verity, I must make him arms of a new fashion.' Thinking thus within himself, he takes the said buckler, and having designed what he thought proper, called one of his scholars and bade him complete the painting. This was a tin scullcap, a gorget, a pair of iron gauntlets, with a cuirass, cuishes, and gandadoes, a sword, a dagger, and a spear. Our great personage, of whom nobody knew anything, having returned for his shield, marches forward and inquires, 'Master, is the shield painted?' To be sure it is,' replied Giotto; bring it down here.' The shield being brought, our wise gentleman that would be, began to open his eyes and look at it, calling out to Giotto, What trumpery is this that thou hast painted me here?' 'Will it seem to thee a trumpery matter to pay for it?' answered Giotto. not pay five farthings for it all,' returned the clown. what didst thou require me to paint?' asked Giotto. 'My arms.' And are they not here,' rejoined the painter; 'is there one wanting?' 'Good, good,' quoth the man. “Nay, verily, but it is rather bad, bad,' responded Giotto. 'Lord, help thee, for thou must needs be a special simpleton; why, if a man were to ask thee, "Who art thou?" it would be a hard matter for thee to tell him; yet here thou comest and criest, "Paint me my arms!" If thou wert of the house of the Bardi, that were enough; but thou! what arms dost thou bear? Who art thou? Who were thy forefathers? Art

I will

'And

thou not ashamed of thyself? Begin at least to come into the world before thou talkest of arms, as though thou wert Dusnam of Bavaria at the very least. I have made thee a whole suit of armour on thy shield, if there be any other piece, tell me, and I'll put that too.' 'Thou hast given me rough words, and hast spoiled my shield,' declared the other; and going forth, betook himself to the justice, before whom he caused Giotto to be called. The latter forthwith appeared, but on his side summoned the complainant for two florins,

the price of the painting, and which he demands to be be paid.

"The pleadings being heard on both sides, and Giotto's story being much better told than that of our clown, the judge decided that the latter should take away his buckler, and should pay six livres to Giotto, whom they declared to have the right. Thus the good man had to pay and take to his shield; whereupon he was bidden to depart, and not knowing his place had it taught to him on this wise."

In 1307, Giotto appears to have finished his work at the Scrovegni Chapel, and removed to Florence, where he ultimately settled down. Of this period of his life little, if anything, is known. He went to Assisi some time after this, when I have found it impossible to discover.* He painted during these latter years at Florence, in four chapels of the Santa Croce, at Ravenna (and at Ferrara and Verona, according to Vasari); probably also he made excursions from Florence into many of the neighbouring towns, but no certain traces of his work exist. In 1328 he was commissioned to paint the portrait of Charles of Calabria, the son of Robert of Naples, and in 1330 was sent for by the latter to adorn some of the Neapolitan churches. On his way back to Florence, he painted at Gaeta and Rimini some frescoes which have quite perished. These were his last works in painting, with the exception of some produced during a brief visit to Milan in 1335, for which he obtained the permission of the government to absent himself from the superintendence of the Cathedral and Campanile. The year previous he had been made master of the works of the Cathedral, and chief

* I may here say once for all that owing to my ignorance of the Italian language, and the small amount of time at my disposal, it has been out of my power to undertake that research amongst the MSS. stored in the public libraries of Italy by which alone could the accurate chronology of Giotto's life be determined.

builder to the city of Florence; and while he was still engaged upon his bell tower and the cathedral façade, before his eyes had lost their lustre, or his hand its cunning, he died suddenly in 1336.

Such is the life of our old master as far as we can gather it from the scanty materials before us: to what does it amount? That a boy showed signs of genius; that a man fulfilled his early promise; that a great painter was for once a prophet in his own country and in his own time; and that all history can tell us of him, is that he made bad jokes, and had six ugly children. Such, I say, is the history of Giotto as I have gathered it from the chronicles of Vasari, Baldinucci, and Lanzi, Kugler, Rumohr, Crowe, and Jameson; but there is another history of the man, of greater worth and fuller meaning than can be found in these musty records; there is that which the painter has written with his own hand, in colours which yet retain much of their pristine brightness. The best record of the artist is neither his questionable witticisms, nor these rough outlines of his life, but that which shines forth clearly still on the walls of Santa Croce and the arches of Assisi. What that record means to us, I will try to explain.

CHAPTER VI.

THE CHIEF FUNCTION OF PAINTING.

"All honour and reverence to the divine beauty of form! Let us cultivate it to the utmost in men, women, and children-in our gardens and in our houses. But let us love that other beauty too, which lies in no secret of proportion, but in the secret of deep human sympathy. Paint us an angel if you can, with floating violet robe and a face paled by the celestial light; paint us yet oftener a Madonna, turning her mild face upward and opening her arms to receive the divine glory; but do not impose upon us any aesthetic rules which shall banish from the region of art, those old women scraping carrots with their work-worn hands, those heavy clowns taking holiday in a dingy pot house, those rounded backs and stupid weather-beaten faces that have bent over the spade and done the rough work of the world.”—George Eliot.

B

EFORE I speak in detail of Giotto's pictures, it will be well to consider very shortly what are the chief characteristics of good painting, and in what proportion the beauty of form, of colour, sentiment and thought, should be combined, in order to give us work of the highest order. And such a preliminary inquiry is the more needful, since the whole history of art is the history of the development of one or more of these characteristics, rather than the development of their just combination. If we look back at the greatest schools of the fifteenth century, we find that each of them had one main object in their art, which they pursued to the detriment of the others. However much, for instance, we may admire the feeling of Raphael, we perceive the lack of the

qualities which we find in Titian-however much we delight in Titian or Tintoretto, we feel that there is something lacking which we had in Raphael. And so on with every school, till at last we discover that the deficiency is not one in the individual painter, but is rather owing to the end which he and those of his school proposed to themselves; and whether it be the Florentine striving after expression of emotion, or the Venetian after expression of the truths of shade and colour, each is alike defective. In later times this becomes still more evident in the works of the Dutch painters, and it may be seen at its utmost height in the works of the majority of modern artists, whose aim is commonly restricted not only to one phase of feeling, but to one special manifestation of such phase; not to the seeking of colour, say, as the main object, but to the seeking of one particular colour.

If then every art school which the world has hitherto known, has been in some way partial in its choice of subject and the aims it has proposed to itself, let us think which partiality is the least blameable, and, in fact, what is the best thing that a painter can give us. Is it perfection of form, or of colour, intensity of feeling, or depth of meaning? If we can't have all, what should we choose first and cling to most securely?

Now, at the present day, there is amongst those who care for art, a rapidly-increasing class who, give a most decided answer to this question; one, which if we can at all accept its reasoning, will settle the matter for ever. "Art," they say, "has but one real province, that of the simply sensuous; in whatever degree you admit other elements you so far weaken the art." To use the expression of a member of this school, what is wanted is "a solid sensuousness."

Now whatever else is true, this is false-"falser than all fancy painted;" and, should it once come to be believed, will reduce art to a worse slavery than the one from which Giotto