DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.61902#0134
114
THE MAKERS OF FLORENCE.
exclusively than most of his brethren in art, and except
that he was associated with Arnolfo, perhaps only nomi-
nally and as a matter of compliment in the great “ opera ”
of the cathedral, seems to have had little or no share in the
mass of architectural work which was then getting itself
done on all sides with such wonderful energy and zeal.
He seems to have been a proud man, arrogant and assum-
ing, perhaps thinking it beneath his nobility to keep up a
bottega and enter into the full exercise of his craft, and
has left little knowledge of himself in the world except by
his pictures, which are more valuable as landmarks in art
and indications of the approaching moment when true
beauty and grace were to vanquish the conventional and
untrue, than beautiful in themselves. Whether he did
anything at all in the cathedral we do not know. By the
time of Arnolfo’s death Cimabue too was near his end, and
ora ha Giotto it griclo. A new monarch had arisen in
Art and Florence, a man of greater genius and kinder
soul.
For just about the same date, before Dante had left the
city on that disastrous mission to Pope Benedict from
which he never returned, and Cimabue and Arnolfo, dim
figures in their decay, were fading out of the world, a new
painter, the apprentice and pupil of the old, who had been
painting in the new church in Assisi and had already made
himself famous, got his first great public commission,
which was to paint a Paradiso over the altar in the chapel
of the Podestd in the old stern Bargello palace, where that
officer lived. What more natural than that Giotto, peace-
fully painting the saints of his Paradise, should introduce
the portraits of his friends among them, and above all
that especial friend whose notice of the young painter was
so flattering, and whose acquaintance at once as statesman,
ambassador, and poet, it was a pride to possess? Swung
high up upon his scaffold upon the lofty wall, unaware of
THE MAKERS OF FLORENCE.
exclusively than most of his brethren in art, and except
that he was associated with Arnolfo, perhaps only nomi-
nally and as a matter of compliment in the great “ opera ”
of the cathedral, seems to have had little or no share in the
mass of architectural work which was then getting itself
done on all sides with such wonderful energy and zeal.
He seems to have been a proud man, arrogant and assum-
ing, perhaps thinking it beneath his nobility to keep up a
bottega and enter into the full exercise of his craft, and
has left little knowledge of himself in the world except by
his pictures, which are more valuable as landmarks in art
and indications of the approaching moment when true
beauty and grace were to vanquish the conventional and
untrue, than beautiful in themselves. Whether he did
anything at all in the cathedral we do not know. By the
time of Arnolfo’s death Cimabue too was near his end, and
ora ha Giotto it griclo. A new monarch had arisen in
Art and Florence, a man of greater genius and kinder
soul.
For just about the same date, before Dante had left the
city on that disastrous mission to Pope Benedict from
which he never returned, and Cimabue and Arnolfo, dim
figures in their decay, were fading out of the world, a new
painter, the apprentice and pupil of the old, who had been
painting in the new church in Assisi and had already made
himself famous, got his first great public commission,
which was to paint a Paradiso over the altar in the chapel
of the Podestd in the old stern Bargello palace, where that
officer lived. What more natural than that Giotto, peace-
fully painting the saints of his Paradise, should introduce
the portraits of his friends among them, and above all
that especial friend whose notice of the young painter was
so flattering, and whose acquaintance at once as statesman,
ambassador, and poet, it was a pride to possess? Swung
high up upon his scaffold upon the lofty wall, unaware of