he subsequent and minor particulars. It is at least
undoubted truth that Giotto was born, and passed the years of
childhood, at Vespignano, about fourteen miles north of Florence, on
the road to Bologna. Few travellers can forget the peculiar landscape
of that district of the Apennine. As they ascend the hill which rises
from Florence to the lowest break in the ridge of Fiesole, they pass
continually beneath the walls of villas bright in perfect luxury, and
beside cypress-hedges, enclosing fair terraced gardens, where the
masses of oleander and magnolia, motionless as leaves in a picture,
inlay alternately upon the blue sky their branching lightness of pale
rose-colour, and deep green breadth of shade, studded with balls of
budding silver, and showing at intervals through their framework of
rich leaf and rubied flower, the far-away bends of the Arno beneath
its slopes of olive, and the purple peaks of the Carrara mountains,
tossing themselves against the western distance, where the streaks of
motionless cloud burn above the Pisan sea. The traveller passes the
Fiesolan ridge, and all is changed. The country is on a sudden
lonely. Here and there indeed are seen the scattered houses of a farm
grouped gracefully upon the hill-sides,--here and there a fragment of
tower upon a distant rock; but neither gardens, nor flowers, nor
glittering palace-walls, only a grey extent of mountain-ground, tufted
irregularly with ilex and olive: a scene not sublime, for its forms
are subdued and low; not desolate, for its valleys are full of sown
fields and tended pastures; not rich nor lovely, but sunburnt and
sorrowful; becoming wilder every instant as the road winds into its
recesses, ascending still, until the higher woods, now partly oak and
partly pine, drooping back from the central crest of the Apennine,
leave a pastoral wilderness of scathed rock and arid grass, withered
away here by frost, and there by strange lambent tongues of earth-fed
fire.[4] Giotto passed the first ten years of his life, a
shepherd-boy, among these hills; was found by Cimabue near his native
village, drawing one of his sheep upon a smooth stone; was yielded up
by his father, "a simple person, a labourer of the earth," to the
guardianship of the painter, who, by his own work, had already made
the streets of Florence ring with joy; attended him to Florence, and
became his disciple.

[Footnote 3: Lord Lindsay, _Christian Art_, vol. ii. p. 166.]

[Footnote 4: A