DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.51584#0052
48
EARLY ITALIAN PAINTERS.
Vasari, “ no less a good Christian than an excellent
painter he was honourably interred in the church
of Santa Maria del Fiore, where his master Ci-
mabue had been laid with similar honours thirty-
five years before. Lorenzo de’ Medici afterwards
placed above his tomb his effigy in marble, from
which the illustrative portrait has been taken.
Giotto left four sons and four daughters, but we do
not hear that any of his descendants became distin-
guished in art or otherwise.*
Before we proceed to give some account of the
personal character and influence of Giotto, both as
a man and an artist, of which many amusing and
interesting traits have been handed down to us, we
must turn for a moment to reconsider that revo-
lution in art which originated with him—which
seized at once on all imaginations, all sympathies ;
which Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch have all
commemorated in immortal verse or as immortal
prose; which, during a whole century, filled Italy
and Sicily with disciples formed in the same school
and penetrated with the same ideas. All that had
been done in painting before Giotto, resolved itself
into the imitation of certain existing models, and
their improvement to a certain point in style of
* In the foregoing sketch some disputed points in the life
of Giotto are for obvious reasons left at rest, and the order
of events has been somewhat changed, in accordance with
more exact chroniclers than Vasari.
EARLY ITALIAN PAINTERS.
Vasari, “ no less a good Christian than an excellent
painter he was honourably interred in the church
of Santa Maria del Fiore, where his master Ci-
mabue had been laid with similar honours thirty-
five years before. Lorenzo de’ Medici afterwards
placed above his tomb his effigy in marble, from
which the illustrative portrait has been taken.
Giotto left four sons and four daughters, but we do
not hear that any of his descendants became distin-
guished in art or otherwise.*
Before we proceed to give some account of the
personal character and influence of Giotto, both as
a man and an artist, of which many amusing and
interesting traits have been handed down to us, we
must turn for a moment to reconsider that revo-
lution in art which originated with him—which
seized at once on all imaginations, all sympathies ;
which Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch have all
commemorated in immortal verse or as immortal
prose; which, during a whole century, filled Italy
and Sicily with disciples formed in the same school
and penetrated with the same ideas. All that had
been done in painting before Giotto, resolved itself
into the imitation of certain existing models, and
their improvement to a certain point in style of
* In the foregoing sketch some disputed points in the life
of Giotto are for obvious reasons left at rest, and the order
of events has been somewhat changed, in accordance with
more exact chroniclers than Vasari.