GIOTTO'S GOSPEL OF LABOR. 



89 



was brought across the Alps to Italy, chiefly, it 

 seems, by the influence of the Dominican and 

 Franciscan brothers. But the Italians never real- 

 ly adopted the principles of the Northern archi- 

 tecture. They did but adapt the Gothic patterns 

 and Gothic piercings to the decoration of build- 

 ings raised according to their traditional princi- 

 ples. In this mixed manner they produced, for 

 a period of about a hundred and fifty years, mon- 

 uments of surpassing beauty, richness, and deli- 

 cacy. In this manner Arnolfo designed the great 

 church of Florence, called no longer in popular 

 speech the church of Sta. Reparata, but the 

 church of the Virgin of Florence, our Lady of 

 the Flower, or of the Lily. Some time after the 

 death of Arnolfo, in 1334, the famous painter 

 Giotto was summoned to continue and complete 

 his work. At this time Giotto was nearly sixty 

 years old. He had spent his life traveling from 

 one city of Italy to another, and wherever he 

 went had won fame and friendship. He was a 

 painter far greater than any that had gone be- 

 fore, and greater than any who came after him 

 for many years. But we do not hear of his hav- 

 ing been employed, till now, on sculpture or archi- 

 tecture. However, he must have thrown all his 

 energy and all his genius into the work. He died 

 within two years of his appointment ; but in the 

 mean time he had designed not only a rich, new 

 front for the cathedral, but a new bell-tower, 

 down, as we are told, to the last detail of its dec- 

 orations, which was to stand at the southwest 

 angle of the church. This bell-tower is the fa- 

 mous Campanile, the most beautiful of all build- 

 ings in the inlaid and incrusted Tuscan-Gothic, 

 and one of the most beautiful, certainly, in the 

 world. 



It is interesting to notice, in some of Giotto's 

 early paintings, the designs of architecture which 

 he puts into his backgrounds. He was engaged, 

 almost as a boy, in helping to paint a great se- 

 ries of frescoes, in which the miracles of St. 

 Francis are commemorated in his native town of 

 Assisi. In these he had occasion to paint plenty 

 of tabernacles and pavilions designed in the new 

 Tuscan-Gothic manner. And now in his old age 

 the occasion comes for him to raise in actual mar- 

 ble a building fairer than any of those dreams of 

 his boyhood. We all dream dreams, I suppose, 

 and make up in our imaginations things we should 

 like to do in reality. But it is only the very lucky 

 who ever live to see their dreams come true. 

 Generally our imagination is but the safety-valve 

 of our discontent, the means by which we make 

 up to ourselves for the disappointments of fact. 



The weakness of our powers, or the constraint 

 of our life, or the spirit of the age, one thing or 

 another, shuts out our energies from their de- 

 sired scope ; every one seems to be tending dif- 

 ferent ways and following different aims ; our ex- 

 perience is all failure and distraction, and we try 

 to console ourselves by fancying the sympathy 

 and the achievement which we know in our 

 hearts will never be ours. But there are ages of 

 the world, ages when the efforts of many tend in 

 one direction, and when a man may dream never 

 such great things, and his dreams, or something 

 better than his dreams, shall come true ; for his 

 imagination, at its wildest, only bodies forth 

 something which a thousand willing hands are 

 ready to make real, and at its hottest is only on fire 

 with the unuttered needs of a myriad kindred 

 hearts. The thirteenth century was such an age 

 in Italy, for some at least of her children. With 

 all its dissensions, with all its banishments, with 

 all its spite of bitterness, it was an age not of 

 prose but of poetry, not of failure but of achieve- 

 ment. At the dawn of the age St. Francis lay 

 and dreamed his dream of nameless enterprise, 

 high and holy, and knew not yet what call was 

 upon him. But within a score of years he had 

 found out his quest, and dared it, and won ; 

 through him the poor and needy had learned the 

 meaning of the words of Christ ; through him, 

 for good or ill, the hearts of men were attuned, 

 for three hundred fruitful years, to the authority 

 of the heirs of Peter. He had gone forth in re- 

 proach and nakedness, and had chanted alone, in 

 his mother - tongue, upon his mother -hills, his 

 hymn in praise of the Lord his God for his brother 

 the sun and his sister the moon, and for the wind, 

 and for fair weather, and all weathers ; a few 

 years more, and a thousand passionate tongues 

 had caught, up his accents, and all Italy pealed 

 with canticles that taught the people to see in 

 their God the most gracious of cottage children, 

 and in his mother, blessed among women, the 

 sweetest and most patient of peasant mothers. 

 And at the close of this age, Giotto, helping as a 

 boy among older hands to set forth the miracles 

 of St. Francis in that " visible speaking," as Dante 

 calls it, which was a new thing among the people 

 — Giotto, too, as a boy, had dreams beyond his 

 present performance. Arnolfo and other famous 

 architects were building churches and cemeteries 

 and council-halls in the new manner which had 

 come in with the congregations of the preaching 

 and begging friars. And the young Giotto, in the 

 backgrounds of his paintings, had to invent the 

 stateliest pavilions and canopies and churches in 



