St Clare Receiving the Veil from St Francis of Assisi XVII century
St. Clare Receiving the Veil from St. Francis of Assisi (oil on canvas)
Unknown artist from the Italian School, (17th century)
A school of painting is applied to the painters of one city or province who for successive generations worked under some common local influence, and with some general similarity in design, color, or technique,- as, fro example, "the Florentine school," "the Umbrian school."
Painters in the old times were closely bound together as fellow-members of a painters’ guild, with its clearly defined set of rules and traditions; moreover, the universal system of apprenticeship, which compelled the young painter to work for a term of years in the bottega or studio of some established freedman of the guild, frequently caused the impress of the genius of one man to be very clearly stamped on a large number of pupils, who thus all picked up and frequently retained for life certain tricks of manner or peculiarities of method which often make it difficult to distinguish the authorship of a special painting...
The strong similarity which often runs through the productions of several artists who had been fellow-pupils under the same master was largely increased by the fact that most popular painters, such as Botticelli or Perugino, turned out from their botteghe many pictures to which the master himself contributed little beyond the general design,- the actual execution being in part or even wholly the work of pupils or paid assistants.
It was not beneath the dignity of a great painter to turn out works at different scales of prices to suit rich or poor, varying from the well-paid-for altar-piece given by some wealthy donor, which he master would paint wholly with his own hand, down to the humble bit of decorative work for the sides of a wedding cassone, which would be let entirely to the prentice hand of a pupil...
In other cases the heads only in a picture would be by the master himself or possibly the whole of the principal figures, the background and accessories being left to assistants. The buyer sometimes stipulated in a carefully drawn up contract that the cartoon or design should be wholly the work of the master, and that he should himself transfer it on the wall or panel. It will thus be seen how impossible it is always to decide whether a picture should be classed as a piece of bottega work or as a genuine production of a noted master; and this will explain the strange inequality of execution which is so striking in many of the works of the old masters, especially the Italians.
Location: Musee des Beaux-Arts, Caen, France
Comments
Post a Comment