DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.61902#0138
118
THE MAKERS OF FLORENCE.
birth to Fra Angelico. His father was a countryman
called Bondone, a natur ale per sone, as Vasari describes him
no way superior to the other peasants about. Fortunately
the critics have found nothing to say against the pretty
story which tells how Cimabue, fine painter-cavalier,
making some chance expedition into the country, encoun-
tered in his way a flock of sheep grazing about the wilds,
in the charge of a brown peasant boy of ten, withbuskined
legs, no doubt, and unkempt locks, like those still to be
met with by all the rural ways of Italy. The child, intent
upon his occupation, was drawing, or trying to draw with
no instruction but that of nature, with a pointed stone
upon a piece of slate, a picture of one of his sheep.
Cimabue, captivated by the adventure, and seeing in the
childish outline that something of aptitude and possibility
which an artist’s eye is so quick to see, asked if the boy
would go with him to be taught, and Bondone, hastily
called from his fields and overawed no doubt by the ap-
pearance of so fine a gentleman, consented, “ because he
was very poor,” Vasari says; but he could not have been
so very poor, since we find that he left land to his son in
the Mugello, though he had no claim to gentility, and was
only a “natural person,” an Italian clown, like all the other
villagers and plowmen about. After this pretty intro-
duction to him, we hear no more of the lad till we find him
at Assisi, doing work of a wonderfully advanced character
for the age, already with more beauty in it than that of
his master, and distinctly different and individual. Even
at so early a period he was himself and not merely
Cimabue’s pupil ; Vasari remarking in the after record
upon a series of drawings which were said to be “invenzione
di Dante,” suggests that even in the much-praised designs
of Assisi the young painter had been aided by the poet.
In most cases this is as foolish a suggestion as it is derog-
atory, for few people have either leisure or inclination thus
THE MAKERS OF FLORENCE.
birth to Fra Angelico. His father was a countryman
called Bondone, a natur ale per sone, as Vasari describes him
no way superior to the other peasants about. Fortunately
the critics have found nothing to say against the pretty
story which tells how Cimabue, fine painter-cavalier,
making some chance expedition into the country, encoun-
tered in his way a flock of sheep grazing about the wilds,
in the charge of a brown peasant boy of ten, withbuskined
legs, no doubt, and unkempt locks, like those still to be
met with by all the rural ways of Italy. The child, intent
upon his occupation, was drawing, or trying to draw with
no instruction but that of nature, with a pointed stone
upon a piece of slate, a picture of one of his sheep.
Cimabue, captivated by the adventure, and seeing in the
childish outline that something of aptitude and possibility
which an artist’s eye is so quick to see, asked if the boy
would go with him to be taught, and Bondone, hastily
called from his fields and overawed no doubt by the ap-
pearance of so fine a gentleman, consented, “ because he
was very poor,” Vasari says; but he could not have been
so very poor, since we find that he left land to his son in
the Mugello, though he had no claim to gentility, and was
only a “natural person,” an Italian clown, like all the other
villagers and plowmen about. After this pretty intro-
duction to him, we hear no more of the lad till we find him
at Assisi, doing work of a wonderfully advanced character
for the age, already with more beauty in it than that of
his master, and distinctly different and individual. Even
at so early a period he was himself and not merely
Cimabue’s pupil ; Vasari remarking in the after record
upon a series of drawings which were said to be “invenzione
di Dante,” suggests that even in the much-praised designs
of Assisi the young painter had been aided by the poet.
In most cases this is as foolish a suggestion as it is derog-
atory, for few people have either leisure or inclination thus