Memoirs of the early Italian painters / by Anna Jameson; thoroughly revised and in part rewritten by Estelle M. Hurll.
- Anna Brownell Jameson
- Date:
- 1899
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Memoirs of the early Italian painters / by Anna Jameson; thoroughly revised and in part rewritten by Estelle M. Hurll. Source: Wellcome Collection.
50/335 page 16
![GIOTTO Born 1276, Diicn 1336 Credette Cimabue nella Pittura Tener lo campo, ed ora ha Giotto il grido; — Sicche la fama di cokii oscura. Cimabue thought To lord it over painting’s field; and now The cry is Giotto’s and his name eclips’d. Cary’s Dante [Purg. canto xi. 93]. These often-quoted lines from Dante’s Purgatorio must needs be once more quoted here: for it is a curious circum- stance that, applicable in his own day, five hundred years ago, they should still be so applicable in ours. Open any common history not intended for the very profound, and there we still find Cimabue “ lording it over painting’s field,” and placed at the head of a revolution in Art with which, as an artist, he had little or nothing to do — but much as a man; for to him — to his quick perception and generous protection of talent in the lowly shepherd-boy — we owe Giotto, than whom no single human being of whom we read has exercised, in any particular department of science or art, a more immediate, wide, and lasting influence. The total change in the direction and charac- ter of Art must in all human probability have taken place sooner or later, since all the influences of that wonderful period of regeneration were tending towards it. Then did architec- ture struggle as it were from the Byzantine into the Gothic forms, like a mighty plant putting forth its rich foliage and shooting up towards heaven ; then did the speech of the people — the “ vulgar tongues,” as they were called — begin to assume their present structure, and become the medium through which beauty and love and action and feeling and thought were to be uttered and immortalized; and then arose Giotto, the des- tined instrument through which his own beautiful art was to become one of the great interpreters of the human soul, with](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b24877888_0050.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
