Giovanni Giolitti

“ We should say he admired Simone and Lorenzetto more than Giotto, for the grace of their figures, refinement of execution, and greater richness of the accessories, robes and ornamentation, together with the pleasing brilliance of colouring, all approached more nearly to Fra Giovanni's own artistic sentiment than the style of Giotto.
And even less than the Umbrian painters or miniaturists (if indeed there were any worthy to influence the artistic spirit of our artist) did the landscape of verdant Umbria stir his soul, which even the sweet slopes of Fiesole could not touch. ”

“ The trouble with the politician as with the trained diplomat is that he never goes beneath the surface. He takes appearances for realities. He has often lost that instinct of race which should enable him to understand his own humanity. To a Giolitti, adept in the trading game of political management, it must seem insane for Italy to plunge into the war against powerful allies, who at just this time were triumphing in West and East alike—all the more when the sentimental and trading instincts of the populace might be partly satisfied with the concessions so grudgingly wrung from Austria. ”

“ They were honest,—that everybody admitted,—and they were experienced. In less troubled times the nation might prefer the popular politician Giolitti, who had a large majority of the deputies in the Parliament in his party, and who had presented Italy a couple of years earlier with its newest plaything, Libya,—and concealed the bills. But Giolitti had prudently retired to his little Piedmont home in Cavour. All the winter he had kept out of Rome, leaving the Salandra Government to work out a solution of the knotty tangle in which he had helped to involve his country. ”

“ Instead of maintaining a firm policy, Giolitti allowed the movement to spread until, towards the autumn of 1893, he became alarmed and drafted troops into the island, though in numbers insufficient to restore order. At the moment of his fall the movement assumed the aspect of an insurrection, and during the interval between his resignation (24th November) and the formation of a new Crispi cabinet (10th December) conflicts between the public forces and the rioters were frequent. ”

“ Democracies are prone to be deceived in their chosen representatives: they discover them mortgaged to a leader, secret or open. The Salandra Government knew, of course, Giolitti's prejudices in favor of Italy's old allies, disguised as patriotically neutralista sympathies. He had discreetly retired to little Cavour in Piedmont all the winter, maintaining a disinterested aloofness throughout the prolonged negotiations. ”

“ Many of his countrymen profess to distrust him and to say that Giolitti made him and still controls him. Nothing could be more absurd. Nitti is the type of man who is made by his endowment and by his environment. It would be easier to think of any other public man in Italy as the tool of a dictator, dethroned or enthroned, than it would be of Nitti. The son of poor parents who sacrificed everything for his education, he has been journalist, author, teacher, economist, professor, advocate, and statesman. ”

“ But the aged Giolitti grasped the problem with more firmness, which was what one might expect from the statesman who, after his return to power, had leaned neither on the industrial magnates of Milan nor on their Bolševik antagonists. Giolitti was resolved to put an end to the nuisance of d'Annunzio; in no constitutional State is there room for a Prime Minister and such a swashbuckler. The Nationalists of Italy were furious when they perceived that the Premier was in earnest and that force would be employed against their idol. ”

“ Jolyon Forsyte! So it is! Haven't seen you, sir, for years. Dear me! Times aren't what they were. Why! you and your brother, and that auctioneer—Mr. Traquair, and Mr. Nicholas Treffry—you used to have six or seven stalls here regular every season. And how are you, sir? We don't get younger!"
The colour in old Jolyon's eyes deepened; he paid his guinea. They had not forgotten him. He marched in, to the sounds of the overture, like an old war-horse to battle.
Folding his opera hat, he sat down, drew out his lavender gloves in the old way, and took up his glasses for a long look round the house. ”

“ And here perhaps it is best for me to make a slight digression, in order to speak of the character and disposition which specially belong to every artist independently of everything else—of his studies, of what he copies, and of the fashion of the day. Who would have thought that so sweet and strong a painter as Giotto would ever have risen out of the harsh and coarse mosaic-paintings of the Byzantines and the teachings of Cimabue? ”

“ The hill of Vespignano, Giotto's birthplace, is much too steep for the chestnuts and calash; moreover, we are only too glad of an excuse for walking up the pretty path cut into the hillside, bordered by trees hung with ivy, and leading to a serried rank of young cypresses, ranged together like a black watch on the crest of the hill, as if to guard the modest stone building, which tradition says is the very house where the artist Giotto was born. Even for a shepherd's dwelling, the house is small and uninteresting, which naturally flings a suspicion over its verity ”

“ All the other great Italian colourists see only the beauty of colour, but Giotto also its brightness. And none of the others, except Tintoret, understood to the full its symbolic power; but with those—Giotto and Tintoret—there is always, not only a colour harmony, but a colour secret. It is not merely to make the picture glow, but to remind you that St. Francis preaches to a fire-worshipping king, that Giotto covers the wall with purple and scarlet;—and above, in the dispute at Assisi, the angry father is dressed in red, varying like passion ”

“ The great reality of Giotto's designs adds to the helpless wonderment with which we feel the passionate pluck of the Hero, the sense of being separated from it by an impassable gulf, the reflection on all that has come and gone to make morality at that vertiginous pitch impossible. There are no such high places of humility left to climb to. An observant friend who has lived long in Italy lately declared to me, however, that she detested the name of this moralist, deeming him chief propagator of the Italian vice most trying to the would-be lover of the people, the want of personal self-respect. ”

“ Such, I say, is the history of Giotto as I have gathered it from the chronicles of Vasari, Baldinucci, and Lanzi, Kugler, Rumohr, Crowe, and Jameson; but there is another history of the man, of greater worth and fuller meaning than can be found in these musty records; there is that which the painter has written with his own hand, in colours which yet retain much of their pristine brightness. The best record of the artist is neither his questionable witticisms, nor these rough outlines of his life, but that which shines forth clearly still on the walls of Santa Croce and the arches of Assisi. ”

“ Giotto never succeeded, to the very end of his days, in representing a figure lying down, and at ease. It is one of the most curious points in all his character. Just the thing which he could study from nature without the smallest hindrance, is the thing he never can paint; while subtleties of form and gesture, which depend absolutely on their momentariness, and actions in which no model can stay for an instant, he seizes with infallible accuracy. ”

“ And Orlando, the Prime Minister, flew up to the Chamber and parleyed with Giolitti in the most cordial fashion. Centurione's documents were at once investigated and no proofs of treason were found, no witnesses proposed by him being examined. He was expelled from the National Defence group for "indiscipline," his colleagues frustrating his attempts to sit next to them by repeatedly changing their seats. [79] The attitude of the Fascio was humble and apologetic, and the other significant feature of the incident was the haste with which Orlando reacted to Giolitti's demand for an inquiry. ”

“ If one can see their work aright, it is beautiful; but it has lost touch with life, or is a mere satirical comment upon it, that Giotto, with his simplicity, his eager delight in natural things and in man, will supersede and banish. In him, Europe seems to shake off the art and fatality of the East, under whose shadow Christianity had grown up, to be altogether transformed and humanised by Rome, when she at the head really of humanism and art should once more give to the world the thoughts and life of another people full of joy and temperance—things so hard for the Christian to understand. ”

“ Before leaving the Paduan frescoes, I must allude to those allegorical figures of the virtues and vices in which Giotto has, as it were, distilled the essence of his understanding of human nature. These personified virtues and vices were the rhetorical commonplaces of the day, but Giotto’s intuitive understanding of the expression of emotion enabled him to give them a profound significance. He has in some succeeded in giving not merely a person under the influence of a given passion, but the abstract passion itself, not merely an angry woman, but anger. ”

“ It is, in fact, almost impossible to understand how any Italian, familiar with the eager gesticulations of the lower orders of his countrywomen on the smallest points of dispute with each other, should have been incapable of giving more adequate expression of true action and passion to the group of mothers; and, if I were not afraid of being accused of special pleading, I might insist at some length on a dim faith of my own, that Giotto thought the actual agony and strivings of the probable scene unfit for pictorial treatment, or for common contemplation ”

“ Only in this supreme matter of cricket he had been nervous, for his father—in Crimean whiskers then—had ever impressed him as the beau ideal. Though never canonised himself, old Jolyon's natural fastidiousness and balance had saved him from the errors of the vulgar. How delicious, after howling in a top hat and a sweltering heat, to go home with his father in a hansom cab, bathe, dress, and forth to the "Disunion" Club, to dine off whitebait, cutlets, and a tart, and go—two "swells," old and young, in lavender kid gloves—to the opera or play. ”

“ To old Jolyon it seemed that his son had grown. 'More of a man altogether,' was his comment. Over the natural amiability of that son's face had come a rather sardonic mask, as though he had found in the circumstances of his life the necessity for armour. The features were certainly those of a Forsyte, but the expression was more the introspective look of a student or philosopher. He had no doubt been obliged to look into himself a good deal in the course of those fifteen years. ”

“ Naturally not abrupt, except when nervously excited, Jolyon had become control incarnate. The sad patience of old people who cannot exert themselves was masked by a smile which his lips preserved even in private. He devised continually all manner of cover to conceal his enforced lack of exertion. Mocking himself for so doing, he counterfeited conversion to the Simple Life; gave up wine and cigars, drank a special kind of coffee with no coffee in it. In short, he made himself as safe as a Forsyte in his condition could, under the rose of his mild irony. ”

“ Buelow's mission to Italy and his relations with Giolitti, the defeated abettor of Austria in the business preceding Italy's declaration of war, when they encountered the statecraft of Sonnino and Salandra, are given in this version of Buelow's playing of his "trump card":
Although the die was cast and Italy's decision taken, he had the Austrian concessions greatly amplified, and he offered them, not to the King's Government, but to Giolitti, his secret ally, who was not in office, but was known to be the Dictator of Italy. ”

“ It was this conquest, this touch of the magician, this striking of the sympathetic notes of life and reality, that chiefly gave Giotto his immense reputation among his contemporaries, and made him the fit exponent of the vivid, penetrating, and practical genius of emancipated Florence. His is one of the few names in history which, having become great while its bearer lived, has sustained no loss of greatness through subsequent generations. ”

“ The artists of the fifteenth century—for the Giottesques do little more than carry, without developing them, the themes of Giotto into various parts of Italy—work at adding to the art exactly those qualities which belong exclusively to it, and which baffle the mere written word: they acquire the means, slowly and laboriously, of showing these events no longer merely to the mind, but also to the eye ”

“ The whole spirit of the Greek frieze is as vivid in Giotto's work as it is in the original sculpture, executed more than a thousand years before. It merely shows the extraordinary unity of all good art, that a mediæval Italian, working purely from nature and life, should be able to arrive by himself, at a representation which has all the feeling of that which is acknowledged to be the finest art the world has ever seen. It must be noticed that where Giotto falls short of his Grecian predecessor, is chiefly in the nobility of the types both of man and horse. ”

“ When he can draw and paint every detail of his subject, then, and not till then, he can suppress judiciously. Great painters have thus instinctively commenced by making minutely detailed studies. Now, Giotto never made one such in his life; he did not know how. He was a beginner possessing magnificent natural gifts, still a beginner, a breaker of new paths. He drew and painted the human body exactly as well as he knew how to, leaving out elaborate modeling simply because he was unable to accomplish it. ”