Hand-Book of Painting. the Italian Schools (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1874 Excerpt: ... CHAPTER I. TUSCAN SCHOOLS GIOTTO AND HIS FOLLOWERS. GIOTTO. At the head of the didactic or allegorical style stands Giotto, the son of one Bondone, a poor labourer. He was born at Vespignano, near Florence, in 1276, and died at Florence in 1336. Ho was originally a shepherd boy, iu which condition, it is said, he was discovered by Cimabue drawing a sheep upon a slab of stone.. Struck with the boy, then ten years of age, Cimabue took him to Florence, and gave him instruction in the arts. All traces of his industry under this great teacher have perished, but it may be safely assumed that he laboured as a youth as well as in early manhood on the walls of that grand sanctuary of piety and art which arose after the death of St. Francis. At Assisi, therefore, in the celebrated church of S. Francesco--the cradle of Florentine art--and surrounded by the rudimental efforts of his predecessors, the young Giotto may be said to have worked out his apprenticeship as a painter. It is here, among the frescoes of the lower series of the upper church, illustrating the life of St. Francis, that his hand is traced by the internal evidence of its dawning superiority. Of the frescoes now ascribed to him may be mentioned the first in order--a man throwing his cloak on the ground for the Saint to tread on--with several on the opposite side; viz., the death of the dissolute Lord of Celano--the dead body of St. Francis on his pallet lamented by his brethren, while angels convey his soul to Heaven--the incredulity of Girolamo, a doctor of Assisi, who thrusts his hand into the wound in the Saint's side--S. Chiara, the sister of the Saint, with her nuns, embracing the body as it rests at S. Damiano on the way to Assisi--Pope Gregory IX. receiving in his sleep from the hands of St. Fra...