The birth of Italian painting is closely connected with the religious life of the Italians.  The building of the church of S. Francis at Assisi gave it the first great impulse; and to the piety aroused by S. Francis throughout Italy, but mostly in the valleys of the Apennines, it owed its animating spirit in the fourteenth century.  The church of Assisi is double.  One structure of nave, and choir, and transept, is imposed upon another; and the walls of both, from floor to coping-stone, are covered with fresco-painted pictures taking here the place occupied by mosaic in such churches as the cathedral of Monreale, or by coloured glass in the northern cathedrals of the pointed style.  Many of these frescoes date from years before the birth of Giotto.  Giunta the Pisan, Gaddo Gaddi, and Cimabue, are supposed to have worked there, painfully continuing or feebly struggling to throw off the decadent traditions of a dying art.  In their school Giotto laboured, and modern painting arose with the movement of new life beneath his brush.  Here, pondering in his youth upon the story of Christ’s suffering, and in his later manhood on the virtues of S. Francis and his vow, he learned the secret of giving the semblance of flesh and blood reality to Christian thought.  His achievement was nothing less than this.  The Creation, the Fall, the Redemption of the World, the moral discipline of man, the Judgment, and the final state of bliss or misery—­all these he quickened into beautiful and breathing forms.  Those were noble days, when the painter had literally acres of walls given him to cover; when the whole belief of Christendom, grasped by his own faith, and firmly rooted in the faith of the people round him, as yet unimpaired by alien emanations from the world of classic culture, had to be set forth for the first time in art.  His work was then a Bible, a compendium of grave divinity and human history, a book embracing all things needful for the spiritual and the civil life of man.  He spoke to men who could not read, for whom there were no printed pages, but whose heart received his teaching through the eye.  Thus painting was not then what it is now, a decoration of existence, but a potent and efficient agent in the education of the race.  Such opportunities do not occur twice in the same age.  Once in Greece for the pagan world; once in Italy for the modern world;—­that must suffice for the education of the human race.

Like Niccola Pisano, Giotto not only founded a school in his native city, but spread his manner far and wide over Italy, so that the first period of the history of painting is the Giottesque.  The Gaddi of Florence, Giottino, Puccio Capanna, the Lorenzetti of Siena, Spinello of Arezzo, Andrea Orcagna, Domenico Veneziano, and the lesser artists of the Pisan Campo Santo, were either formed or influenced by him.  To give an account of the frescoes of these painters would be to describe how the religious, social, and philosophical conceptions of the fourteenth century found complete expression in form and colour.  By means of allegory and pictured scene they drew the portrait of the Middle Age in Italy, performing jointly and in combination with the followers of Niccola Pisano what Dante had done singly by his poetry.