18 GIOTTO AND HIS WORKS IN PADUA

the road winds into its recesses, ascending still, until the higher woods, now partly oak and partly pine, drooping back from the central crest of the Apennine, leave a pastoral wilderness of scathed rock and arid grass, withered away here by frost, and there by strange lambent tongues of earth-fed fire.* Giotto passed the first ten years of his life, a shepherd boy, among these hills; was found by Cimabue, near his native village, drawing one of his sheep upon a smooth stone;¹ was yielded up by his father, “a simple person, a labourer of the earth,”² to the guardianship of the painter, who, by his own work, had already made the streets of Florence ring with joy;³ attended him to Florence, and became his disciple.

We may fancy the glance of the boy, when he and Cimabue stood side by side on the ridge of Fiesole, and for the first time he saw the flowering thickets of the Val d’Arno; and deep beneath, the innumerable towers of the City of the Lily,⁴ the depths of his own heart yet hiding the fairest of them all. Another ten years passed over him, and he was chosen from among the painters of Italy to decorate the Vatican.⁵

5. The account given us by Vasari of the mode of his competition on this occasion, is one of the few anecdotes of him which seem to be authentic (especially as having

* At Pietra Mala. The flames rise two or three feet above the stony ground out of which they spring, white and fierce enough to be visible in the intense rays even of the morning sun.

¹ [Or scratching it, as Ruskin elsewhere suggests: see Vol. XXIII. p. 267.]

² [Vasari: “lavoratore di terra e naturale persona.”]

³ [See Vol. XXIII. p. 202.]

⁴ [For the many towns of Florence (the City of the Lily, Vol. XXIII. p. 68), see ibid., p. 65.]

⁵ [The date of Giotto’s summons to Rome is fixed by good evidence. Baldinucci, quoting from documents recorded in the Vatican archives, shows that in 1298 Cardinal Giacomo Gaetani de’ Stefaneschi ordered the Navicella of S. Peter (now in the vestibule of St. Peter’s, over the main door) to be made in mosaic “by the hand of Giotto,” “a very celebrated painter,” and also an altar-piece for the high altar (now in the Sagrestia dei Canonici), “which cost 800 florins of gold.” The fact that Giotto was in 1298 so celebrated is held by many to support 1266 as the year of his birth.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]