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In default of any eloquence of their own, these men made use of messengers with symbols of one kind or another, like the ascetic near Siena who sent a 'little hermit, that is a pupil, into the terrified city with a skull upon a pole to which was attached a paper with a threatening text from the Bible.
The people of Siena having their army in the field against the Florentines under the captainship of Gian Tedesco, nephew of Saccone da Pietramala, and of Giovanni d'Azzo Ubaldini, this Giovanni d'Azzo fell sick in camp and was carried to Siena, where he died; wherefore, being grieved at his death, the people of Siena caused to be made for his obsequies, which were most honourable, a catafalque of wood in the shape of a pyramid, and on this they placed the statue of Giovanni himself on horseback, larger than life, made by the hand of Jacopo with much judgment and invention.
A very strange note, preserved at Siena, to a "Nina padrona mia dilettissima," shows that the memory of Gori and the friendship of Gori's friends were not the only things which attracted him ever and anon from Florence to Siena.
Had they existed, it is almost impossible to understand how they would ever throughout Europe have come to an end; for as the favourite proverb of Catharine of Siena has it, one dead man cannot bury another dead man; and the Middle Ages, after this tedious dying of the fifteenth century, required to be shovelled into the tomb, nay, rather, given the final stroke, by the Renaissance.
Nor is there at Manchester any picture by Duccio da Siena, the great, and, one may almost say, the worthy contemporary of Giotto, from which his power and feeling are to be well estimated. Like Giotto he struggled to free himself from the swathing-clothes in which the traditions of Byzantine Art had bound up the limbs and the imaginations of artists, and he succeeded in at last breaking loose.
The lady murmured a resigned assent, and Doctor Lombard interposed with a smile: "My dear sir, my wife considers Siena a most salubrious spot, and is favorably impressed by the cheapness of the marketing; but she deplores the total absence of muffins and cannel coal, and cannot resign herself to the Italian method of dusting furniture." "But they don't, you know they don't dust it!" Mrs.
Something in this "primitive" art has been lost when we come to Angelico, some almost morbid loveliness that you may find even yet in the air about Perugia and Siena, in the delicate flowers there, the honeysuckle which the country people call le manine della Madonnina the little hands of the Virgin, and even in the people sometimes, in their soft gestures and dreamy looks.
It is not till we come to Giovanni Bellini, born about 1430, that we find a work of the Quattrocento in the delightful but puzzling Allegory , where Our Lady sits enthroned beside a lagoon in a strange and lovely landscape of rocks and trees; while beside her kneels St. Catherine of Alexandria, and again, St. Catherine of Siena; farther away stand St. Peter and St.
I have seen it, and it is decidedly good.... Monsignore di Sanseverino has promised to show me some fine things, and I hear that Monsignore Colonna and the Cardinal of Siena have also some good things, but, unluckily, they are both of them away from Rome. Since I am here I must do my best to play the rogue. I hope to have enough to load a bark shortly, and send statues to Genoa and to Milan.
Son of a merchant, Boccaccio di Chellino di Buonaiuto, of Certaldo in Val d'Elsa, a little town about midway between Empoli and Siena, but within the Florentine "contado," Giovanni Boccaccio was born, most probably at Paris, in the year 1313. His mother, at any rate, was a Frenchwoman, whom his father seduced during a sojourn at Paris, and afterwards deserted.
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