lower church of Assisi. This series, however, is not really in that part of the church which Vasari designates, but is in the Chapel of the Sacrament; and the works in that chapel are understood to be by Giotto di Stefano, who Worked in the second half of the 14th century—very excellent productions of their period. It might hence be inferred that two different men produced the works which are unitedly fathered upon the half-legendary “ Giottino,” the consumptive youth, solitary and melancholic, but passion- ately devoted to his art. A large number of other works have been attributed to the same hand ; we need only men- tiun an Apparition of the Virgin to St Bernard, in the Florentine Academy ; a lost painting, very popular in its day, commemorating the expulsion, which took place in 1343, of the duke of Athens from Florence ; and a marble statue erected on the Florentine campanile. Vasari parti- cularly praises G-iottino for well-blended chiaroscuro. He
left behind him various scholars in the art.GIOTTO (1276–1336), relatively to his age one of the greatest and most complete of artists, fills in the history of Italian painting a place analogous to that which seems to have been filled in the history of Greek painting by Polygnotus. That is to say, he lived at a time when the resources of his art were still in their infancy, but considering the limits of those resources, his achievements were the highest possible. At the close of the Middle Age, he laid the foundations upon which all the progress of the Renaissance was afterwards securely based. In the days of Giotto, the knowledge possessed by painters of the human frame and its structure rested only upon general observation, and not upon any minute, prolonged, or scientific study; while to facts other than those of humanity their observation had never been closely directed. Of linear perspective they possessed few ideas, and those elementary and empirical, and scarcely any ideas at all of aerial perspective or the conduct of light and shade. As far as painting could ever be carried under these conditions, so far it was carried by Giotto. In its choice of subjects, his art is entirely subservient to the religious spirit of his age. Even in its mode of conceiving and arranging those subjects, it is in part still trammelled by the rules and consecrated traditions of the past. Thus it is as far from being a perfectly free as from being a perfectly accomplished form of art. Many of those truths of nature to which the painters of succeeding generations learnt to give accurate and complete expression, Giotto was only able to express by way of imperfect symbol and suggestion. But in spite of these limitations and shortcomings, and although he has often to be content with expressing truths of space and form conventionally or inadequately, and truths of structure and action approximately, and truths of light and shadow not at all, yet among the elements over which he has control he maintains so just a balance that his work produces in the spectator less sense of imperfection than that of many later and more accomplished masters. He is one of the least one-sided of artists, and his art, it has been justly said, resumes and concentrates all the attainments of his time not less truly than all the attainments of the crowning age of Italian art are resumed and concentrated in Raphael. In some particulars the painting of Giotto was never surpassed,—in the judicious division of the field and massing and scattering of groups,—in the union of dignity in the types with appropriateness in the occupa- tions of the personages,-—in strength and directness of intellectual grasp and dramatic motive,—in the combination of perfect gravity with perfect frankness in conception, and of a noble severity in design with a great charm of harmony and purity in colour. The earlier Byzantine and Roman workers in mosaic had bequeathed to him the high abstract qualities of their practice, their balance, their impressiveness, their grand instinct of decoration 3 but while they had compassed these qualities at an entire sacrifice of life and animation, it is the glory of Giotto to have been the first among his countrymen to breathe life into art, and to have quickened its stately rigidity with the fire of natural incident and emotion. It was this conquest, this touch of the magician, this striking of the sympathetic notes of life and reality, that chiefly gave Giotto his immense reputation among his contemporaries, and made him the fit exponent of the vivid, penetrating, and practical genius of emancipated Florence. His is one of the few names in history which, having become great while its bearer lived, has sustained no loss of greatness through subsequent generations.
No two men were ever more unlike than the rustic Giotto and the patrician Dante ; but among the high places of history, their figures stand side by side on a common eminence. They were contemporaries, Dante being the elder of the two by eleven years, and friends, or, at the least, acquaintances. The poetry of Dante, reporting concerning things unseen with a definiteness not less than that of actual vision, served in many ways, until the days of Michelangelo, not only as an inspiration but as a law to the religious art of Italy. This inspiring and legislating authority of the sacred poet was exercised first of all upon Giotto,——partly, it appears, by means of personal intercourse between the two men. On the other hand, Giotto is celebrated in Dante’s verse as the foremost painter of the new age. Nor is this the only tribute to his pre-eminence which we find in contemporary, or almost contemporary, literature. He is from the first a kind of popular hero. He is celebrated by the poet Petrarch and by the historian Villani. He is made the subject of tales and anecdotes by Boccaccio and by Franco Sacchetti. From these notices, as well as from Vasari, we gain a distinct picture of the man, as one whose nature was in keeping with his peasant origin ; whose sturdy frame and plain features corresponded to a character rather distinguished for shrewd and genial strength than for sublimer or more ascetic qualities; a master craftsman, to whose strong combining and inventing powers nothing came amiss 3 conscious of his own deserts, never at a loss either in the things of his art or in the things of life, and equally ready and efficient whether he has to design the scheme of some great spiritual allegory in colour or imperishable monument in stone, or whether he has to show his wit in the encounter of practical jest and repartee. From his own hand we have a contribution to literature which helps to substantiate this conception of his character. A large part of Giotto’s fame as a painter was won in the service of the Franciscans, and in the pictorial celebration of the life and ordinances of their founder. As is well known, it was a part of the ordinances of Francis that his disciples should follow his own example in worshipping and being wedded to poverty,—-poverty idealized and personified as a spiritual bride and mistress. Giotto, having on the commission of the order given the noblest pictorial embodiment to this and other aspects of the Franciscan doctrine, presently wrote an ode in which his own views on poverty are expressed; and in this he shows that, if on the one hand his genius was at the service of the ideals of his time, and his imagination open to their significance, on the other hand his judgment was very shrewdly aware of their practi- cal dangers and exaggerations.
in the same generation by a distinguished citizen of Siena) was the son of a poor peasant of Vespignano. He was born in 1276, and drew, we are told, by natural instinct with whatever materials he could lay his hands on. He was ten years old when Cimabue, as the story goes, found him by the wayside, drawing a sheep with a piece
of charcoal upon a stone or tile. The master, then at the