The frescoes of the Arena Chapel at Padua, representing the history of Christ and the Virgin in fifty square compartments, remain among Giotto's most famous works. The frescoes of the vaulted roof of the lower church at Assisi are also very fine.
"Here," says Mrs. Jameson, in "Early Italian Painters," "over the tomb of S. Francis, the painter represented the three vows of the order—Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience: and in the fourth compartment, the saint enthroned and glorified amidst the host of Heaven.
"The invention of the allegories under which Giotto has represented the vows of the saint—his marriage with Poverty—Chastity seated in her rocky fortress—and Obedience with the curb and yoke—is ascribed by tradition to Dante."
He was architect and sculptor as well as painter, and the design of the beautiful Campanile of the Duomo at Florence is due to him.
Cimabue and Giotto's contemporary, the sculptor Niccolo Pisano, was another distinguished artist of the early Italian revival. He is said to have been inspired by the study of antique sculpture. A certain sarcophagus (Phædra and Hippolytus) by its life and movement is supposed to have suggested the character which he sought in his work. The dramatic vitality which he infused into his figures was certainly extraordinary, as his famous pulpit at Pisa demonstrates. There was some danger of losing monumental dignity and repose, but it meant a return to nature and life after a long period of restraint and convention which had become dead.
Alinari Photo.]
NICCOLO PISANO. PULPIT (PISA BAPTISTERY).
The revival, therefore, was both salutary and necessary, though it is not unnatural that painters should have profited most by its effects, and that painting should have become the leading and popular art, because most immediate and familiar in its appeal and the width of its sympathy and range.
For vivid dramatic intensity of conception and earnestness of purpose the work of Orcagna stands out among the early painters of Florence. Andrea Orcagna was the son of a goldsmith of Florence. The goldsmiths of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were in general excellent designers, and not unfrequently became painters, as in the instances of Francia, Ghirlandajo, Verrocchio, Andrea del Sarto. It was in his father's workshop that Andrea Orcagna first learned his art. He was born before 1310, and he painted at the Campo Santo in 1332. His famous work was the fresco still to be seen on the wall of the Campo Santo at Pisa—"The Triumph of Death." It presents us with certain contrasts of life and death, of pleasure and pain, of pomp and pride and poverty, the severe life of the holy man, the gay life of the pleasure seeker. There is a striking group of huntsmen reining in their horses at the sight of certain grim coffins containing great and pompous personages in various stages of decay. Grotesque fiends, too, are seen hustling wicked ones into a fiery pit. Thus does the early painter enforce the old moral. Thus does he paint the sharp contrasts of life and death, the short life and the merry one; the careless worldling and the rich and powerful finally levelled by death; while the higher spiritual life and the virtues of self-denial and sacrifice are suggested by the pious and primitive life of the monks.