rches of every city; the activity was
extreme. Giotto, who had his studio, his "botega," in Florence, worked
also at Assisi, Rome, and Padua. Sienna was covering the walls of her
public palace with frescoes, some figures of which resemble the
paintings at Pompeii.[475] An antique statue found within her territory
was provoking universal admiration, and was erected on the Gaia fountain
by the municipality; but the Middle Ages did not lose their rights, and,
the republic having suffered reverses, the statue fell into disgrace.
The god became nothing more than an idol; the marble was shattered and
carried off, to be treacherously interred in the territory of
Florence.[476]

The taste for collections was spreading; the commerce of antiquities
flourished in Northern Italy. Petrarch bought medals, and numbered among
his artistic treasures a Madonna of Giotto, "whose beauty," he says in
his will, "escaped the ignorant and enraptured the masters of the
art."[477] This brightening of the land was the result of concurring
wills, nor did it pass unobserved even then; towns enjoyed their
masterpieces, and, like young women, "se miraient en leur beaute."
Contemporaries did not leave to posterity the care of crowning the
great poets of the time. Italy, the mother of art, wished the laurel to
encircle the brow of the living, not to be simply the ornament of a
tomb. Rome had crowned, in 1341, him who, "cleansing the fount of
Helicon from slime and marshy rushes, had restored to the water its
pristine limpidity, who had opened Castalia's grotto, obstructed by a
network of wild boughs, and destroyed the briers in the laurel grove":
the illustrious Francis Petrarch.[478] Though somewhat tardy, the honour
was no less great for Dante: public lectures on the "Divine Comedy" were
instituted in Florence, and the lecturer was Boccaccio.[479]

It was impossible that a mind, from infancy friendly to art and books,
should not be struck by this general expansion; the charm of this
literary springtime was too penetrating for Chaucer not to feel it; he
followed a movement so conformable to his tastes, and we have a proof of
it. Before his journeys he was ignorant of Italian literature; now he
knows Italian, and has read the great classic authors of the Tuscan
land: Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Dante. The remembrance of their works
haunts him; the "Roman de la Rose" ceases to be his main literary ideal.
He was acquainted with the old classics before his