In the Accademia of Florence there is another colossal Madonna by Cimabue, also an altar-piece representing the same subject as that of the one in S. Maria Novella, the arrangement, however, being slightly different. Instead of the six guardian angels who support the chair on which the Virgin is seated (in the former picture), there are here eight, and beneath the throne in niches stand four prophets; the thirty medallions of saints which surround the frame in the former picture are here absent. I am unable to give an accurate description of the differences between these two pictures, as I have only studied the one in the Accademia;[35] but there is, according to Crowe and Cavalcaselle, "a more obstinate maintenance of the old types" in the latter picture: and it is certainly true, from my own observation, that the colour has sustained such injuries from restoration and time, as to be almost entirely destroyed. This picture was originally of the gable form, but some ingenious artist, who considered that an unpleasant shape for a picture, has supplied the two triangular pieces necessary to complete the oblong, and painted thereon two cherubim, as poor in conception, colour, and execution as could well be imagined. The old shape of the work is still clearly visible, and in any other country than Italy would be at once restored.[36]
CHAPTER V.
GIOTTO.
"Where Cimabue found the shepherd boy,
Tracing his idle fancies on the ground."
Rogers's Italy.
Giotto was born[37] at the small village of Vespignano, about fourteen miles from Florence, amidst surroundings, the chief characteristics of which are very beautifully described by Mr. Ruskin in the following paragraph:—
"Few travellers can forget the peculiar landscape of that district of the Apennines. As they ascend the hill which rises from Florence to the lowest peak in the ridge of Fiesole, they pass continually beneath the walls of villas bright in perfect luxury, and beside cypress hedges inclosing fair terraced gardens, where the masses of oleander and magnolia, motionless as leaves in a picture, inlay alternately upon the blue sky their branching lightness of pale rose colour and deep green breadth of shade, studded with walls of gleaming silver; and shining at intervals through their framework of rich leaf and rubied flower, the far-away bends of the Arno beneath its slopes of olive, and the purple peaks of the Carrara mountains tossing themselves against the western distance, where the streaks of motionless clouds hover above the Pisan sea. The traveller passes the Fiesolan ridge, and all is changed. The country is on a sudden lonely. Here and there indeed are seen the scattered houses of a farm grouped gracefully upon the hill-sides; here and there a fragment of tower upon a distant rock; but neither gardens nor flowers, nor glittering palace exists. Only a gray extent of mountain-ground tufted irregularly with ilex and olive; a scene not sublime, for its forms are subdued and low; not desolate, for its valleys are full of sown fields and tended pastures; not rich nor lovely, but sunburnt and sorrowful, becoming wilder every instant as the road winds into its recesses, ascending still, until the higher woods, now partly oak and partly pine, dropping back from the central crest of the Apennines, leave a partial wilderness of scathed rock and arid grass, withered away here by frost, and there by strange lambent tongues of earth-fed fire."[38]
Giotto's name is, according to Lord Lindsay, a contraction of Ambrogiotto. In the modern sense of the word, he appears to have had absolutely no education, for we find him when ten years old engaged in tending sheep upon the hill-side. It is noticeable that for one who was to effect the change in art which Giotto subsequently produced, no amount of early training could have been so beneficial, as the silent undogmatic one, that he received amongst the fresh meadows, and under the blue skies. The native genius within him grew gradually in strength, unhelped save by the influences of rustic life, and unhindered by tradition or example. It was no doubt to these early shepherd days, that he owed the strong sympathy with nature that he retained during his whole career, and his power of representing simple facts of animal life. Throughout all his pictures, even those of his latest period, whenever he got a chance of introducing an animal he always seized it eagerly, and the little touches of dog, donkey, and ox nature which may be found scattered here and there in his works, form one of its most peculiar and pleasing features; especially when we consider that this was to artists an absolutely virgin soil. Thus in the fresco at Assisi[39] representing the birth of Christ, perhaps the most remarkable portion of the picture is the manner in which the two donkeys are poking their heads over the manger to examine the child, with that expression of happy placid stupidity, so well known to all who have ever had to do with these animals. And again, in the sculpture of the shepherd, forming one of the series round the base of the Campanile at Florence, the expression of the puppy's face, (grave consideration mixed with a sense of responsibility) as he watches the sheep filing past the shepherd's tent, is wonderfully natural, and worthy of Sir Edwin Landseer, except that it is in one way much too good for him, in its thorough dogginess; Landseer always intensified his animals' feelings to the very verge of caricature. Hence one reason why he was so commonly and universally popular.