The attention which, in his childhood, Giotto seems to have given to all natural forms and appearances, showed itself in his earlier pictures; he was the first to whom it occurred to group his personages into something like a situation, and to give to their attitudes and features the expression adapted to it. Thus, in a very early picture of the Annunciation, he gave to the Virgin a look of fear, and in another painted some time after, of the Presentation in the Temple, he made the Infant Christ shrink from the priest, and, turning, extend his little arms to his mother-the first attempt at that species of grace and naïveté of expression, afterwards carried to perfection by Raffaelle. These and other works painted in his native city, so astonished his fellow-citizens, and all who saw them, by their beauty and novelty, that they seem to have wanted adequate words in which to express their delight and admiration, and insisted that the figures of Giotto so completely beguiled the senses that they were taken for realities.

In the Church of Santa Croce, Giotto painted a Coronation of the Virgin, still to be seen, with choirs of angels on either side. In the refectory he painted the Last Supper, also still remaining ; a grand, solemn, and simple composition, which, in the endeavor to give variety of expression and attitude to a number of persons,-all seated, and all but two actuated by a similar feeling,--must still be regarded as extraordinary. In a chapel of the Church known as The Carmine, at Florence, he painted a series of pictures from the life of John the Baptist. These were destroyed by fire in 1771, but happily an English engraver named Patch, then studying at Florence, had previously made accurate drawings from them, which he engraved and published.

Pope Boniface VIII., hearing of his marvellous skill, invited him to Rome, and the story says that the messenger of His Holiness, wishing to have some proof that Giotto was indeed, the man he was in search of desired to see a specimen of his excellence in his art; whereupon Giotto, taking up a sheet of paper, traced on it, with a single flourish of his hand, a circle so perfect that "it was a miracle to see," and seems to have at once converted the Pope to a belief in his superiority over all other painters. This story gave rise to the well-known Italian proverb," Piu tondo che l' O di Giotto," -rounder than the O of Giotto,-and is something like a story told of one of the Grecian painters. Giotto went to Rome, and

there executed many things which raised his fame higher and higher, and among them, for the ancient Basilica of St. Peter, the famous mosaic of the Navicella, or the Barca, as it is sometimes called. It represents a ship with the Disciples on a tempestuous sea. The winds, personified as demons, rage around it. Above are the Fathers of the Old Testament; on the right stands Christ, raising Peter from the waves. The subject has an allegorical significance, denoting the troubles and triumphs of the Church. This mosaic has often changed its situation, and has been restored again and again, till nothing of Giotto's work remains but the original composition. It is now in the vestibule of St. Peter's at

Rome.

For the same Pope Boniface, Giotto painted the Institution of the Jubilee of 1300, which is still to be seen in the Lateran in Rome.

In Padua, Giotto painted the Chapel of the Arena with frescoes from the life of Christ and the Virgin in fifty square compartments. There is an exceeding grace and simplicity in some of the groups, particularly the marriage of the Virgin and Saint Joseph. At Padua, Giotto met his friend Dante, and the influence of one great genius on another is strongly exemplified in some of his succeeding works, and particularly in his next grand performance, the frescoes in the Church of Assisi. In the under church, and immediately over the tomb of Saint Francis, the painter represented the three vows of the Order,--Poverty, Chastity and Obedience,— and in the fourth compartment the Saint enthroned and glorified amidst the host of Heaven. The invention of the allegories under which Giotto has represented the vows of the Saint, his marriage with Poverty, Chastity seated in her rocky fortress, and Obedience with the curb and yoke, are ascribed by tradition to Dante.* Giotto also painted, in the Campo Santo at Pisa, the whole history of Job, of which only some fragments remain.

By the time Giotto had attained his thirtieth year, he had reached such hitherto unknown excellence in art, and his celebrity was so universal, that every city and every petty sovereign in Italy contended for the honor of his presence and his pencil, and tempted him with the promise of rich rewards. For the lords of Arezzo, of

* See the Divina Commedia. (“Paradiso,” C. XI.)

Rimini, and of Ravenna, and for the Duke of Milan, he executed many works, now almost entirely obliterated. Castruccio Castricani, the warlike tyrant of Lucca, also employed him; but how Giotto was induced to listen to the offers of this enemy of his country, is not explained. Perhaps Castruccio, as the head of the Ghibelline party in which Giotto had apparently enrolled himself, appeared in the light of a friend rather than an enemy. However this may be, a picture which Giotto painted for Castruccio, and in which he introduced the portrait of the tyrant, with a falcon on his fist, is still preserved in the Lyceum at Lucca. For Guido da Polente, the father of the hapless Francesco di Rimini, he painted the interior of a church; and for Malatesta di Rimini he painted the portrait of that prince in a bark, with his companions and a company of mariners, and among them, Vasari tells us, was the figure of a sailor, who, turning round with his hand before his face, is in the act of spitting into the sea, so life-like as to strike beholders with amazement. This has perished, but the figure of the thirsty man stooping to drink, in one of the frescoes at Assisi, still remains to show the kind of excellence through which Giotto excited such admiration in his contemporaries.

It is said, but this does not rest on very satisfactory evidence, that Giotto also visited Avignon with Pope Clement V., and painted there the portraits of Petrarch and Laura.

About the year 1327, King Robert of Naples, the father of Queen Joanna, wrote to his son, the Duke of Calabria, then at Florence, to send him, on any terms, the famous painter Giotto, who accordingly travelled to the Court of Naples, stopping on his way in several cities, where he left specimens of his skill. He also visited Orvieto for the purpose of viewing the sculpture with which the brothers Agostino and Agnolo were decorating the Cathedral, and not only bestowed on it high commendation, but obtained for the artists the praise and patronage they merited. There is at Gaeta a crucifixion painted by Giotto, either on his way to Naples or on his return, in which he introduced himself kneeling in an attitude of deep devotion and contrition at the foot of the cross. This introduction of portraiture into a subject so awful was another innovation, not so praiseworthy as some of his alterations. Giotto's feeling for truth and propriety of expression is particularly remarkable and commendable in the alteration of the dreadful but popular

subject of the crucifix. In the Byzantine school, the sole aim seems to have been to represent physical agony, and to render it, by every species of distortion and exaggeration, as terrible and as repulsive as possible. Giotto was the first to soften this awful and painful figure by an expression of divine resignation, and by greater attention to beauty of form. A crucifixion painted by him became the model for his scholars, and was multiplied by imitation through all Italy; so that a famous painter of crucifixions after the Greek fashion, Margaritone, who had been a friend and contemporary of Cimabue, confounded by the introduction of the new method of art, which he partly disdained and partly despaired to imitate, and old enough to hate innovations of all kinds, through vexation took to his bed, and so died.

On his arrival at Naples, Giotto was received by King Robert with great honor and rejoicing, and, being a monarch of singular accomplishments and fond of the society of learned and distinguished men, he soon found that Giotto was not merely a painter, but a man of the world, a man of various acquirements, whose general reputation for wit and vivacity was not unmerited. He would sometimes visit the painter at his work, and, while watching the rapid progress of his pencil, amused himself with the quaint good sense of his discourse. "If I were you, Giotto," said the King to him one very hot day, I would leave off work, and rest myself," " And so would I, sire," replied the painter, "if I were you!" The King, in a playful mood, desired him to paint his kingdom, on which Giotto immediately sketched the figure of an ass with a heavy pack-saddle on his back, smelling with an eager air at another pack-saddle lying on the ground, on which were a crown and sceptre. By this emblem the satirical painter expressed the servility and fickleness of the Neapolitans, and the King at once understood the allusion.

While at Naples, Giotto painted in the Church of the Incoronati a series of frescoes representing the Seven Sacraments according to the Roman ritual. These still exist, and are among the most authentic and best preserved of his works. The Sacrament of Marriage contains many female figures, beautifully designed and grouped, with graceful heads and flowing draperies. This picture is traditionally, said to represent the marriage of Joanna of Naples and Louis of Tarento; but Giotto died in 1336, and these famous espousals took place in 1347; thus a dry date will sometimes

confound a very pretty theory. In the Sacrament of Ordination there is a group of chanting-boys, in which the various expressions of the act of signing are given with that truth of imitation which made Giotto the wonder of his day. His paintings from the Apocalypse in the Church of Santa Chiara were whitewashed some two hundred and fifty years since, by a prior of the convent, becausc, in the opinion of this barbarian, they made the church look dark!

Giotto quitted Naples about the year 1328, and returned to his native city with increased wealth and fame. He still worked with unabated application, assisted by his pupils, for his school was now the most famous in Italy. Like most of the early Italian artists, he was an architect and sculptor, as well as a painter; and his last public work was the famous Campanile at Florence, founded in 1334, for which he made all the designs, and even executed with his own hands the models for the sculpture on the three lower divisions. According to Kugler, they form a regular series of subjects illustrating the development of human culture through religion and law. This tower is of a Græco-Araba-Gothic style, quadrangular, and built of black, white and red polished marble. Four of the statues which surround it are by Donatello, and the others by Nicolo Aretino, Andrea Pisano, Gittino and Luca della Robbia. When the Emperor Charles V. saw this elegant structure, he exclaimed that it ought to be "kept under glass." In the same allegorical taste, Giotto painted many pictures of the Virtues and Vices, ingeniously invented and rendered with great attention to natural and appropriate expression. In all of these the influence of the genius of Dante can be distinctly traced. A short time

He

before his death, he was invited to Milan by Azzo Visconti. executed some admirable frescoes in the ancient palace of the Dukes of Milan; but these have perished. Finally, having returned to Florence, he soon afterwards died,-" yielding up his soul to God in the year 1336; and having been," says Vasari," no less a good Christian than an excellent painter." His remains were interred in the Church of Santa Maria dell' Fiore, where his master Cimabue had been laid thirty-five years before. Lorenzo de' Medici afterwards placed above his tomb an effigy in marble. Giotto left four sons and four daughters, none of whom, so far as history records, distinguished themselves in art or otherwise.