little if any
knowledge, was by his means effectually recalled to life." This seems to
detract in some degree from his eulogies of Cimabue; but it is to the
last sentence that our attention should be directed, which implies that
in profiting by the master's example he succeeded in extending the
possibilities of the new art beyond its first limits. Cimabue, we may
believe, drew his Virgins and Saints from living models, whereas his
predecessors had merely repeated formulas laid down for them by long
tradition. Giotto went further, and extended his scope to the world at
large. For the plain gold background he substituted the landscape, thus
breaking down, as it were, a great wall, and seeing beyond it. Nor was
this innovation merely a technical one--it was the man's nature that
effected it and made his art a living thing.

Giotto, who was born in 1276, was the son of a simple husbandman, who
lived at Vespignano, about fourteen miles from Florence. Cimabue chanced
upon the boy when he was only about ten years old, tending his father's
sheep, and was astonished to find that he was occupied in making a
drawing of one of them upon a smooth piece of rock with a sharp stone.
He was so pleased with this that he asked to be allowed to take him back
to Florence, and the boy proved so apt a pupil that before very long he
was regularly employed in painting.

His influence was not confined to Florence, or even to Tuscany, but the
whole of Italy was indebted to him for a new impulse in art, and he is
said to have followed Pope Clement V. to Avignon and executed many
pictures there. Giotto was not only a painter, but his name is also
famous in the history of architecture: the wonderful Campanile adjoining
the Duomo in Florence was designed by him, and the foundations laid and
the building erected under his instructions. On sculpture too he
exercised a considerable influence, as may be seen in the panels and
statues which adorn the lower part of the tower, suggested if not
actually designed by Giotto, and carved by Andrea Pisano.

Chief of the earlier works of Giotto are his frescoes in the under
church at Assisi, and in these may be seen the remarkable fertility of
invention with which he endowed his successors. Instead of the
conventional Madonna and Child, and groups of saints and angels, we have
here whole legends represented in a series of pictures of almost
dramatic character. In the four triangular compartments of the groined