Cimabue did not free his style from what are called Byzantine or Romanesque mannerisms.  To unpractised eyes his saints and angels, with their stiff draperies and angular attitudes, though they exhibit stateliness and majesty, belong to the same tribe as the grim mosaics and gaunt frescoes of his predecessors.  It is only after careful comparison that we discover, in this picture of the Rucellai for example, a distinctly fresh endeavour to express emotion and to depict life.  The outstretched arms of the infant Christ have been copied from nature, not merely borrowed from tradition.  The six kneeling angels display variety of attitude suited to several shades of devout affection and adoring service.  The head of the Madonna, heavy as it is and conventional in type, still strives to represent maternal affection mingled with an almost melancholy reverence.  Prolonging our study, we are led to ask whether the painter might not have painted more freely had he chosen—­whether, in fact, he was not bound down to the antique mode of presentation consecrated by devout tradition.  This question occurs with even greater force before the wall-paintings ascribed to Cimabue in the church of S. Francis at Assisi.

It remained for Giotto Bondone, born at Vespignano in 1276, just at the date of Niccola Pisano’s death, to carry painting in his lifetime even further than the Pisan sculptor had advanced the sister art.  Cimabue, so runs a legend luckily not yet discredited, found the child Giotto among the sheep-folds on the solemn Tuscan hill-side, drawing with boyish art the outline of a sheep upon a stone.[126] The master recognised his talent, and took him from his father’s cottage to the Florentine bottega, much as young Haydn was taken by Renter to S. Stephen’s at Vienna.  Gifted with a large and comprehensive intellect, capable of sustained labour, and devoted with the unaffected zeal of a good craftsman to his art, Giotto in the course of his long career filled Italy with work that taught succeeding centuries of painters.  As we travel from Padua in the north, where his Arena Chapel sets forth the legend of Mary and the life of Christ in a series of incomparable frescoes, southward to Naples, where he adorned the convent of S. Chiara, we meet with Giotto in almost every city.  The “Passion of our Lord” and the “Allegories of S. Francis” were painted by him at Assisi.  S. Peter’s at Borne still shows his mosaic of the “Ship of the Church.”  Florence raises his wonderful bell-tower, that lily among campanili, to the sky; and preserves two chapels of S. Croce, illuminated by him with paintings from the stories of S. Francis and S. John.  In the chapel of the Podesta he drew the portraits of Dante, Brunetto Latini, and Charles of Valois.  And these are but a tithe of his productions.  Nothing, indeed, in the history of art is more remarkable than the fertility of this originative genius, no less industrious in labour than fruitful of results for men who followed him.  The sound common sense, the genial temper, and the humour of the man, as we learn to know him in tales made current by Vasari and the novelists, help to explain how he achieved so much, with energy so untiring and with excellence so even.