A history of Italian tiles - Infotile

figure D
brush would have found the task
challenging. And Giotto also succeeded
in conveying by the attitude of a
fisherman who is throwing his line
from a rock and on whose face is a
look of eager anticipation... This work
thoroughly deserves the praise if has
won from all other artists.”
What Vasaris’s description shows us
is that by this time mosaic technique
had capitulated to the dominant artistic
form of the period - fresco. Pietro
Cavallini and Jacopo Turriti, despite
their work in mosaic, like Giotto
produced their greatest work in fresco,
which better expressed the social and
aesthetic values of the rising middle
class. This new society - survivors of
the Black Death, legatees of Dante
and Bocaccio, required a new artistic
form to give visual expression to
their cultural values. Mosaic, with its
formal and chromatic simplification
and spiritual frame of reference was
unsuited to the task.
Anthony came and removed my very
empty soup bowl and topped up my
glass. He didn’t bother to ask if I had
enjoyed it - the state of the bowl said
it all.
As I waited for the main course my mind
began to focus on the Rinascimento
proper. Rinascimento, Renaissance -
call it what you will - it seemed to me to
represent the birth of modern Western
civilisation as much as a rebirth of
classical learning. It is easy to see the
Rinascimento as merely a transition
from the culmination of mediaeval
trends to the foretaste of Baroque.
And certainly while that is true to some
extent, it is equally true of every epoch.
But even more than most periods the
Rinascimento was an age of transition.
It wanted to be seen as different from
the preceding age, virtually naming
itself (an unprecedented gesture), and
formulating the notion that it has given
‘rebirth’ to Roman and Greek learning
and culture.
To the idea of superiority over the
mediaeval period, the Rinascimento
added a twist - it wanted to remain
traditional, but the tradition of antiquity
not Christianity. This period looked
back to a mythical past and aspired
to be not merely like it but better,
by synthesising antique and modern
knowledge.
Its realisation of being different
from the preceding period gave the
Rinascimento an historical perspective,
in effect a vantage point from which it
could survey and comment on the
past, and made it sharply aware of
the value of leaving monuments for
posterity, in ink as much as in stone:
Ghiberti, Vasari and Leon Battista
Alberta, to name just three whose
writings have permanently shaped our
cultural perceptions.
The typical tendencies of Early
Rinascimento art to place man in his
own environment (e.g. Gentile Bellini’s
‘Procession of the True Cross in Piazza
San Marco’), itself realised with the
maximum science, was the product
of an intellectual climate not naturally
suitable for the flourishing of the arts.
Indeed the early Rinascimento placed
more emphasis in art on knowledge
than on beauty, and as a result there
is a pronounced naturalism in much
of the sculpture and painting which it
produced. The Rinascimento seems
on occasion to want confidence in ART
as such, to inhibit imagination in a way
not done by the mediaeval period.
figure D. This late 15th or early ... Hispano-Moresque design. Over four and
a half centuries later this same pattern and others like it were
being manufactured by Italian companies and exported around the
world, including Australia.
The Rinascimento also manifested a
new interest in ‘nature’, though it no
more discovered nature than it did
antiquity. When Leonardo drew his
plant study he was urged on by truth
to natural observation (see Vasari’s