Page:An Elementary History of Art.djvu/367

In Floeence. 337 from the Passion of Christ, the Entry into Jerusalem, etc., in the cathedral of Siena, and other minor works, in which he perhaps displayed greater feeling for beauty and knowledge of form than Cimabue himself. The National Gallery contains a Madonna and Child by Duccio. We have now reached the second stage of the develop- ment of the Italian school of painting, and shall have to distinguish between two styles into which it branched off in the time of Giotto. We still find Tuscany taking the lead, but Tuscan artists are no longer of one mind. The head-quarters of one school was Florence — of the other, Siena : the Florentines and their followers, who derived their practice to a certain extent from the early Sienese masters, were distinguished for vigour of conception and richness of composition ; the Sienese, for warmth of feeling and grace in the treatment of single figures. At the head of the new Florentine school stands Ambrogiotto Bondone, known as Giotto (1266 — 1337) who was the first Italian painter to free himself entirely from Byzantine traditions, and who exercised a lasting influence on art in every part of Italy. According to an old tradition, now exploded, Giotto began life as a shepherd-boy on the mountains near Vespignano, his native place, and his artistic genius was first discovered by Cimabue, who surprised him, when a child of some ten or twelve years old, drawing one of his sheep on a piece of smooth slate with a sharply-pointed stone. Cimabue at once took him to his own home in Florence, and taught him the rudiments of his art. It was not long before Giotto surpassed his master ; and his earnest study of nature, and steadfast resistance to all that was false or EHA Z