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Updated: June 22, 2025
"But I must do as father says." "Let us go and ask him," said the stranger. His pictures were known and admired in every city of Italy. Bondone was surprised when Cimabue offered to take his little boy to Florence and teach him to be a great painter. "I know that the lad can draw pictures wonderfully well," he said. "He does not like to do anything else. Perhaps he will do well with you.
He was the son of a shepherd named Bondone, and while watching his father's flocks in the field, he showed a natural genius for art by constantly delineating the objects around him. A sheep which he had drawn upon a flat stone, after nature, attracted the attention of Cimabue, who persuaded his father, Bondone, to allow him to go to Florence, confident that he would be an ornament to the art.
"My father is Bondone the laborer, and I am his little Giotto, so please the signor," said he. "Well, then, Giotto, should you like to come and live with me, and learn how to draw, and paint sheep like this, and horses, and even men?"
So back they went together to the village, but not before Giotto had carefully put his sheep into the fold, for he was never one to leave his work half done. Bondone was amazed to see his boy in company with such a grand stranger, but he was still more surprised when he heard of the stranger's offer. It seemed a golden chance, and he gladly gave his consent.
It was more than six hundred years ago that a little peasant baby was born in the small village of Vespignano, not far from the beautiful city of Florence, in Italy. The baby's father, an honest, hard-working countryman, was called Bondone, and the name he gave to his little son was Giotto.
This last painter flourished from 1282 to 1320; his altar-piece for the Cathedral of Siena was also carried to its place in solemn procession, with the sound of trumpet, drum, and bell. GIOTTO DI BONDONE was the next artist in whom we have an unusual interest. He was born at Del Colle, in the commune of Vespignano, probably about 1266, though the date is usually given ten years later.
Another time he went riding with a very learned lawyer into the country to look after his property. For when Bondone died, he left all his fields and his farm to his painter son. Very soon a storm came on, and the rain poured down as if it never meant to stop. 'Let us seek shelter in this farmhouse and borrow a cloak, suggested Giotto.
In the year 1276 according to that invaluable publication, "Chambers' Miscellany of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge" about forty miles from Florence, in the town of Vespignano, there lived a poor laboring man named Bondone. This man had a son whom he brought up in the ignorance usual to the lowly condition of a peasant boy.
Old Bondone consented to the wish of his son, and the boy went to Florence with Cimabue. Giotto soon went beyond his master in his sketches. His former familiarity with nature, while tending his sheep, doubtless contributed a good deal to his astonishing progress. One morning the master came into his studio, and looking at a half finished head, saw a fly resting on the nose.
It remained for Giotto Bondone, born at Vespignano in 1276, just at the date of Niccola Pisano's death, to carry painting in his lifetime even further than the Pisan sculptor had advanced the sister art. Cimabue, so runs a legend luckily not yet discredited, found the child Giotto among the sheep-folds on the solemn Tuscan hill-side, drawing with boyish art the outline of a sheep upon a stone. The master recognised his talent, and took him from his father's cottage to the Florentine bottega, much as young Haydn was taken by Renter to S. Stephen's at Vienna. Gifted with a large and comprehensive intellect, capable of sustained labour, and devoted with the unaffected zeal of a good craftsman to his art, Giotto in the course of his long career filled Italy with work that taught succeeding centuries of painters. As we travel from Padua in the north, where his Arena Chapel sets forth the legend of Mary and the life of Christ in a series of incomparable frescoes, southward to Naples, where he adorned the convent of S. Chiara, we meet with Giotto in almost every city. The "Passion of our Lord" and the "Allegories of S. Francis" were painted by him at Assisi. S. Peter's at Borne still shows his mosaic of the "Ship of the Church." Florence raises his wonderful bell-tower, that lily among campanili, to the sky; and preserves two chapels of S. Croce, illuminated by him with paintings from the stories of S. Francis and S. John. In the chapel of the Podest
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