PICTURES IN THE COLLECTION OF SIR HUBERT PARRY, AT HIGHNAM COURT, NEAR GLOUCESTER WRITTEN BY ROGER FRY ARTICLE I.-ITALIAN PICTURES OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY ASTsummer,bythecourtesy of Sir Hubert Parry, I was enabled to visit Highnam Court in company with Mr. Berenson. It was intended that we should collaborate in the work of bringing to the notice of students some of the very remarkable Italian paintings in this collection. Owing to ill health and the pressure of other work Mr. Berenson has not been able to do what he had hoped. Under these circumstances I shall confine myself to a brief account of these pictures in the hope that at some future date Mr. Berenson will again take the subject in hand and draw from these examples those more definite conclusions which his far wider knowledge of Italian art would justify. In justice to him I must add that, except where expressly stated, he is not responsible for the ideas here put forward. A few words on the collection in general may be appropriate; for, no less than the house, the garden, and all its surroundings, the collection at Highnam bears the impress of a very remarkable personality, that of Thomas Gambier Parry, the father of the present owner. On leaving the university, in 1838, Parry bought the Highnam estate, near Gloucester, which became thenceforward his home. But the duties of a country squire, though undertaken with unusual energy and benevolence, did not absorb his entire activities. His enthusiastic love of Italian art led him to travel frequently, and to devote himself to the hope of acclimatizing in England the art of fresco wall-decoration. Realizing the unsuitability to our climate of the true Italian method of fresco painting, he made many researches in technique, which led ¶ We The works of the trecento are not even now estimated at their real value, and it is in the specimens of trecento and early quattrocento painting that the Highnam collection is most remarkable. Hence, if we take the works in chronological order, we begin at once with a picture which is in its way unique, the Nativity and Adoration (Plate I). The singularity of this is that we have here The a panel painted in tempera, belonging at the Burlington latest to the early years of the fourteenth Magazine, century, which is not only untouched, but Number V in complete preservation, and which for brilliance and intensity of colour and the perfection of its enamel-like smalto can scarcely be surpassed by works of the succeeding century. It is a small panel in which the figures are drawn with miniature-like precision. The prevailing tone is the pale brown in which the rocky landscape is rendered. It is almost of the colour and surface quality of boxwood or tarnished ivory. Upon this the plants and trees, still treated with the elementary symbolism of Byzantine art, are relieved in vivid black green; while the chief notes in the draperies -which are hatched with gold, according to the Byzantine tradition-are an intense blue green and a very positive transparent pink, with rarer touches of scarlet and celadon green. The effect of this colour scheme is very unusual, and recalls at once the wellknown altarpiece of St. Cecilia in the corridor of the Uffizi. Two other altarpieces, by the same master, who is best known from his frescoes in the upper church at Assisi, have been recently discovered by Mr. Herbert Horne in the neighbourhood of Florence, and in these also a similar colour scheme is observable. That the Highnam panel is a contemporary work, and, like those, marks the first germs of a distinctively Italian tradition, is apparent, but the tempting conclusion that it is by the same remarkable painter is not altogether borne out by the forms. For the master of the St. Cecilia altarpiece, though he was Giotto's contemporary, shows an independent development out of the older tradition. Only in the Assisi frescoes is he influenced, and that in a secondary and superficial way, by Giotto; whereas this panel, which from its composition and the use of gold hatchings on the draperies we may assign to an early period of the move 1 Mr. Horne hopes before long to publish these works in THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE. ment, bears already decided traces of the style of Giotto. Whereas in the master of the St. Cecilia altarpiece we note the peculiarity of small heads, elongated figures, fine-drawn features, and spider-like extremities; above all a sense of elegance, almost of affectation, which connects his work more with the decadent classic tradition than with the new ideas of Giovanni Pisano and Giotto; here we have already, more rounded forms, and more solid relief, while the poses are of a kind which allow of re-entering lines, gathering the form together in a self-centred mass. Particularly noteworthy in this respect is the group at the bottom of the composition, where the influence of forms discovered by Giovanni Pisano in bas-relief is clearly apparent. ¶There are comparatively few extant works of art which exemplify this precise movement in the development of the Italian from the early Christian style, but among them the closest analogy to our picture may be found in the panels at Munich, Nos. 979 and 980, in which a number of scenes are united in a single panel, though not as here in a single composition. We have in them a similar mixture of Byzantine tradition as seen in the gold hatchings on the draperies, similar large and rather heavy masks, similar deep shadows in the eye orbits, while the corners of the mouth are marked by similar round dots. Indeed the angel to Christ's left in the Last Judgement of the Munich panels is almost the exact counterpart of the angel immediately above the Christ in the Highnam Adoration. These Munich panels are considered by Mr. Berenson to be early works by Giotto. Is it possible that we have in the Highnam picture yet another early work by the same hand, and in incomparably better preservation? Besides the general likeness of style to the Munich pictures, there are certain characteristics which would point to such a conclusion; perhaps the most striking is the drawing of the hands. Thus the pose of the Madonna's hand with the two first fingers outstretched, the others clenched, is |