GIOTTO'S GOSPEL OF LABOR. 



91 



apt to think only of the consummate accomplish- 

 ment of the Greek artists, of their profound sense 

 of the beauty of the human body, and their unex- 

 ampled power of representing all the aspects of 

 that beauty in bronze or marble. That, indeed, 

 is one of the great distinctions of Greek art ; but 

 an equally essential distinction of the Greek art- 

 ist lies in simplicity, in manly justness and direct- 

 ness of imagination, in his habit of expressing, 

 without a shadow either of affectation or super- 

 fluity, exactly that which he desires to express 

 and no more. And in all these qualities the early 

 school of Tuscan sculpture in the fourteenth cen- 

 tury is much nearer the Greek than the more ac- 

 complished school of a century later. Andrea 

 Pisano had as stanch a sense of fact and as high 

 a sense of dignity as any artist in the whole his- 

 tory of art. Andrea Pisano knew a great deal, 

 too, about limbs and draperies. He could design 

 and place them, we shall see, as well as any one, 

 though he certainly could not render the subtilty 

 and richness of their living surfaces as well as 

 either the Greeks before or the Renaissance sculp- 

 tors after him. And what accomplishment he 

 has, in this or any other part of his craft, he does 

 not force upon our notice. He leaves his back- 

 grounds coarsely roughened with the chisel, his 

 accessories sometimes blocked out barely enough 

 for recognition; and even in the main subject he 

 does not push his work very far, but is content as 

 soon as ever he has got the spirit and essence of 

 his subject well expressed. And in the expression 

 of that essence he shows — or he and Giotto show 

 together — a justness and dignity of thought, a 

 grave and sure imaginative penetration, which 

 raise the work to the level of the highest which 

 has been done by man. 



I call the series Giotto's " Gospel of Labor " 

 because it is conceived in the spirit of a citizen 

 who, in an industrial community, deliberately ap- 

 plies himself to commemorate the growth of 

 industries. With the sculptured decorations of 

 the upper courses of the tower, as they are men- 

 tioned in Vasari, and may be seen to this day, we 

 have nothing to do. Those symbolical figures of 

 the planets and the virtues, with the other figures 

 of the apostles in niches (many of them executed 

 by later hands), would be a study of the utmost 

 interest ; but they are too high up to be clearly 

 seen, and to photograph them would be a con- 

 siderable undertaking. Let us only take note of 

 them as a part of the general scheme, and go on 

 to the examination of those panels in relief— each 

 being of hexagonal shape, and inclosed within a 

 moulded border — which are well within sisrht, and 



which especially concern us. " Those stories in 

 marble in which are represented the beginnings 

 of all the arts " — here we must remember that it 

 was a new thing in those days for an artist to 

 range at large among subjects of his own choice. 

 It is hard for us to realize how firmly, in the 

 middle age, art was bound to the service of the 

 Church alone, and to a fixed range of stock repre- 

 sentations. John of Pisa was the first sculptor 

 of the revival who invented free symbols and 

 allegories of his own, or who, in works like the 

 public fountain of Perugia, associated with figures 

 of saints and apostles subjects of secular and 

 practical life. In the decorations of the Floren- 

 tine bell-tower this spirit of freedom has advanced 

 a great stride farther. Florence was an industrial, 

 a commercial, a manufacturing community, and 

 the Florentine sculptor will adorn the lowest 

 course of the great tower, the symbol of Floren- 

 tine pride and unity, with a plain and practical 

 history of the sources of his city's prosperity. 



II. 



The chronicle begins, like all mediaeval chron- 

 icles, with the beginning of the world. Through- 

 out the middle age, the creation and the fall of 

 man formed the indispensable first scenes in ev- 

 ery record of general or of local history, whether 

 figured in color upon the pages of written books, 

 or in sculpture within the enriched recesses of 

 cathedral-fronts. Neither the sentiment of piety 

 nor the desire of completeness could be satisfied 

 without thus going back in every case to the 

 sacred origin of things as revealed in the book 

 of Genesis. Accordingly the first two of our 

 Florentine series, beginning at the west side of 

 the tower, are the familiar subjects of the birth 

 of Adam and the birth of Eve. Paradise is sug- 

 gested by a tree or two roughly carved in the 

 background ; the draped and dignified figure of 

 God the Father stands, in the first scene, over 

 the first-born man, and, in the second, helps into 

 existence the first-born woman, who springs from 

 the side of the man while he lies collapsed in 

 sleep. Thus far there is no departure from tra- 

 ditional treatment, only a dignity, a simple grace 

 and expressiveness in the grouping, which assert 

 the new-born genius of Italian art. Beautiful as 

 these two groups are, however, it happens that 

 we can see the same subjects carved, more beau- 

 tifully and more expressively still, by another 

 Italian hand at nearly the same time. On the 

 front of the famous cathedral of Orvieto, the 

 spaces on either side of the three great doors are 



