Francesco Paolo Priolo British (1837-1887)

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Image courtesy of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Cimabue and the Young Giotto, ca. 1880's Watercolor and bodycolor over pencil 29.1 x 24.5 cm WA 1963.103

Little is known of Francesco Paolo Priolo, apart from the Italian origins his name suggests. A brief entry on Priolo in Victorian Painters reveals that he lived and painted in England, frequently explored “Italianate” themes, and died young, at the mere age of thirty.[i] With minimal additional information on Priolo, it is difficult to determine how he was educated as an artist, with which artists and intellectuals he associated, and what ideas he sought to convey in his paintings. His biography thus remains hidden in the veils of history. Unable to rely on direct art historical examination and analysis of Priolo, we are left to understand this artist through the traces left to us in his artwork.

The subject of Priolo’s watercolor, Cimabue and the Young Giotto, comes from a legend told in Giorgio Vasari’s canonical text, Lives of the Artists.[ii] Per the aforementioned interest in “Italianate” themes, the scene is entirely fitting. According to the legend, Cimabue, the great painter of the thirteenth century, was walking in the forest when he chanced upon Giotto, the son of a poor Tuscan shepherd, sketching his sheep with a pointed stone onto a smooth rock. Astonished and immediately impressed by Giotto’s skill as an artist and his deft ability to draw from life, despite a lack of any formal artistic training, Cimabue proceeded to invite Giotto to live with him in Florence as an apprentice. Under the tutelage of Cimabue, Giotto supposedly managed not only to master the style of his teacher, but also to surpass him in skill and fame, thus breaking from the artistic codes of traditional Byzantine art and opening the way to the innovations of the Renaissance.

While there is no further evidence that Giotto actually lived with and studied under Cimabue, this legend nonetheless tells an important story of origins. Herein Vasari establishes a sense of historic and artistic continuity, revealing how the early stages of Italian Renaissance art emanated from the lessons and traditions of what had existed before. Moreover, the legend accounts more specifically for Giotto’s artistic legacy as it connects him directly to the previous generation.

Priolo’s watercolor shows Giotto in a moment of inspiration, as he sits on the ground at the center of the composition. With his right elbow resting on a flat rock and hand poised to draw with a stone implement, Giotto intently sketches the hindquarters of one of the sheep before him. Giotto is so enraptured by his subject that he appears unaware of the arrival of Cimabue standing squarely above the young shepherd.

The class distinction between Giotto and Cimabue is immediately apparent in their clothing and relative position to one another. Sitting on the ground, close to nature, Giotto wears a simple shepherd’s garb of fitted pale blue trousers and a light-colored tunic. At eye level with the sheep of his flock, Giotto’s low position emphasizes his humble origins. Cimabue, however, is dressed in a pale gray-blue robe with heavy columnar folds and a red satin cloak, lined in green. More removed from nature, Cimabue, with his hand on his hip and face turned in a downward glance, looks at Giotto with a hint of disdain. Cimabue is clutching a large book that attests to his literacy, educational background, and worldliness.  Perhaps he is contemplating the possibility that despite all of those advantages, he is being surpassed by Giotto’s skilled drawing from nature.

Priolo might have sought to insert himself into the cultural legacy of the Renaissance, as an artist in the nineteenth century. Like Cimabue and Giotto after him, the young Priolo also pays homage to his artistic forbearers as he simultaneously paints in his own time. His choice of subject matter not only connects Priolo to the artists of the Early Renaissance, but also to the Pre-Raphaelites, a group of nineteenth-century British painters who declared their allegiance to the “primitive” of art of the period before Raphael and the High Renaissance.[iii] The subject matter, technique, and style of Cimabue and the Young Giotto echo those of the Pre-Raphaelite painters. Born less than a decade after the founding of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Priolo might have grown up seeing their works.

In fact, Priolo’s watercolor shows a striking similarity to paintings by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, one of the main figures of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Like Priolo, he was also an English artist of Italian descent. Born in London in 1828, a generation before Priolo, Rossetti developed a particular fascination with his thirteenth-century namesake, Dante Alighieri. In 1848, Rossetti completed his translation of Dante’s Vita Nuova. Rossetti’s engagement with Dante’s text provided inspiration for a number of his painted works, including The Meeting of Dante and Beatrice in Paradise of 1853-4, Beatrice Meeting Dante at a Marriage Feast, She Denies Him Her Salutation of 1855, and Dante's Dream at the Time of the Death of Beatrice of 1856 and 1871. Similarly to Priolo’s work, most of Rossetti’s depictions of Dante were done in watercolor, sometimes with graphite articulations.

Priolo’s figure of Cimabue bears an uncanny likeness to Rossetti’s paintings of Dante. Both figures wear heavy robes, long fabric headdresses, and are shown in profile. Moreover, I would suggest that the face of Cimabue physically resembles that of Dante, with its long, straight nose and softly shadowed eye.[iv] The connection extends more directly to subject matter, as Rossetti, too, painted Giotto in a moment of artistic creation and working from a live model. In the Rossetti portrayal, Giotto’s model is none other than Dante Alighieri. In Giotto Painting the Portrait of Dante, a watercolor and pencil work from 1859, Rossetti reenacted a scene he imagined in the aftermath of the 1839 discovery of Giotto’s portrait of Dante on a wall of the Bargello in Florence.[v] As seen in their choice of subject matter, each of these British artists probably sought to connect with his artistic and personal cultural lineage in Early Renaissance Italy. The close resemblance of Cimabue and the Young Giotto to works dealing with the subject of Dante and Giotto by Rossetti, further points to Priolo’s admiration and emulation of a British-Italian artist in his own age.

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