the Christian
preachers themselves--were found sufficient to explain to a barbarous
people some of the great ruling truths of Christianity. These, and such
as these, were placed in churches, or borne about by gospel
missionaries and were appealed to, when words failed to express the
doctrines and mysteries which were required to be taught. Such appeals
were no doubt frequent, in times when Greek and Latin ceased to be
commonly spoken, and the present languages of Europe were shaping
themselves, like fruit in the leaf, out of the barbarous dissonance of
the wild tongues which then prevailed. These Christian preachers, with
their emblems and their relics, were listened to by the Gothic
subverters of the empire of art and elegance, with the more patience and
complacency, since they desired not to share in their plunder or their
conquests, and opened to them the way to a far nobler kingdom--a kingdom
not of this earth.

"Though abundance of figures of saints were carved, and innumerable
Madonnas painted throughout Italy, in the earlier days of the Christian
church, they were either literal transcripts of common life, or
mechanical copies or imitations of works furnished from the great store
looms of the Asiatic Greeks. There were thousands--nay, tens of
thousands of men, who wrote themselves artists, while not one of them
had enough of imagination and skill to lift art above the low estate in
which the rule and square of mechanical imitation had placed it. Niccolo
Pisano appears to have been the first who, at Pisa, took the right way
in sculpture: his groups, still in existence, are sometimes too crowded;
his figures badly designed, and the whole defective in sentiment; but
he gave an impulse--communicated through the antique--to composition,
not unperceived by his scholars, who saw with his eyes and wrought with
his spirit. The school which he founded produced, soon after, the
celebrated Ghiberti, whose gates of bronze, embellished with figures,
for the church of San Giovanni, were pronounced by Michael Angelo worthy
to be the gates of Paradise. While the sister art took these large
strides towards fame, Painting lagged ruefully behind; she had no true
models, and she had no true rules; but 'the time and the man' came at
last, and this man was Giovanni Cimabue."

GIOVANNI CIMABUE.

This great painter is universally considered the restorer of modern
painting. The Italians call him "the Father of modern Painting;" and