Umbrian school

“ See for Correggio's connection with the Ferrarese-Bolognese School, Morelli's German Galleries, pp. 120-124.
THE UMBRIAN SCHOOL
"More allied to the Tuscan than to the Venetian spirit, the Umbrian masters produced a style of genuine originality. The cities of the Central Apennines owed their specific quality of religious fervour to the influences emanating from Assisi, the headquarters of the cultus of St. Francis. This pietism, nowhere else so paramount, except for a short period in Siena, constitutes the individuality of Umbria" (J. A. Symonds: Renaissance in Italy, iii. 133) . ”

“ The pietism, characteristic of the Umbrian School generally, is conspicuous in Niccolò, of whom Vasari remarks that "the expression of grief in his angels, and the tears they shed, are so natural that I do not believe any artist, however excellent he might be, could have done it much better." ”

“ The student of history cannot but notice with surprise that a city famed like Siena for its vanity, its factious quarrels, and its delicate living, should have produced an almost passionately ardent art of piety. [159] The same reflections are suggested at Perugia, torn by the savage feuds of the Oddi and Baglioni, at warfare with Assisi, reduced to exhaustion by the discords of jealous parties, yet memorable in the history of painting as the head-quarters of the pietistic Umbrian school. ”

“ I may mention that this curious anecdote, together with a variety of other interesting matter respecting Perugino and the other artists of the Umbrian school, will be found in a volume by Professor Adamo Rossi, to be published in 1876 under the auspices of the Italian government commission for the preservation and publication of historical documents regarding Tuscany and Umbria. ”

“ The painters of the Sienese school were on the whole faithful to the style indicated, and later on in the century they extend the boundaries of their school by spreading its influence into the hill country of Umbria. In the cities of this region Taddeo di Bartoli, one of the best of the followers of Simone, worked about the end of the century, and early Umbrian art in consequence exhibits the same devotional character, the same dreaminess, the same grace and decorative charm, that are at home in Siena. ”

“ The important and outstanding educational result of the revival of ancient learning by Italian scholars was that it laid a basis for a new type of education below that of the university, destined in time to be much more widely opened to promising youths than the old cathedral and monastic schools had been. This new education, based on the great intellectual inheritance recovered from the ancient world by a relatively small number of Italian scholars, dominated the secondary-school training of the middle and higher classes of society for the next four hundred years. ”

“ The olive and vine flourished in their valleys; they grew spelt abundantly; and the boars of Umbria were famous. Ancient authors describe the Umbrians as leading effeminate lives, and as closely resembling their Etruscan enemies in their habits (Theopompus, fragm. 142; Pseudo-Scymnus, 366-8) . It is almost certain that each race influenced and modified the other to a large extent. Mommsen has pointed out that the names of many towns in Etruria are Umbrian, a fact which shows how persistent even after conquest was their influence in that region. ”

“ Looking at cities and villages so purely Umbrian, some spread among cornfields close to a swift clear river, others set upon heights which nearly touch the sky on stormy days, we forget that beyond these hills and mountains encircling the big valley of Umbria stretch other lands as fair. We forget, because it is a little world which during long centuries has been set apart from all else, and where man has but completed the work of nature herself. ”

“ Francis as an example of what added strength our modern soul may get by a sojourn in the Past. What our soul may get of similar but more sober joy may be shown by another example from that wonderful Umbrian district, one of the earth's oases of spiritual rest and refreshment. Among all the sane and satisfying art of the Renaissance, Umbria, on the whole, has surely grown for us the highest and the holiest. I am not speaking of the fact that Perugino painted saints in devout contemplation, nor of their type of face and expression. ”

“ It was just at the beginning of the Thirteenth Century that the great universities came into being as schools, in which all the ordinary forms of learning were taught. During the Twelfth Century, Bologna had had a famous school of law which attracted students from all over Europe. Under Irnerius, canon and civil law secured a popularity as subjects of study such as they never had before. The study of the old Roman Law brought back with it an interest in the Latin classics, and the beginning of the true new birth—the real renaissance—of modern education must be traced from here. ”

“ We are to remember the difficulties which impede all such efforts in Romish countries. Where the priest regulates the faith, he must always be jealous of the education. But the German habits of the government predominated over the superstition of Rome, and a species of military discipline was introduced, to compel the young Italians to learn the use of their indolent understandings. Within a few years after the peace of 1815 a national school system was put in action in Lombardy. ”

“ In the emphasis they placed on moral worth, education of the body as well as the mind, and moderation in all things, they were much ahead of us. Their schools became a type for the cities of the entire Mediterranean world, being found from the Black Sea south to the Persian Gulf and westward to Spain. When Rome became a world empire the Greek school system was adopted, and in modified form became dominant in Rome and throughout the provinces, while the universities of the Greek cities for long furnished the highest form of education for ambitious Roman youths. ”

“ Rome realized the importance of exercising control over schools, and of fostering their increase, and she developed this policy in spite of the stern anti-Roman position eventually exhibited by William I. We must note here two canons on the question of education which, though promulgated at national synods sitting at Westminster, really emanated from Rome. Canon XVII. of 1138 A. D. ordained that schoolmasters should not, under penalty of ecclesiastical punishment, 'hire out' their schools. This canon made for efficiency. The man who took the fees must teach the school. ”

“ It is especially necessary to make clear that the language known as Umbrian is that of a certain limited area, which cannot yet be shown to have extended very far beyond the eastern half of the Tiber valley (from Interamna Nahartium to Urvinum Mataurense) , because the term is often used by archaeologists with a far wider connotation to include all the Italic, pre-Etruscan inhabitants of upper Italy; Professor Ridgeway, for instance, in his Early Age of Greece, frequently speaks of the “Umbrians” as the race to which belonged the Villanova culture of the Early Iron age. ”

“ In 108 fact, the want of hospitality, if not actual hostility, of universities to the new learning, often stimulated the growth of court schools. In many instances where the university was especially conservative, a court school was set up by its side as a professed rival. Gradually, however, the humanistic training crept into all the universities of Italy, and the classical literature of the Greeks and Romans largely took the place of the former grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic. ”

“ In this, so Umbrian a characteristic, he was a worthy follower of Fiorenzo, the not unworthy second to Perugino, and a forerunner of Raphael. The ample and spacious setting of his groups takes off from their cramped and crowded effect. Where the action is awkward, or the colour heavy, the whole spirit is lightened and lifted as you breathe the air of those delicious landscapes, or wander in imagination under those high-poised arcades, or look out from a palace chamber at the freedom and sweet breezes of a mountain distance. ”

“ Having borrowed—conquered one might almost say—Greek religion, philosophy, literature, and learning, the Romans naturally borrowed also the school system that had been evolved to impart this culture. Never before or since has any people adapted so completely to their own needs the system of educational training evolved by another. To the Greek basis some distinctively Roman elements were added to adapt it better to the peculiar needs of their own people, while on the other hand many of the finer Greek characteristics were omitted entirely. ”

“ The Greek school-terminology is throughout and intentionally avoided. Very earnestly the author points out the danger of many teachers, and inculcates the golden rule that the scholar ought above all to be induced by the teacher to help himself; with equal earnestness he recognizes the truth that the school is a secondary, and life the main, matter, and gives in his examples chosen with thorough independence an echo of those forensic speeches which during the last decades had excited notice in the Roman advocate-world. ”

“ Among the artists who maintained in Umbria the influences left by Ottaviano and Gentile, two were of special merit, Nicolò Alunno, of Foligno, and Benedetto Bonfigli, of Perugia. Their works have been often confounded, but with the latter only have we to do, for, besides being nearer to Gentile both in age and in manner, he is generally considered as the master of Pietro Perugino, [*140] and thus forms a link in the artistic chain which we are endeavouring to establish, through the best Umbrian painters, from Oderigi of Gubbio to Raffaele of Urbino. ”

“ We must not regard these philosophical schools as higher schools in the modern sense; though each school had a head who had the management in his own hands, and at his death appointed a successor, yet there was no question of an organised scheme of studies or of instruction regularly occupying certain hours of the day, or, indeed, of any of the conditions which could be compared with our modern universities, at any rate not before the period of the Roman Empire. ”

“ Further, in the colonies, and especially the colonies of the West, philosophy and art had done something for higher education. Thus in Italy the Pythagorean school was, in the fullest sense of the term, an educational institution; and in Sicily the rhetorical teaching of Corax and Tisias was presumably educational in the same sense as the teaching of Gorgias. But in central Greece, where, at any rate down to the Persian Wars, politics, domestic and foreign, were all-engrossing, and left the citizen little leisure for self-cultivation, the need of a higher education had hardly made itself felt. ”

“ All through the fifteenth century the universities of Italy, pre-eminent since their foundation for secular studies, had been gaining reputation by their offer of a wider education than the threadbare discussions of the schoolmen. The discovery and revival in the fifteenth century of Greek literature, which had stirred Italian society so profoundly, gave to the universities a northward-spreading fame. Northern scholars, like Rudolf Agricola, hurried south to find congenial air at the centre of intellectual life. ”

“ Still in these days, even at Rome, young men must receive some kind of education, and to meet this want the Sapienza College is provided. Both in the age of the scholars and the nature of the studies it bears a much closer resemblance to a Scotch high school than to an University, but still, such as it is, it forms the great lay-place of education in the Papal States. There is a separate theological faculty; p. 141the head of the college is a Cardinal, and the whole course of study is under the control and supervision of the priests. ”

“ All is ascetic, yet tender, save where, far off on the plain, the low red wall of a city lies like a sword across the land. In the distance Umbria, with its clean, pale landscapes, so significant and lucent under the quivering dome of white, seems less of earth than Heaven, almost breathlessly impersonal, a country more for angels than for men; but nearer at hand she smiles at you, like some saint turning from the ravishments of contemplation to encourage a fellow-being whose vision is not clarified to behold what she has seen. ”

“ Perhaps the most significant of all is school itself. Words for ‘teaching’ and ‘learning’ among the Romans inevitably came to express unacademic ideas. When they did want a word for academic processes they had to borrow it, like ‘schola’, from Greece. Yet, curiously enough, the original meaning of ‘schole’ in Greek was not school at all. What the Roman felt about the whole business of book-learning and disputing and thinking and talking philosophy is indeed conveyed to us clearly enough by the meaning of the Latin ‘schola’, from which we have taken school. ”

“ To make such temporary changes was not difficult in an age when what we have to call an university, consisted of masters and scholars, without college buildings, without libraries, without endowments, and without scientific apparatus. The technical name for such institutions seems to have been 'studium scholarium,' Italianised into 'studio' or 'studio pubblico.' Among the more permanent results of these secessions may be mentioned the establishment of the high school at Vicenza by translation from Bologna in 1204, and the opening of a school at Arezzo under similar circumstances in 1215 ”

“ We made our discoveries, saw much, learned not a little philosophy. And, most of all, we caught a glimpse of the heart of Umbria—Umbria of the saints. We watched the gathering of the golden maize in the plain below Assisi while [viii] we walked with St. Francis among the vines and olives; we saw the vintage being brought home with song and thanksgiving at Orvieto and Viterbo. We dwelt among beautiful simple-hearted men and women, living in little farms far from the toil of the modern world, who still worship God in the gladness of their hearts and the spirit of the ardent thirteenth century ”