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Even in the "Decameron" of Boccaccio the stories are seldom localized: they happen almost anywhere at almost any time. The interest in Boccaccio's narrative, like the interest in Giotto's painting, is centered first of all in the element of action, and secondly in the element of character. But his stories are all foreground.
He and his wife had come from Russia, where they had been revolutionists. The three men examined the paper closely. "That's what we need," said Izon. "You must let us help to spread it!" Joe added the three to the Stove Circle. He went to Giotto's house with him, up to the sixth floor of a tenement, and met the Italian's neat, dark-eyed wife, and looked in on the three sleeping children.
We produce, probably, per capita, 1000 times more in weight of ready-made clothing, Irish lace, artificial flowers, terra cotta, movie-films, telephones, and printed matter than those Florentines did, but we have, with our 100,000,000 inhabitants, yet to produce that little town, her Dante, her Andrea del Sarto, her Michael Angelo, her Leonardo da Vinci, her Savonarola, her Giotto, or the group who followed Giotto's picture.
Architecture, again, though it has its own laws laws esoteric enough, as the true architect knows only too well yet sometimes aims at fulfilling the conditions of a picture, as in the Arena chapel; or of sculpture, as in the flawless unity of Giotto's tower at Florence; and often finds a true poetry, as in those strangely twisted staircases of the chateaux of the country of the Loire, as if it were intended that among their odd turnings the actors in a wild life might pass each other unseen: there being a poetry also of memory and of the mere effect of time, by which it often profits greatly.
Thomas Aquinas, seated on a Gothic throne. Now observe, this throne, with all the canopies below it, and the complete representation of the Duomo of Florence opposite, are of finished Gothic of Orecagna's school later than Giotto's Gothic.
And there was Florence, with Giotto's campanile and Santa Maria Novella, where the young Protestant frequented monasteries, made hay with monks, sketched with his new-found friends Rudolf Durheim of Berne and Dieudonné the French purist; and spent long days copying Angelico and annotating Ghirlandajo, fevered with the sun of Italy at its strongest, and with the rapture of discovery, "which turns the unaccustomed head like Chianti wine."
Giotto was buried with suitable honours by a city which, like the rest of the nation, has magnified its painters amongst its great men, in the church of Santa Maria del Fiore, where his master Cimabue had been buried. Lorenzo de' Medici afterwards placed over Giotto's tomb his effigy in marble. In chronicling ancient art I must here diverge a little.
But the day on which, while my father took counsel with his family upon our strange meeting with Legrandin, I went down to the kitchen, was one of those days when Giotto's Charity, still very weak and ill after her recent confinement, had been unable to rise from her bed; Francoise, being without assistance, had fallen into arrears.
Anthony's, and we saw them with the satisfaction naturally attending the contemplation of frescos discovered only since 1858, after having been hidden under plaster and whitewash for many centuries; but we could not believe that Giotto's fame was destined to gain much by their rescue from oblivion.
I wonder how many of the travellers who stand entranced before this mausoleum, in sunshine and at dusk or under the moon, and who have not troubled about its history, realise that Giotto's Tower in Florence is three centuries older, and St. Peter's in Rome antedates it by a little, and St. Paul's Cathedral in London is only twenty or thirty years younger. Yet so it is.