The Story of Assisi

by Lina Duff Gordon

The cry is Giotto's, and his name eclipsed."

Dante, Purgatory, xi., Cary's translation.

The work of Cimabue, grand and noble as it is, yet gives the impression of belonging to remote times, between which and that of Giotto, his pupil, a great gulf is set. In both churches at Assisi we pass from the early efforts of an awakening age to the work of one, who, if not the first to see the light, was the first to discover the true principles of art, to give it life, and to found a school whence a long series of painters came to carry on for generations the lessons he had taught. Cimabue did wonders for the century in which he lived; of Giotto, even granting that his drawing was sometimes faulty, and the types of faces he painted were not always beautiful, it would be an insult to express such condescending praise; and even a hasty study of his frescoes in San Francesco must soon explain the everlasting sway he holds, now, as in those first years when his work seemed little short of miraculous to the wondering Florentines.

PLAN OF THE LOWER CHURCH AND MONASTERY OF SAN FRANCESCO AT ASSISI

Some fourteen miles to the north of Florence, among the hills of the Mugello, lies the scattered hamlet of Vespignano where Giotto Bondone was born of a poor peasant family in the year 1265. Even at an early age, Vasari says, the boy was remarkable for the vivacity and quick intelligence which endeared him not only to his parents, but to all who knew him in the village and country round. He passed his childhood among them, knowing nothing of the city just across the hills, but learning much, during the long days while he wandered forth to tend his father's sheep, which was helpful to him in after years to preserve his straightforward outlook upon life and the strength and freshness of a nature that loved the sunburnt valleys and the freedom of the shepherd's existence.

When Giotto was ten years old it happened that Cimabue, on his way from Florence to Vespignano upon a matter of business, found him seated by the roadside, his flock gathered near, busily employed in drawing the outline of a sheep from life upon a smooth piece of rock. Struck by the boy's industry in the pursuit of art and his evident cleverness, Cimabue hastened to obtain the father's consent to adopt and make an artist of him. Leaving the old life in the peasant's cottage for ever, Giotto now turned south along new roads, and with Cimabue by his side, saw for the first time the city of Florence, beautiful as she lay upon the banks of the Arno in a setting of wooded hills.

The progress he made under Cimabue's guidance, who taught him all he knew, was marvellous indeed. At ten years of age a shepherd tracing idle fancies on the stones, then for a few years an apprentice in a Florentine workshop grinding colours with the others for his master's big Madonnas; while ten years later he had already gained the title of Master and was a famous painter, courted by popes and kings, and leaving masterpieces upon the walls of churches throughout Italy, that people of all times and countries have come and paused awhile to see.

Let us suppose it was the air of Florence, which, according to Vasari, "generates a desire for glory and honour and gives a natural quickness to the perceptions of men," that made Giotto a perfect Florentine, alert, witty, and ever ready with a caustic repartee to anyone who bandied words with him. But though other influences were at work around him, and new images crowded upon his active brain, he kept undimmed the vision of his mountain valley, of the fields, of the days spent in his native village, and, with the eyes of a shepherd he continued to look on all the incidents of human life; he saw the grandeur, the tragedy, the weaknesses, aye, and the humour too, in everything that surrounded him, setting it all down in his frescoes in his own simple and original way. In a few words Mr Ruskin has touched upon the keynotes of Giotto's character when he says: ... "his mind was one of the most healthy, kind and active that ever informed a human frame. His love of beauty was entirely free from weakness; his love of truth untinged by severity; his industry constant without impatience; his workmanship accurate without formalism; his temper serene and yet playful; his imagination exhaustive without extravagance; and his faith firm without superstition. I do not know, in the annals of art, such another example of happy, practical, unerring, and benevolent power."