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They all paint better than Giotto and Cimabue, in some respects better than Perugino; but they paint in vain, probably because they were not nearly so much in earnest, and meant far less, though possessing the dexterity to express far more. Andrea del Sarto appears to have been a good painter, yet I always turn away readily from his pictures.
Thus Joe came to know Jacob Izon and Salvatore Giotto and Nathan Latsky. He was greatly interested in Izon, the facts of whose life he soon came to know. Izon was a designer, working at Marrin's, the shirtwaist manufacturer; he made thirty dollars a week, had a wife and two children, and was studying engineering in a night school.
For out of those Cosmati mosaics, and those barbarous frescoes of the old basilicas, will come Giotto and all the Renaissance; and out of those Church songs will come Dante; they are all signs, poor primitive rhymes and primitive figures, that the world is teeming again, and will bear, for centuries to come, new spiritual wonders.
There is a familiar something gone from the surroundings, and that something is soon remembered to be Dante's baptistery, which does not exist from Brunelleschi's dome, being blotted out by the façade of Santa Maria. One hundred feet below, showing its upper and richer portion gloriously from this novel point of view, is what from the piazza is the soaring bell tower, the Campanile of Giotto.
She stood, a figure for Bournemouth pier, in her grotesque bonnet, and watched the son of the Umbrian saint the friar who walks among the Giotto frescoes at Assisi and between the cypresses of Bello Sguardo, and has paced the centuries continually since the coming of the friars. One might have asked of her the kindness of a fellow-feeling.
"As for me," said the Countess Martin, "I am not learned enough to admire Giotto and his school. What strikes me is the sensuality of that art of the fifteenth century which is said to be Christian. I have seen piety and purity only in the images of Fra Angelico, although they are very pretty.
When Boniface VIII. sent a messenger to invite Giotto to Rome, the messenger asked Giotto to show him something of the art which had made him so famous. Giotto, with a pencil, by a single motion drew so perfect a circle that it was thought to be a miracle, and this gave rise to a proverb still much used in Italy: Piu tondo che l'O di Giotto, or, "Rounder than the O of Giotto."
Wherefore, if Giotto or anybody else choose to spend himself upon a sermon or an essay or an article of the Creed, and do well thereby, I may not blame him, nor call him back to study the play of light across a marsh or the flight of pigeons in the westering sun. Ma, basta, basta cosi, you may say with the Cavaliere of Goldoni.
While he was working to King Robert of Naples, the king, who was watching the painter on a very hot day, said, with a shrug, 'If I were you, Giotto, I would leave off work and rest myself this fine day, 'And so would I, sire, if I were you, replied the wag.
A woman tearing her dress open at her breast. Inscription here undecipherable; but in the Renaissance Copy it IS "IRA CRUDELIS EST IN ME." Giotto represents this vice under the same symbol; but it is the weakest of all the figures in the Arena Chapel. The "Wrath" of Spenser rides upon a lion, brandishing a firebrand, his garments stained with blood.
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