The romantic tales and episodes in the lives of painters which have come down to us are always interesting, and in Italy, being the centre of artistic life from the fourteenth to the end of the sixteenth centuries, we find abundant lore of this sort.
That picturesque legend of Cimabue of Florence, first told by Lorenzo Ghiberti (who was born in 1378), for instance, finding the youthful Giotto as a shepherd boy, while riding in the valley of Vespignano, about fourteen miles from Florence, sketching the image of one of his flock upon a smooth fragment of slate with a pointed stone, and taking him to Florence as his pupil.
Cimabue is commonly supposed to have been the first to show a new departure in the direction of greater freedom and naturalness of treatment, the first whose work shows much individuality, and emerges from the somewhat set and prescribed traditions of the Byzantine school which characterizes the earliest Italian painting of the Christian period really influenced by the Greek church mosaic design, which may be considered almost as the swathing clothes of mediæval painting in Italy.
His altar-piece for the church of Sta. Maria Novella was carried in procession through Florence to the church—a subject which has furnished a theme for Lord Leighton's well-known and fine decorative early work, too seldom seen.
Cimabue's portrait in the white embroidered costume with a hood, appears in a group with Giotto and other famous contemporaries, including Petrarch and Laura, in a fresco by Simone Memmi, a contemporary painter, on the wall of the chapel of the Cappella degli Spagnoli at Sta. Maria Novella.
But Giotto marks the real point of departure. Coming straight from outdoor life, from the simple country pursuits of a shepherd boy, it was significant that he should be the first to introduce a new spirit into art. Natural simplicity and directness, power of dramatic narrative painting, dignity and simplicity of style, and decorative beauty—these were some of the qualities with which Giotto enriched the field of early Italian art.
Alinari Photo.]
SIMONE MEMMI. FRESCO CONTAINING PORTRAITS OF CIMABUE, GIOTTO, AND CONTEMPORARIES. (FLORENCE. CLOISTERS OF S. M. NOVELLA.)
He became the friend of Dante, who pays him a tribute in the well-known lines in his poem "Il Purgatorio,"