Memoirs of the Early Italian Painters, and of the Progress of Painting in Italy (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: GIOTTO. Born 1276, died 1338. Credette Cimabue nella Pittura Tener lo campo, ed ora ha Giotto il grido;? Sicche la fama di colui oscura. Cimabue thought To lord it over painting's field; and now The cry is Giotto's, and his name eclips'd. Carey's Dante. These often-quoted lines, from Dante's ' Purga- torio, ' must needs be once more quoted here: for it is a curious circumstance that, applicable in his own day, five hundred years ago, they should still be so applicable in ours. Open any common history not intended for the very profound, and there we still find Cimabue lording it over painting's field, and placed at the head of a revolution in art, with which, as an artist, he had little or nothing to do?but much as a man; for to him?to his quick perception and generous protection of talent in the lowly shepherd-boy, we owe Giotto, than whom no single human being of whom we read has exercised, in any particular department of science or art, a more immediate, wide, and lasting influence. The total change in the direction andcharacter of art must in all human probability have taken place sooner or later, since all the influences of that wonderful period of regeneration were tending towards it. Then did architecture struggle as it were from the Byzantine into the Gothic forms, like a mighty plant putting forth its rich foliage and shooting up towards heaven; then did the speech of the people?the vulgar tongues, as they were called?begin to assume their present structure, and become the medium through which beauty and love and action and feeling and thought were to be uttered and immortalized; and then arose Giotto, the destined instrument through which his own beautiful art was to become not a mere fashioner of idols, but one of the great interpreters of the ...