United States or India ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
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.
Giotto was the son of a small farmer at Vespignano, near Florence. He was instructed in art by Cimabue, who discovered him drawing a lamb on a stone while herding sheep, and took him as his pupil.
A Giotto never forgets the look of his sheep on the bare hillside of Vespignano, Fra Angelico paints his heavenly pictures with the colours of spring flowers found on the slopes of Fiesole, Perugino delights in the wide spaciousness of the Umbrian plains with the winding river and solitary cypresses.
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.
No more notable or distinct figure than Giotto is in all the history of Florence. He was born a peasant, in the village of Vespignano in the Mugello, the same district which afterward gave birth to Fra Angelico. Giotto had at least part of his professional training in the great cathedral at Assisi built over the bones of St.
The story is that one day when Cimabue rode in the valley of Vespignano he saw a shepherd-boy who was drawing a portrait of one of his sheep on a flat rock, by means of a pointed bit of slate for a pencil. The sketch was so good that Cimabue offered to take the boy to Florence, and teach him to paint.
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
It appears, however, from an authentic document, cited by Campi, that Cimabue was employed in 1302 in executing a mosaic picture of St. John, for the cathedral of Pisa; and as he left this figure unfinished, it is probable that he did not long survive that year. This great artist, one of the fathers of modern painting, was born at Vespignano, a small town near Florence, in 1276.
Nor was this innovation merely a technical one it was the man's nature that effected it and made his art a living thing. Giotto, who was born in 1276, was the son of a simple husbandman, who lived at Vespignano, about fourteen miles from Florence.
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.
Word Of The Day