r, but who appears actually to have been nothing more than his
fellow-workman and associate....

The Cathedral, the Palazzo Pubblico, the two great churches of Santa
Croce and Santa Maria Novella, all leaped into being within a few years,
almost simultaneously. The Duomo was founded, as some say, in 1294, the
same year in which Santa Croce was begun, or, according to others, in
1298; and between these two dates, in 1296, the Palace of the Signoria,
the seat of the Commonwealth, the center of all public life, had its
commencement. All these great buildings, Arnolfo designed and began, and
his genius requires no other evidence. The stern strength of the
Palazzo, upright and strong like a knight in mail, and the large and
noble lines of the Cathedral, ample and liberal and majestic in ornate
robes and wealthy ornaments, show how well he knew to vary and adapt his
art to the different requirements of municipal and religious life and to
the necessities of the age.

We are not informed who they were who carried out the design of the
Duomo. Arnolfo only lived to see a portion of this, his greatest work,
completed--"the three principal tribunes which were under the cupola,"
and which Vasari tells us were so solid and strongly built as to be able
to bear the full weight of Brunelleschi's dome, which was much larger
and heavier than the one the original architect had himself designed.
Arnolfo died when he had built his Palazzo in rugged strength, as it
still stands, with walls like living rock and heavy Tuscan cornices--tho
it was reserved to the other masters to put upon it the wonderful crown
of its appropriate tower--and just as the round apse of the cathedral
approached completion; a hard fate for a great builder to leave such
noble work behind him half done, yet the most common of all fates. He
died, so far as there is any certainty in dates, in 1300, during the
brief period of Dante's power in Florence, when the poet was one of the
priors and much engaged in public business; and the same eventful year
concluded the existence of Cimabue, the first of the great school of
Florentine painters--he whose picture was carried home to the church in
which it was to dwell for all the intervening centuries with such pride
and acclamation that the Borgo Allegri is said to have taken its name
from this wonderful rejoicing....

No more notable or distinct figure than Giotto is in all the history of
Florence. He was born a peasant, in th