her still
with their beauty, do you even know what they mean? And if you do, are
they any more to you than an idle tale, a legend, which has lost even
its meaning? No, we look at these faint and far-off things merely with
curiosity as a botanist looks through his albums, like one who does not
know flowers.

Then there is the great Ancona (102) from S. Trinita attributed to
Cimabue about which the critics have been so eloquent, till under their
hands Cimabue has vanished into a mere legend; and Madonna too, is she
now any more than a tale that is told? Beside it you find another
Madonna (103) from Ognissanti which they agree together is really from
the hand of Giotto, though with how much intervention and repainting;
but they confess too that there is little to be learnt from it, since
Giotto may be seen to better advantage and more truly himself in his
frescoes, which yet remain in the churches as of old. And it is for this
we have robbed the lowly and stolen away the images of their gods.

It is a lesser because a merely imitative art that you see in the work
of Taddeo Gaddi and the Madonna and Child with six saints of his son
Agnolo, or the Entombment ascribed to Taddeo but really the work of an
inferior painter, Niccolo di Pietro Gerini from Or San Michele. Yet
those twelve scenes from the lives of Christ and St. Francis are lovely
enough; and in the Crucifixion there (112) we seem to see the work of a
master. A host of painters, "the Giottesques," as we may call them,
followed: Puccio Capanna, Buffalmacco, Francesco da Volterra, Stefano
Fiorentino, the grandson of Giotto, Giottino, and Spinello Aretino, all
of whom were painting about the middle of the fourteenth century in
Giotto's manner but without his genius, or any true understanding of his
art. The gradual passing of this derivative work, the prophecy of such
painters as Masolino, Masaccio, and Fra Angelico may be found in the
work of Orcagna, of Antonio Veneziano, and Starnina, and possibly too in
the better-preserved paintings of Lorenzo Monaco of the order of S.
Romuald of Camaldoli, in the Annunciation (143), for instance, here in
this very room.

Andrea Orcagna was born about 1308. He was a man of almost universal
genius, but his altarpiece in S. Maria Novella is nearly all that
remains to us of his painting, and splendid though it be, has been
perhaps spoiled by a later hand than his. In the Accademia here there is
a Vision of St. Bernard (No. 138),