Michael Angelo's object was from the beginning that of an artist. He addresses not the sympathies of his day, but the understanding of all time, and he treats the subject in the mode best adapted to bring every one of his own powers into full play. As [Pg 79] might have been expected, while the self-forgetfulness of Orcagna has given, on the one hand, an awfulness to his work, and verity, which are wanting in the studied composition of the Sistine, on the other it has admitted a puerility commensurate with the narrowness of the religion he had to teach. ”

“ Neither in that fresco is he wanting in dramatic episode; the adaptation of the Niobe on the spectator's left hand is far finer than Orcagna's condemned queen and princess; the groups rising below, side by side, supporting each other, are full of tenderness, and reciprocal devotion; the contest in the center for the body which a demon drags down by the hair is another kind of quarrel from that of Orcagna between a feathered angel and bristly fiend for a diminutive soul—reminding us, as it forcibly did at first, of a vociferous difference in opinion between a cat and a cockatoo. ”

“ Life in all its varied manifestations of beauty and strangeness seemed weaving a rhythmical dance around me as I moved, and wherever the spirit of man had passed I knew that my foot had once been familiar.
“As I gazed the mediaeval bosses of the tabernacle of Orcagna seemed to melt and flow into their primal forms so that the folded lotus of the Nile and the Greek acanthus were braided with the runic knots and fish-tailed monsters of the North, and all the plastic terror and beauty born of man’s hand from the Ganges to the Baltic quivered and mingled in Orcagna’s apotheosis of Mary. ”

“ But Orcagna's angels float without assistance or effort, by their own inherent lightness, as naturally as we walk. They are not out of their element, but bring their element with them. These are not men caught up into the skies, and do not need to be sustained there. The world they inhabit is not earth in heaven, but heaven on earth,—the earth seen in accordance with the purpose of its existence.
Giotto's fellow-citizens were struck with the new interest which the language of attitude and gesture and all the familiar details of life acquired in his representation of them. ”

“ The theme is miserable folk in time of pestilence crying out to Death to end their sorrows. The entire fresco would have shown Death passing them by and poising the scythe for prosperous and happy folk beyond. The whole scene exists in the famous frescoes of the Pisan Campo Santo which, while traditionally ascribed to Orcagna, are unquestionably of Sienese inspiration. They will occupy us later. Orcagna’s solitary position in Florence reminds us that artistic succession is rarely from master to pupil, but from great soul to great soul across intervening mediocrity.
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“ He derived the inspiration of the subject directly from Orcagna's fresco in Santa Maria Novella, only Fra Angelico has created a paradise too exclusively modelled on the monastic life. "His ideal," writes Reymond, "is a young neophyte entirely absorbed in prayer—a contemplative being who has renounced earthly life, abdicating his qualities as a man to dream of nothing but the future life. Orcagna, on the contrary, dreams of an ideal in which human life triumphs in all its fulness, and one might say that the beings which people his Paradise are but glorified bodies." ”

“ Compare especially the flying angels in the two little pictures 571 and 572, with such figures as those by Botticelli (1034) , and it will be seen at once how inferior Orcagna's knowledge was.
573-5. THE NATIVITY, ADORATION, AND RESURRECTION. Orcagna (part of the altar-piece, 569) .
These panels are very rude and "conventional": nothing can be more absurd, for instance, than the sleeping sheep and shepherds at the top of the Nativity; but they are interesting, if only by comparison with later pictures of the same subjects. ”

“ The havoc wrought by time and damp has been terrible; not only are the pictures faded and discoloured, but of the earliest only mutilated fragments, 'here an arm and there a head,' remain. Giotto's illustrations of the book of Job have thus perished. Still Orcagna's work has partially escaped, and left us indications of what it was in his and its youth, when Michael Angelo and Raphael did not disdain to borrow from it in design and arrangement. ”

“ Early Italian art has nothing more truly beautiful to offer than the white-robed Madonna kneeling at the judgment seat of Christ. [129]
It will be felt by every genuine student of art that if Orcagna painted these frescoes in S. Maria Novella, whereof there is no doubt, he could not have executed the wall-paintings in the Campo Santo at Pisa attributed to him by Vasari. To what artists or artist we owe those three grave and awful panels, may still be regarded an open question. ”

“ Between the arches of the front, and among other ornaments, by his own hand, Orgagna sculptured seven marble figures in mezzo-relievo, representing the seven theological and cardinal Virtues, [19] which are so admirably done, that, taken in conjunction with the rest of the work, they prove this master to have been no less excellent as a sculptor, than he was as a painter and architect. In addition to his talents, Andrea was, besides, endowed with a most cheerful disposition and kind heart; no man, of his condition, was ever more amiable, or of pleasanter manners. ”

“ He next, as one effort usually leads to another, made attempts at painting in colours, both in fresco and distemper, wherein he succeeded so well, with the assistance of his brother Bernardo Orgagna, that he was taken by the latter to paint in his company in the church of Santa Maria Novella, where, in the principal chapel, which then belonged to the family of the Ricci, the brothers executed together the life of Our Lady. ”

“ From this Giottesque treadmill, painting was released by the intervention of another art. The painters were hopelessly mediocre; their art was snatched from them by the sculptors. Orcagna himself, perhaps the only Giottesque who gave painting an onward push, had modelled and cast one of the bronze gates of the Florence baptistery; the generation of artists who arose at the beginning of the fifteenth century, and who opened the period of the Renaissance, were sculptors or pupils of sculptors. ”

“ It was after this great plague that, in consequence of the Compagnia having had great riches left to them, "to the honour of the Holy Virgin Mary and for the benefit of the poor," the Captains of Orsanmichele, as the heads of these Laudesi were called, summoned Orcagna, in 1349, to the "work of the pilaster," as it was officially styled, to enclose what remained of the miraculous picture in a glorious tabernacle. ”