donna Laura, with
so much credit to himself.

[Illustration: _M. S._

MADONNA AND CHILD

(_After the painting by_ Lippo Memmi. _Altenburg: Lindenau Museum, 43_)]

TADDEO GADDI

LIFE OF TADDEO GADDI,

PAINTER OF FLORENCE

It is a beautiful and truly useful and praiseworthy action to reward
talent largely in every place, and to honour him who has it, seeing that
an infinity of intellects which might otherwise slumber, roused by this
encouragement, strive with all industry not only to learn their art but
to become excellent therein, in order to advance themselves and to
attain to a rank both profitable and honourable; whence there may follow
honour for their country, glory for themselves, and riches and nobility
for their descendants, who, upraised by such beginnings, very often
become both very rich and very noble, even as the descendants of the
painter Taddeo Gaddi did by reason of his work. This Taddeo di Gaddo
Gaddi, a Florentine, after the death of Giotto--who had held him at his
baptism and had been his master for twenty-four years after the death of
Gaddo, as it is written by Cennino di Drea Cennini, painter of Colle di
Valdelsa--remained among the first in the art of painting and greater
than all his fellow-disciples both in judgment and in genius; and he
wrought his first works, with a great facility given to him by nature
rather than acquired by art, in the Church of S. Croce in Florence, in
the chapel of the sacristy, where, together with his companions,
disciples of the dead Giotto, he made some stories of S. Mary Magdalene,
with beautiful figures and with most beautiful and extravagant costumes
of those times. And in the Chapel of the Baroncelli and Bandini, where
Giotto had formerly wrought the panel in distemper, he made by himself
in fresco, on one wall, some stories of Our Lady which were held very
beautiful. He also painted over the door of the said sacristy the story
of Christ disputing with the Doctors in the Temple, which was afterwards
half ruined when the elder Cosimo de' Medici, in making the noviciate,
the chapel, and the antechamber in front of the sacristy, placed a
cornice of stone over the said door. In the same church he painted in
fresco the Chapel of the Bellacci, and also that of S. Andrea by the
side of one of the three of Giotto, wherein he made the scene of Jesus
Christ taking Andrew and Peter from their nets, and the crucifixion of
the former Apostle, a work great