r's, which was served in different rooms,
according to the weather and the time of year; secondly, the 'tinello,'
or canteen, as we should call it, for the so-called gentlemen
retainers--among whom, by the bye, ranked the chief butler and the head
groom, besides the chaplain and the doctor; thirdly, the servants' hall,
where all the lower people of the house fed together. Then, as now in
old countries, the labour of a large household was indefinitely
subdivided, and no servant was expected to do more than one thing, and
every servant had an assistant upon whom he forced all the hard work. A
shepherd lad, brought in from the hills in his sheepskin coat, sheepskin
breeches, and leg swathings of rags and leather, would naturally be the
butt of such an establishment. On the other hand, the shepherd boy was a
genius and had a tongue like a razor, besides being the favourite of the
all-powerful master; and as it was neither lawful nor safe to lay hands
on him, his power of cutting speech made him feared.

So he learned Latin with the man who had taught Dante,--and Dante was
admitted to be the most learned man of his times,--and he ground the
colours and washed the brushes for Cimabue, and drew under the master's
eye everything that he saw, and became, as the chronicler Villani says
of him, 'the most sovereign master of painting to be found in his time,
and the one who most of all others took all figures and all action from
nature.' And Villani was his contemporary, and knew him when he was
growing old, and recorded his death and his splendid funeral.

One-half of all permanent success in art must always lie in the
mechanical part of it, in the understanding and use of the tools. They
were primitive in Giotto's day, and even much later, according to our
estimate. Oil painting was not dreamt of, nor anything like a lead
pencil for drawing. There was no canvas on which to paint. No one had
thought of making an artist's palette. Not one-tenth of the substances
now used for colours were known then. A modern artist might find himself
in great difficulties if he were called upon to paint a picture with
Cimabue's tools.

But to Giotto they must have seemed marvellous after his pointed stone
pencil and his bit of untrimmed slate. Everything must have surprised
and delighted him in his first days in Florence--the streets, the
houses, the churches, the people, the dresses he saw; and the boy who
had begun by copying the sheep that wer