life in the year 1300, having little
less than resurrected painting. He left many disciples, and among others
Giotto, who was afterwards an excellent painter; which Giotto dwelt,
after Cimabue, in his master's own house in the Via del Cocomero.
Cimabue was buried in S. Maria del Fiore, with that epitaph made for him
by one of the Nini:

CREDIDIT UT CIMABOS PICTURAE CASTRA TENERE,
SIC TENUIT, VIVENS: NUNC TENET ASTRA POLI.

[Illustration: _Anderson_

THE CRUCIFIXION

(_After the fresco by_ Cimabue. _Assisi: Upper Church of S.
Francesco_)]

I will not refrain from saying that if to the glory of Cimabue there had
not been contrasted the greatness of Giotto, his disciple, his fame
would have been greater, as Dante demonstrates in his _Commedia_,
wherein, alluding in the eleventh canto of the _Purgatorio_ to this very
inscription on the tomb, he said:

Credette Cimabue nella pittura
Tener lo campo, ed hora ha Giotto il grido,
Si che la fama di colui s' oscura.

In explanation of these verses, a commentator of Dante, who wrote at the
time when Giotto was alive and ten or twelve years after the death of
Dante himself--that is, about the year of Christ 1334--says, speaking of
Cimabue, precisely these words: "Cimabue was a painter of Florence in
the time of the author, very noble beyond the knowledge of man, and
withal so arrogant and so disdainful that if there were found by anyone
any failing or defect in his work, or if he himself had seen one (even
as it comes to pass many times that the craftsman errs, through a defect
in the material whereon he works, or through some lack in the instrument
wherewith he labours), incontinently he would destroy that work, however
costly it might be. Giotto was and is the most exalted among the
painters of the same city of Florence, and his works bear testimony for
him in Rome, in Naples, in Avignon, in Florence, in Padua, and in many
parts of the world." This commentary is now in the hands of the Very
Reverend Don Vincenzio Borghini, Prior of the Innocenti, a man not only
most famous for his nobility, goodness, and learning, but also endowed
with such love and understanding for all the finer arts that he has
deserved to be elected by the Lord Duke Cosimo, most properly, as his
Lieutenant in our Academy of Design.

But to return to Cimabue: Giotto, truly, obscured his fame not otherwise
than as a great light does the splendour of one much less, for the
rea