A Chapter in Fourteenth Century Iconography: Verona

Abstract

THE schools of painting in North Italy in the fourteenth century have each their distinct personality and history. The unraveling of the strands of influence, derivation, and interchange enhances the interest of their varied production, which, one must confess, is but too apt to remain on a qualitative level far inferior to that of the more important groups of Central Italy. There are two diverse aspects from which one may approach these primitive masters, the iconographic and the stylistic: material and manner, object and presentation; and we may note at the outset that iconographic connections and affinities do not always run parallel to stylistic relations, of which paradox the Veronese group, whose origins we now seek to elucidate, is a most apt illustration. And let it not be objected that iconographie considerations are of minor importance in this new century. The real break, the effectual cessation of vital contact between the artists and the thought of the people is not before but after the trecento. In this period the artist still faithfully reflects a stream of thought, a tradition which is at once conceptual and pictographic, and indeed one may add that religious iconography in Italy presents at this moment a local diversity and color which it lacked in the centuries preceding, and which it is about to lose in the approaching Renaissance. Dugento iconography has a singularly homogeneous, if transitional character. Its tendency can be summed up in the expression, “the nationalization (and to some extent the Westernization) of the Byzantine formulae.” But trecento iconography is more complex, and varies from center to center, though its elements are still reducible to a few very simple lowest terms—the Byzantine residuum, the imports from the Romanesque and Gothic iconographies of the transalpine countries, the original and national Italian factor, which admits in itself a considerable provincial diversity.