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They have read guide-books, noting the stars and double stars; they have dipped into histories of art and volumes of criticism. They have been told to observe the dramatic force of Giotto, the line of Botticelli, the perfect composition of Raphael, the color of Titian; all this they have done punctiliously.
"This Giotto! why it's a cheap rechauffe of Titian!" No, my friend. The boy who tried so hard to draw those steps in perspective had been carried down others, to his grave, two hundred years before Titian ran alone at Cadore. But, as surely as Venice looks on the sea, Titian looked upon this, and caught the reflected light of it forever.
"Yes," continued Giotto, "but you cannot prevail on me to trust to your verbal promise a second time." "You shall have a pardon under my signet before you begin."
All you need know, and you scarcely, before this fresco, need know so much, is, that here are an old husband and old wife, meeting again by surprise, after losing each other, and being each in great fear; meeting at the place where they were told by God each to go, without knowing what was to happen there. "So they rushed into one another's arms, and kissed each other." No, says Giotto, not that.
The first of these portraits was that of the painter Giotto, as one who had given new light and life to art; the second, Fillippo Brunelleschi, distinguished for architecture; the third, Donatello, eminent for sculpture; the fourth, Uccello himself, for perspective and animals; and the fifth was his friend Giovanni Manetti, for the mathematics.
So much has Ruskin's development seemed to contradict itself, that one is scarcely surprised at one conclusion being apparently opposed to the former one; but a change so great as this, from Giotto, Perugino, and Cima, to Tintoret, Titian, and Veronese, as the religious ideals, will, indeed, amaze all who read it. Yet this is but the logical consequence of his progression hitherto.
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.
The exhumation of the antique had, as we have seen, been contemporaneous with the birth of painting; nay, the study of the remains of antique sculpture had, in contributing to form Niccolò Pisano, indirectly helped to form Giotto; the very painter of the Triumph of Death had inserted into his terrible fresco two-winged genii, upholding a scroll, copied without any alteration from some coarse Roman sarcophagus, in which they may have sustained the usual Dis Manibus Sacrum.
A chapel of the Bonapartes is here, containing memorials of two female members of the family. In several chapels, moreover, there were some of those distressing frescos, by Giotto, Cimabue, or their compeers, which, whenever I see them, poor, faded relics, looking as if the Devil had been rubbing and scrubbing them for centuries, in spite against the saints, my heart sinks and my stomach sickens.
The only good thing in it, in my judgment, is this, that after having discoursed of many ancient painters, and particularly of those cited by Pliny, he makes brief mention of Cimabue, Giotto, and many others of those times; and this he did, with much more brevity than was right, for no other reason but to slip with a good grace into a discourse about himself, and to enumerate minutely, as he did, one by one, all his own works.
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