The stone and the brush: Drawing from nature

This time two years ago, I arrived in Brazil for the first time. While in São Paulo I visited the Pinacoteca, which is to Brazilian art what Tate Britain is to British art – it contains many excellent examples of nineteenth-century Brazilian painting, an area of art history which is virtually unknown in the UK. I previously wrote a blog post about one of these works, Pedro Weingärtner's The maker of angels. Another picture in the Pinacoteca which caught my attention was Infância de Giotto (Giotto's childhood) by Oscar Pereira da Silva (1867–1939), painted in 1895:

Oscar Pereira da Silva, Infância de Giotto (Giotto's childhood), 1895, oil on canvas, 138 x 75 cm, Pinacoteca de São Paulo, Brazil.

The painting depicts a speculated incident from the childhood of the Florentine painter and architect Giotto di Bondone (ca. 1267–1337), one of the great artists of the early Renaissance. The account of Giotto's life given in Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550/68) recounts the following story from when Giotto was ten years old and living in the Tuscan countryside with his father, a shepherd:

[Giotto] was constantly driven by his natural inclination to draw on the stones or the ground some object in nature, or something that came into his mind. One day Cimabue, going on business from Florence to Vespignano, found Giotto, while his sheep were feeding, drawing a sheep from nature upon a smooth and solid rock with a pointed stone, having never learnt from any one but nature. Cimabue, marvelling at him, stopped and asked him if he would go and be with him. And the boy answered that if his father were content he would gladly go. Then Cimabue asked Bondone for him, and he gave him up to him, and was content that he should take him to Florence.[1]

As ever, I was looking at this painting with my Pre-Raphaelite hat on. Giotto's work was greatly admired by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and F. G. Stephens wrote appreciatively of his frescoes (or the reproductions that he saw of them) in his essays for The Germ and The Crayon in the 1850s. But I was also reminded of – bear with me – Dante Gabriel Rossetti's early painting The girlhood of Mary Virgin:

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The girlhood of Mary Virgin, 1848–9, oil on canvas, 83.2 x 65.4 cm, Tate, London.

Why the connection? Look at what the young Mary (the younger woman with the red hair) is doing and what she is working on. She is seated at an embroidery frame, and has been patiently working a design of three white lilies onto the blood-red fabric. If we follow her gaze, we realise that she has been copying the three real lilies which are standing in a vase atop a stack of books in front of her. She has even mimicked the different directions in which the flower heads are facing: two pointing in one direction, the third in the opposite direction.

Mary is therefore making art in accordance with Pre-Raphaelite principles, tracing natural forms directly from original objects that exist in her reality, through close observation. F. G. Stephens stated that Pre-Raphaelite artists were aiming to produce 'pure transcripts and faithful studies from nature', and that this required 'a somewhat longer and more devoted course of observation than any other'.[2] Mary, therefore, is a Pre-Raphaelite artist. Pereira da Silva has depicted Giotto in much the same way. Instead of embroidery, it is scratching onto a rock with a stone, and instead of lilies, it is a sheep (or a goat? It looks more like a goat to me) – yet the basic idea is unchanged. Giotto was an actual pre-Raphaelite painter who is credited with being one of the first artists to draw directly from the world around him; a concept which Pereira da Silva explores by illustrating Vasari's anecdote in a highly realistic manner.

The connections between Pereira da Silva's painting and Pre-Raphaelitism don't stop here. Rossetti also admired Giotto because he is thought to have painted one of the few known likenesses of Dante Alighieri, the Florentine poet whom Rossetti idolised with a quasi-religious fervour. In 1852, Rossetti made several studies for a design of Giotto painting the portrait of Dante:

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Study for 'Giotto painting the portrait of Dante', 1852, ink on paper, 19 x 16.8 cm, Tate, London. 

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Giotto painting the portrait of Dante, ca. 1852, pen and ink on paper, Birmingham Museums Trust.

These designs[3] culminated in a finished watercolour:

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Giotto painting the portrait of Dante, 1852, watercolour on paper, 36.8 x 47 cm, collection of Andrew Lloyd Webber. Source.

Like Pereira da Silva, Rossetti was influenced by Vasari's biography of Giotto, which states that 'Giotto painted, among others, as may be seen to this day in the chapel of the Podestà's Palace at Florence, Dante Alighieri, his contemporary and great friend, and no less famous a poet than Giotto was a painter'.[4] Rossetti used this as a starting-point for his design, in which Giotto is shown painting Dante's portrait onto the chapel wall while Dante himself gazes wistfully down at Beatrice Portinari, his unrequited love (the red-haired woman in the lower-right corner). Rossetti's watercolour is all about different powers of observation: Giotto, a painter, is looking at Dante, a poet, who is looking at Beatrice. Both Giotto and Dante will immortalise the objects of their gaze in their works of art: the painted fresco, and the poems in La vita nuova.

Fresco in the Podestà Chapel in the Palazzo del Bargello, Florence, attributed to Giotto di Bondone. Dante is thought to be the central figure dressed in dark red. Source.

In a 1979 article about this supposed portrait of Dante by Giotto in the Podestà Chapel at the Bargello in Florence, the art historian E. H. Gombrich posed the question: 'Did Giotto draw a sheep on a stone, and did he make a portrait of Dante?'[5] Rossetti chose to depict Giotto in much the same way as Pereira da Silva would, forty years later: a gifted artist drawing directly from nature. Even the sense of graphic creation is similar; the pointed stone of Giotto's childhood has been replaced with the delicate brush of the professional painter, and the rock outdoors with the whitewashed chapel wall.

As in other cases, it's difficult to know if Pereira da Silva was at all aware of Pre-Raphaelitism. His style generally was inspired by French realist and Academic painting rather than the peculiarities of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; see other examples of his work on the Google Art Project. Still, it helps us to consider how artists from different countries shared common interests in early Renaissance art and the idea of drawing directly from nature.

Notes

[1] Translation of Vasari's 'Life of Giotto' by Adrienne DeAngelis.

[2] Frederic George Stephens (pseudonym 'John Seward'), 'The Purpose and Tendency of Early Italian Art', The Germ, no. 2 (February 1850), p. 58. Rossetti Archive.

[3] Several years later, Rossetti attempted to paint a replica of this subject, which he never completed – it's now in the collection of Harvard Art Museums.

[4] See note 1.

[5] E. H. Gombrich, 'Giotto's Portrait of Dante?', The Burlington Magazine, vol. 121, no. 917 (August 1979), p. 472.