lla?--and whether, in the backgrounds of Perugino, he would
willingly substitute for the church spires invariably introduced,
flat-topped campaniles like the unfinished tower of Florence?

66. Giotto sculptured with his own hand two of the bas-reliefs of this
campanile, and probably might have executed them all. But the purposes
of his life had been accomplished; he died at Florence on the 8th of
January, 1337. The concluding notice of his character and achievement is
highly valuable.

* * *

67. "Painting indeed stands indebted to Giotto beyond any of her
children. His history is a most instructive one. Endowed with the
liveliest fancy, and with that facility which so often betrays genius,
and achieving in youth a reputation which the age of Methuselah could
not have added to, he had yet the discernment to perceive how much still
remained to be done, and the resolution to bind himself (as it were) to
Nature's chariot wheel, confident that she would erelong emancipate and
own him as her son. Calm and unimpassioned, he seems to have commenced
his career with a deliberate survey of the difficulties he had to
encounter and of his resources for the conflict, and then to have worked
upon a system steadily and perseveringly, prophetically sure of victory.
His life was indeed one continued triumph,--and no conqueror ever
mounted to the Capitol with a step more equal and sedate. We find him,
at first, slowly and cautiously endeavoring to infuse new life into the
traditional compositions, by substituting the heads, attitudes, and
drapery of the actual world for the spectral forms and conventional
types of the mosaics and the Byzantine painters,--idealizing them when
the personages represented were of higher mark and dignity, but in none
ever outstepping truth. Advancing in his career, we find year by year
the fruits of continuous unwearied study in a consistent and equable
contemporary improvement in all the various minuter though most
important departments of his art, in his design, his drapery, his
coloring, in the dignity and expression of his men and in the grace of
his women--asperities softened down, little graces unexpectedly born and
playing about his path, as if to make amends for the deformity of his
actual offspring--touches, daily more numerous, of that nature which
makes the world akin--and ever and always a keen yet cheerful sympathy
with life, a playful humor mingling with his graver lessons,