FLORENCE, BEGINNINGS TO UCCELLO 



ing in painting has been for centuries connected. " To 

 scientific criticism," say Crowe and Cavalcaselle, " Cima- 

 bue as an artist is an unknown person."^ However, 

 Vasari knew all about him as a personality, and says 

 that as a boy he filled his school-books with sketches of 

 men, horses, and other various fancies. But it is in his 

 pupil Giotto Bondone that we see the new spirit more Giotto, 

 distinctly. Very significant, even if unhistorical, is the ^276-1337 

 story how at ten years of age he was found by his future 

 master sitting on the hillside drawing, with a flint on 

 a flat stone, one of the sheep which he was tending.^ 

 " He was not found," says Symonds, "beneath a church 

 roof tracing a mosaic, but on the open mountain, trying 

 to draw the portrait of the living thing committed to his 

 care." ^ While he goes direct to nature there is at the 

 same time a great economy of means : he does not intro- 

 duce natural objects unless they are vital to the story he 

 has to tell. 



In the Allegories of St. Francis which he painted 

 in the lower church at Assisi,^ the centaur, symbol of 

 self-will, of riotous animal impulses, is to be noticed in 



^ A History of Painting in Italy, ed. Langton Douglas, 1903, vol. i. 



P- 193- 



* Vasari, Lives of the Painters, ed. Blashfield and Hopkins, 1897, vol. i. 

 p. 49. 



^ J. A. Symonds, The Re7iaissa7ice in Italy, 1897, vol. iii. p. 139. 



* Mr. Berenson thinks that they are not from Giotto's own hand. — 

 A Sienese Painter of the Franciscaii Legend, 1909, p. 10, note. 



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