such work as
that of the Cavallini and their school at Assisi there may be found a
faint memory of the splendour that had so unfortunately passed away, it
is rather the shadow of the statues we find there--in the Abraham of the
upper church of S. Francesco, for instance--than the more lyrical and
mortal loveliness of the unknown painters of Imperial Rome. Yet it is
there, in that lonely and beautiful church full of the soft sweet light
of Umbria, that Giotto perhaps learned all that was needed to enable him
not only to recreate the art of painting, but to decide its future in
Italy.

Here in the Accademia in the Sala dei Maestri Toscani you may see an
altarpiece that has perhaps come to us from his hands, amid much
beautiful languid work that is still in the shadow of the Middle Age, or
that, coming after him, has almost failed to understand his message, the
words of life which may everywhere be found in his frescoes in Assisi,
in Florence, in Padua, spoiled though they be by the intervention of
fools, the spoliation of the vandals.

Those strange and lovely altarpieces ruthlessly torn from the convents
and churches of Tuscany still keep inviolate the secret of those who,
not without tears, made them for the love of God: once for sure they
made a sunshine in some shadowy place. Hung here to-day in a museum,
just so many specimens that we number and set in order, they seem rude
and fantastic enough, and in the cold light of this salone, crowded
together like so much furniture, they have lost all meaning or
intention. They are dead, and we gaze at them almost with contempt; they
will never move us again. That rude and almost terrible picture of
Madonna and Saints with its little scenes from the life of our Lord,
stolen from the Franciscan convent of S. Chiara at Lucca, what is it to
us who pass by? Yet once it listened for the prayers of the little nuns
of S. Francis, and, who knows, may have heard the very voice of Il
Poverello. That passionate and dreadful picture of St. Mary Magdalen
covered by her hair as with a robe of red gold, does it move us at all?
Will it explain to us the rise of Florentine painting? And you, O
learned archaeologist, you, O scientific critic, you, O careless and
curious tourist, will it bring you any comfort to read (if you can) the
inscription--

"Ne desperetis, vos qui peccare soletis
Exemploque meo vos reperate Deo."

Those small pictures of the life of St. Mary, which surround