e village of Vespignano in the
Mugello, the same district which afterward gave birth to Fra Angelico.
Giotto had at least part of his professional training in the great
cathedral at Assisi built over the bones of St. Francis, was one of
those homely, vigorous souls, "a natural person," like his father, whom
neither the lapse of centuries nor the neighborhood of much greater and
more striking persons about them, can deprive of their naive and genuine
individuality. Burly, homely, characteristic, he carries our attentions
always with him, alike on the silent road, or in the king's palace, or
his own simple shop. Wherever he is, he is always the same, shrewd,
humorous, plain-spoken, seeing through all pretenses, yet never
ill-natured in doing so--a character not very lofty or elevated, and to
which the racy ugliness of a strong, uncultivated race seems
natural--but who under that homely nature carried appreciations and
conceptions of beauty such as few fine minds possess.

Of all the beautiful things with which Giotto adorned his city, not one
speaks so powerfully to the foreign visitor--the forestiere whom he and
his fellows never took into account, tho who occupy so large a space
among the admirers of his genius nowadays--as the lovely Campanile which
stands by the great cathedral like the white royal lily beside the Mary
of the Annunciation, slender and strong and everlasting in its delicate
grace. It is not often that a man takes up a new trade when he is
approaching sixty, or even goes into a new path out of his familiar
routine. But Giotto seems to have turned without a moment's hesitation
from his paints and panels to the less easily-wrought materials of the
builder and sculptor, without either faltering from the great enterprise
or doubting his own power to do it. His frescoes and altarpieces and
crucifixes, the work he had been so long accustomed to, and which he
could execute pleasantly in his own workshop or on the cool new walls of
church or convent, with his trained school of younger artists round to
aid him, were as different as possible from the elaborate calculations
and measurements by which alone the lofty tower, straight, and lightsome
as a lily, could have sprung so high and stood so lightly against that
Italian sky.

Like the poet or the romancist when he turns from the flowery ways of
fiction and invention, where he is unencumbered by any restrictions save
those of artistic keeping and personal will,