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.
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![ation, as terrible and repulsive as possible. Giotto was the lirst to soften this awful ancl 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 crucifixes after the Greek fashion, Margaritone, who had been a friend and contemporary of Cima- bue, confounded by the introduction of this new method of art, which he partly disdained and partly despaired to imitate, and old enough to hate innovations of all kinds, took to his bed infastidito (through vexation), and so died. But to return to Giotto, whom we left on the road to Naples. King Bobert received him 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, amuse 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 king- dom, 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 the fickleness of the Nea- politans, and the king at once understood the allusion. There exists at Naples, in the church of the Incoronata, a series of frescoes representing the Seven Sacraments according to the Bo man ritual, which were formerly attributed to Giotto, but are now supposed to be by some follower of his style and time.1 The Sacrament of Marriage contains many female fig- ures, beautifully designed and grouped, with graceful heads and flowing draperies. This picture is traditionally said to repre- 1 There exist engravings from these frescoes, from which an idea may be formed of the grouping and composition. Three of these are given in [Crowe and Cavalcaselle, History of Painting in Italy]. But when I visited the old church of the Incoronata, in 1858, I found them in a ruined condition.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b24877888_0056.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
