DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.51584#0034
30
EARLY ITALIAN PAINTERS.
character of art must in all human probability
have taken place sooner or later, since all the in-
fluences of that wonderful period of regeneration
were tending towards it. Then did architecture
struggle as it were from the Byzantine into the
Gothic forms, like a mighty plant putting forth its
rich foliage and shooting up towards heaven ; then
did the speech of the people—the vulgar tongues,
as they were called—begin to assume their present
structure, and become the medium through which
beauty and love and action and feeling and
thought were to be uttered and immortalized; and
then arose Giotto, the destined instrument
through which his own beautiful art was to be-
come not a mere fashioner of idols, but one of the
great interpreters of the human soul with all its
“infinite” of feelings and faculties, and of human
life in all its multifarious aspects. Giotto was the
first painter who “ held as it were the mirror up
to nature.” Cimabue’s strongest claim to the gra-
titude of succeeding ages is, that he bequeathed
such a man to his native country and to the world.
About the year 1289, when Cimabue was already
old and at the height of his fame, as he was riding
in the valley of Vespignano, about fourteen miles
from Florence, his attention was attracted by a boy
who was herding sheep, and who, while his flocks
were feeding around, seemed intently drawing on a
smooth fragment of slate, with a bit of pointed
EARLY ITALIAN PAINTERS.
character of art must in all human probability
have taken place sooner or later, since all the in-
fluences of that wonderful period of regeneration
were tending towards it. Then did architecture
struggle as it were from the Byzantine into the
Gothic forms, like a mighty plant putting forth its
rich foliage and shooting up towards heaven ; then
did the speech of the people—the vulgar tongues,
as they were called—begin to assume their present
structure, and become the medium through which
beauty and love and action and feeling and
thought were to be uttered and immortalized; and
then arose Giotto, the destined instrument
through which his own beautiful art was to be-
come not a mere fashioner of idols, but one of the
great interpreters of the human soul with all its
“infinite” of feelings and faculties, and of human
life in all its multifarious aspects. Giotto was the
first painter who “ held as it were the mirror up
to nature.” Cimabue’s strongest claim to the gra-
titude of succeeding ages is, that he bequeathed
such a man to his native country and to the world.
About the year 1289, when Cimabue was already
old and at the height of his fame, as he was riding
in the valley of Vespignano, about fourteen miles
from Florence, his attention was attracted by a boy
who was herding sheep, and who, while his flocks
were feeding around, seemed intently drawing on a
smooth fragment of slate, with a bit of pointed