"Giotto" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... already anticipated much of that meditative subtlety, which is sometimes supposed peculiar to the great imaginative workmen of its close. Leaving the simple religion which had occupied the followers of Giotto for a century, and the simple naturalism which had grown out of it, a thing of birds and flowers only, he sought inspiration in what to him were works of the modern world, the writings of Dante and Boccaccio, and in new readings of his own of ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... decoration. This would have remedied their present nakedness and lack of interest, but it was only in a very few instances carried out. The double church of S.Francesco at Assisi, decorated by Cimabue, Giotto, and other early Tuscan painters, the Arena Chapel at Padua, painted by Giotto, the Spanish Chapel of S.M. Novella, Florence, and the east end of S.Croce, Florence, are illustrations of the splendor of effect ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... a right to begin and rail. The wreck of Florence, says Mr. Ruskin, "is now too ghastly and heart-breaking to any human soul that remembers the days of old"; and these desperate words are an allusion to the fact that the little square in front of the cathedral, at the foot of Giotto's Tower, with the grand Baptistery on the other side, is now the resort of a number of hackney-coaches and omnibuses. This fact is doubtless lamentable, and it would be a hundred times more agreeable to ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... my father, "you must not judge by the work, but by the work in connection with the surroundings. Could Giotto or Filippo Lippi, think you, have got a picture into the Exhibition? Would a single one of those frescoes we went to see when we were at Padua have the remotest chance of being hung, if it were sent in for exhibition ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... though they have feigned to paint the Holy Family and the Crucifixion and the Dead Christ and the Last Supper, it is the loveliness of life that has inspired their art. Yea, even from the prayerful Giotto downwards, it is the pride of life, it is the glory of the human form, it is the joy of color, it is the dignity of man, it is the adoration of the Muses. Ay, and have not our nobles had themselves painted ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... other wicked men; on the other side were Tantalos and Sisyphos. Between these scenes, on the flanks, were various groups of heroes and heroines from the Trojan and other legends. From the remarks of ancient critics, it might be inferred that the genius of Polygnotos, like that of Giotto, was far in advance of his technical skill. Aristotle called him the most ethical of painters, and recommended the young artist to study his works in preference to those of his contemporary Pauson, who was ignobly realistic, or those of Zeuxis, who had great technical merit, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 365, December 30, 1882 • Various
... died in 1300. Fierce as the age in which he lived, says Lanzi, his Madonnas were without beauty, and his angels, even in the same picture, were all in the same attitude. To Cimabue succeeded his pupil, the famous Giotto, who died in 1337. With him the ruggedness of his master's manner was softened down, and considerable advances made towards a better style. He was honourably received at many of the principal towns and cities of Italy, and may, perhaps, be considered as the real founder of their ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... on Italian art in that wonderful fourteenth century, Dante was the greatest. He was the intimate friend of Giotto. Through the communion of mind, not less than through his writings, he infused into religious art that mingled theology, poetry, and mysticism, which ruled in the Giottesque school during the following century, and went hand in hand with the development ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... expression in the early masters at Padua, though she does not mention Giotto. In Florence, the expense of the hotels again obliged her to go through the tiresome work of seeking apartments. They fortunately found sunny rooms, as the cold was intense. To cold followed rain, and she remarks:—"Walking ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... Harford says, "The pencil of Giotto was employed by Benedict XII. in the year 1340"; but he does not tell us how the pencil answered the purpose for which it was employed in a hand other than its ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... from Vasari downwards; partially quoted, but little read. He finished writing his book on the arts the 31st day of July 1437; was born soon after 1350; had been twelve years the disciple of Agnolo Gaddi, who died 1387; son of Taddeo Gaddi, the disciple and godson of Giotto, the "father of modern art." The precepts which he delivers are therefore those acquired in immediate succession from that great first master, and as the secrets of his art. We grieve to add that the work was written in prison, dated from the Stinche in Florence, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... is a poem of many moods, beginning with Giotto's Tower; then wondering why Giotto did not tell the poet who loved him so much that one of his pictures was lying hidden in a shop where some one else picked it up; then, thinking of all Giotto's followers, whose ghosts he imagines are wandering through Florence, sorrowing ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... was by no means behindhand: Dante, Giotto, Brunelleschi, and Donatello were dead, but Ariosto, Raphael, Bramante, and Michael Angelo were now living. Rome, Florence, and Naples had inherited the masterpieces of antiquity; and the manuscripts of AEschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides had come (thanks ...
— The Borgias - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... earthly standard by companionship with the Saviour, exhibiting their high destiny by a noble bearing, worthy of the solemn and glorious duties they were devoted to fulfil. We gaze on these figures as we do on the works of Giotto and Fra Angelico, until we feel human nature may lose nearly all of its debasements before the "mortal coil" is "shuffled off," and that mental goodness may shine through and glorify its earthly tabernacle, and give an assurance in time present of the superiorities of an hereafter. Dead, ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... greatly increased by this spiral action; and the fine {138} instinct of its being so, caused the twisted pillar to be used in the Lombardic Gothic,—at first, merely as a pleasant variety of form, but at last constructively and universally, by Giotto, and all the architects of his school. Not that the spiral form actually adds to the strength of a Lombardic pillar, by imitating contortions of wood, any more than the fluting of a Doric shaft adds to its strength by imitating the canaliculation of a reed; but the ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... gives a most powerful character to the figure. Altogether, this picture contains perhaps a greater amount of bold imagination and originality of conception than any of the kind ever painted. For sublimity there are few works which equal the 'Archangels' of Giotto, who stand singly, holding their sceptres, and with relapsed wings. The 'Paul' of Masaccio is a well-known example of the dignified simplicity of which these artists possessed so large a share. These instances might be multiplied without end; but ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... forth to find what had happened,—first to the cathedral, to see if anything was left of Giotto's tower and Brunelleschi's dome, and, to my great joy, found them standing; but, as I entered the vast building, I saw one of the enormous iron bars which take the thrust of the wide arches of the nave pulled apart and broken as if it had been pack-thread; there were also a few ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... stepped for the first time into his gondola at Venice, the famous Italian cathedrals and stately palaces were already built, and the great architects were gone. Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, who had created Italian literature, lived about as long before Sidney as we live after him. Cimabue and Giotto had begun; Raphael and Michel Angelo had perfected that art in which they have had no rivals—and they were gone. Andrea Doria steered the galleys of Genoa no more, and since the discovery of the Cape of Good Hope and ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... of conventionality which had long bound her. In this he shows his close relation to his times. It is his fidelity to Nature which has made him a leader for all successive generations. The "Vita Nuova" was the beginning of a new school of poetry and of prose as completely as Giotto's O was the beginning of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... painter was born in 1301. He was the grandson and disciple of Giotto, whom, according to Vasari, he greatly excelled in every department of art. From his close imitations of nature, he was called by his fellow citizens, "Stefano the Ape," (ape of nature.) He was the first artist ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... studio of Rossetti, who had the highest opinion of his abilities. And, taking art in its special function, that of the decorator, there can hardly be a dispute as to his rank amongst the greatest of romantic designers of the centuries following that of Giotto. His fertility of invention was very great; and, considering that his studies began at a period which for most artists would have been too late for the acquisition of technical excellence of a high degree, his attainment in that ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... rule. The balance in the finest work is usually on the side of flat tones rather than on the side of gradated tones. Work that errs on the side of gradations, like that of Greuze, however popular its appeal, is much poorer stuff than work that errs on the side of flatness in tone, like Giotto and the Italian primitives, or Puvis de ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... of Giotto has not been drawn up with any idea of attempting a history of his life. That history could only be written after a careful search through the libraries of Italy for all documents relating to the years during which he worked. I have no time for such search, or even for the examination ...
— Giotto and his works in Padua • John Ruskin
... They say of Giotto that he introduced goodness into the art of painting; Washington carried it with him to the camp and the Cabinet, and established a new criterion of human greatness. The purity of his will confirmed his fortitude: and as he never faltered in his ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... until, when mediaeval civilization was reaching its moment of consolidation, when the cathedrals of Lucca and Pisa stood completed, when Niccoto and Giovanni Pisani had sculptured their pulpits and sepulchres, painting, in the hands of, Cimabue and Duccio, of Giotto and of Guido da Siena, freed itself from the tradition of the mosaicists as sculpture had freed itself from the practice of the stone-masons, and stood forth an ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... by a comparative freedom from tradition, by closer approximation to reality and nature, by a charm and a sympathetic quality, and by a scheme of colour that indicate the coming of a new age and spirit. Curiously enough, they are contemporary with the frescoes of Giotto at Padua (1303-1306). But whatever points of similarity may be detected between them and the work of the Italian artist, or between them and the Italian school before Giotto, should be explained as due to a common stock of traditions and to the simultaneous awakening of a new ...
— Byzantine Churches in Constantinople - Their History and Architecture • Alexander Van Millingen
... alone, I supposed the bare words, in such juxtaposition, would sufficiently convey the desired meaning. "Faith and good works" is another fancy, for instance, and perhaps no easier to arrive at: yet Giotto placed a pomegranate fruit in the hand of Dante, and Raffaelle crowned his Theology (in the 'Camera della Segnatura') with blossoms of the same; as if the Bellari and Vasari would be sure to come after, and explain that it was merely "simbolo ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... They were all eagerness, and exchanged names. Thus Joe came to know Jacob Izon and Salvatore Giotto and Nathan Latsky. He was greatly interested in Izon, the facts of whose life he soon came to know. Izon was a designer, working at Marrin's, the shirtwaist manufacturer; he made thirty dollars a week, had a ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... IN FLORENCE" is a fanciful monologue, spoken as by one who is looking down upon Florence, through her magical atmosphere, from a villa on the neighbouring heights. The sight of her Campanile brings Giotto to his mind; and with Giotto comes a vision of all the dead Old Masters who mingle in spirit with her living men. He sees them each haunting the scene of his former labours in church or chapter-room, cloister or crypt; and he sees them grieving ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... peal, than a North Italian belfry holds in leash. But it does not send them out in a mere scale, it touches them in the order of the game of a charming melody. Of all cheerful sounds made by man this is by far the most light-hearted. You do not hear it from the great churches. Giotto's coloured tower in Florence, that carries the bells for Santa Maria del Fiore and Brunelleschi's silent dome, does not ring more than four contralto notes, tuned with sweetness, depth, and dignity, and swinging one musical phrase which ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... there was an extraordinary development in the art of painting under the guidance and inspiration of the first great Italian painter, Giotto. Before his time the frescoes, like the illuminations in the manuscripts of which we have spoken in a previous chapter, were exceedingly stiff and unlifelike. With Giotto there comes a change. Antique art did not furnish him with any models to copy, for whatever the ancients had accomplished ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... geometrical exactitude of the broad and thin coloured lines round the edges of a common cup and saucer, and speculated upon the means by which it was arrived at. A girl drew those lines, a girl with a hand as sure as Giotto's, and no better tools than a couple of brushes and a small revolving table called a whirler. Forty-eight hours a week Mary Beechinor sat before her whirler. Actuating the treadle, she placed a piece ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... phe, Satan, Phe, Phe, ale, phe!' [1] Now I had learned the French tongue well; and on hearing this sentence, the meaning of that phrase used by Dante came into my memory, when he and his master Virgil entered the doors of Hell. Dante and the painter Giotto were together in France, and particularly in the city of Paris, where, owing to the circumstances I have just described, the hall of justice may be truly called a hell. Dante then, who also understood French well, made use of ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... what share Mr. Kirkup had in the recovery of the fresco of Giotto in the chapel of the Palazzo del Podesta at Florence, and whether directly or indirectly I have been the means of depriving him, or any of the cooeperators in that good work, of the merit due to their labors. I shall best enable those ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... eight days in Venice and then returned by easy stages first to Padua, where I wanted to see Giotto's work, then to Verona, and then here (Lugano). Verona delighted me more than anything I have seen, and we will spend two other days there as we ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... obstructions. Illustrious instances will at once flash upon the reader's mind. Claude Lorraine, the pastrycook; Tintoretto, the dyer; the two Caravaggios, the one a colour-grinder, the other a mortar-carrier at the Vatican; Salvator Rosa, the associate of bandits; Giotto, the peasant boy; Zingaro, the gipsy; Cavedone, turned out of doors to beg by his father; Canova, the stone-cutter; these, and many other well-known artists, succeeded in achieving distinction by severe study and labour, under ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... Never since the days of Pericles had such a varied outburst of human energy been summed up in so short a space. Architecture reared the noble monuments of the Duomo and Santa Croce. Cimabue revolutionized painting, and then "the cry was Giotto's." Italian poetry, preluded by the canzonets of Guido Cavalcanti and his rivals, rose to its fullest grandeur in the 'Commedia' of Dante. Italian prose was born in the works of Malaspina and Dino. Within, the Florentines worked out ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... heroic than the Lateran Sophocles, the Venetian Colleoni, or Rauch's statue of Frederick the Great?—Poetical? What picture more sweetly poetical than Raphael's head of himself in the Uffizi, or Giotto's Dante in the Bargello? What ideal statue surpasses in poetical power Michel Angelo's De' Medici in the San Lorenzo Chapel? What ideal head is more beautiful than the Townley Clytie of the British Museum, or the Young ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... a cruel and inhuman caprice of an Italian Painter (I think his name was Giotto), who designing to draw a crucifix to the life, wheedled a poor man to suffer himself to be bound to the cross an hour, at the end of which he should be released again, and receive a considerable gratuity for his pains. But instead of this, as soon as he had him ...
— A Museum for Young Gentlemen and Ladies - A Private Tutor for Little Masters and Misses • Unknown
... same decade and in that same city of Florence, Giotto was at work, was beginning modern art with his paintings, was building the famous cathedral there, was perhaps planning his still more famous bell-tower. Here ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... sometimes laboured and pompous; it is often ungrammatical. But the narrative is generally lively, full of neat phrases, and abounding in quaint expressions—many of them still recognizable in the modern Florentine vernacular—while, in such Lives as those of Giotto, Leonardo da Vinci, and Michelagnolo, Vasari shows how well he can rise to a fine subject. His criticism is generally sound, solid, and direct; and he employs few technical terms, except in connection ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Volume 1, Cimabue to Agnolo Gaddi • Giorgio Vasari
... his feelings through the convolutions of the ode. Bach wrote fugues. The master of St. Vitale found an equivalent for his disquieting ecstasies in severely stylistic portraits wrought in an intractable medium. Giotto expressed himself through a series of pictured legends. El Greco seems to have achieved his stupendous designs by labouring to make significant the ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... lad of thirteen, often comes to my room to display his skill in writing the Chinese character. He is a very bright boy, and shows considerable talent for drawing. Indeed, it is only a short step from writing to drawing. Giotto's O hardly involved more breadth and vigour of touch than some of these characters. They are written with a camel's-hair brush dipped in Indian ink, instead of a pen, and this boy, with two or three vigorous touches, produces characters a foot long, such as are mounted and hung ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... been done by Giotto or by the other early craftsmen, although they had discovered the rudiments of all these difficulties, and had touched them on the surface; as in their drawing, which was sounder and more true to nature than it had been before, and likewise in harmony of colouring and in the ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari
... his bosom. Well has a modern master of art and style said of these old artists, "Many pictures are ostentatious exhibitions of the artist's power of speech, the clear and vigorous elocution of useless and senseless words; while the earlier efforts of Giotto and Ciniabue are the burning messages of prophecy delivered by the stammering lips ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... one or the other, I should quickly take the diadem from my brow." It was his constant endeavor to show himself a generous and intelligent patron of the arts. The interior of his palace had been decorated by the brush of Giotto, one of the first great painters of Italy, and here in this home of luxury and refinement he had gathered together the largest and most valuable library then existing ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... French painting that stands at the beginning of the line of the present tradition. He summoned Leonardo, Andrea del Sarto, Rossi, Primaticcio, and founded the famous Fontainebleau school. Of necessity it was Italianate. It had no Giotto, Masaccio, Raphael behind it. Italian was the best art going; French appreciation was educated and keen; its choice between evolution and adoption was inevitable. It was very much in the position in which American appreciation finds itself to-day. Like ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... excitably a dozen times in a minute; constantly apologizing on being called to order, and constantly repeating the offense the moment afterwards. Mad and mysterious words, never heard before in Rubbleford, poured from his lips. "Devotional beauty," "Fra Angelico's angels," "Giotto and the cherubs," "Enough to bring the divine Raphael down from heaven to paint her." Such were a few fragments of the mad gentleman's incoherent mutterings, as they reached his neighbors' ears. The amusement they yielded was soon wrought ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... as well as making patterns for cushion covers and cathedral windows.... In thus widening our art studies, we shall be harking back in a slight degree to the kind of training that in past ages produced the great masters.... Giotto designed his Campanile primarily for the bells that were to summon the Florentines to their cathedral; the Venetians wanted facades for their palaces, and made facades to delight their eyes; the Japanese ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... cities,—Athens and Florence. Extinguish the architecture and the sculpture, the poetry and the philosophy of Attica; obliterate from the sum of civilization the names of Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, Machiavelli,—of Cimabue, Giotto, Leonardo da Vinci, Brunelleschi, Michel Angelo,—of Brunetto, Ficino, Politian; and how much ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... It is sure to be something not quite proper. H'm.... The tower of Giotto, for example, has certain asperities, angularities, ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... to sin against this special form of the criterion of progress in artistic and literary history. Some, for instance, talk of the infancy of Italian art in Giotto, and of its maturity in Raphael or in Titian; as though Giotto were not quite perfect and complete, in respect to his psychic material. He was certainly incapable of drawing a figure like Raphael, ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... whom people call the father of painting, and the Cosmas family, of whom the last died about the time that Cimabue was born. But though Cimabue was a noble, the Cosmas family who preceded him were artisans first and artists afterwards, and men of the people; and Giotto, whom Cimabue discovered sketching sheep on a piece of slate with a pointed stone, was a shepherd lad. So was Andrea Mantegna, who dominated Italian art a hundred and fifty years later—so was David, one of the greatest poets that ever lived, and so was Sixtus the Fifth, ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... avos et proavos, filios, nepotes et pronepotes! Talk to me about your [Greek text which cannot be reproduced]! Tell me about Cuvier's getting up a megatherium from a tooth, or Agassiz's drawing a portrait of an undiscovered fish from a single scale! As the "O" revealed Giotto,—as the one word "moi" betrayed the Stratford atte-Bowe-taught Anglais,—so all a man's antecedents and possibilities are summed up in a single utterance which gives at once the gauge of his education and his ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... Vermicelli's horse-feed shed, which is up the back alley as you turn around the corner out of the Piazza del Duomo just beyond the house where that stone that Dante used to sit on six hundred years ago is let into the wall when he let on to be watching them build Giotto's campanile and yet always got tired looking as Beatrice passed along on her way to get a chunk of chestnut cake to defend herself with in case of a Ghibelline outbreak before she got to school, at the same ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... in the shade of the little stone summer-house within the Greek portico, she lingered in the blazing sunshine, a figure all glorious health and supple curves, and the stray brown hairs above the brown mass gleamed with the gold of a Giotto aureole. She stood, a duskily glowing, radiant emblem of life against the background of spring greenery and rioting convolvulus. I drew a full breath and looked at her as if magnetised. I had the ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... their figures an impressive air, but which is ill-suited to the representation of the divine Mother and Child. Hence, in this, the earliest manifestation of Christian art, it is the remembrance of the majesty of a prophet, of the benign dignity of the mature Christ, that I we carry away with us. Giotto, however, had no sooner freed himself from the hampering conditions under which his predecessors worked, than we begin to feel the human element enter into art. Down through the centuries until to-day, the long procession ...
— McClure's Magazine December, 1895 • Edited by Ida M. Tarbell
... when Giotto, the painter, was taking his Sunday walk, in his best attire, with a party of friends, at Florence, and was in the midst of a long story, some pigs passed suddenly by, and one of them, running between the painter's legs, threw him down. When he got on his legs again, instead of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 346, December 13, 1828 • Various
... self-restraint,— Whose pleasure is to run without complaint On unknown errands of the Paraclete,— Wanting the reverence of unshodden feet, Fail of the nimbus which the artists paint Around the shining forehead of the saint, And are in their completeness incomplete. In the old Tuscan town stands Giotto's tower, The lily of Florence blossoming in stone,— A vision, a delight, and a desire,— The builder's perfect and centennial flower, That in the night of ages bloomed alone, But wanting still the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... . . no, it's not . . . It's vapor done up like a new-born babe— (In that shape when you die it leaves your mouth) It's . . . well, what matters talking, it's the soul! Give us no more of body than shows soul! Here's Giotto, with his Saint a-praising God, That sets us praising—why not stop with him? 190 Why put all thoughts of praise out of our head With wonder at lines, colors, and what not? Paint the soul, never mind the legs and arms! ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... Piedmont; to stately Milan and to the blue, rapturous reaches of Como; a road that would beckon him on and on, past villages sleeping under cypresses on sunny hillsides to Verona, the city of the "star-crossed lovers;" to Giotto's Padua, and by peerless Venice to strange Dalmatia, where Christian and Moslem look distrustfully into ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... it had long been held that Eve, having been made by the Almighty from a rib taken out of Adam's side, there must be one rib fewer on one side of every man than on the other. This creation of Eve was a favourite subject with sculptors and painters, from Giotto, who carved it upon his beautiful Campanile at Florence, to the illuminators of missals, and even to those who illustrated Bibles and religious books in the first years after the invention of printing; ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... Typewriting, you may as well start it on a proper basis. So I took sunny rooms at a nice hotel for myself and Elsie, and hired a ground floor in a convenient house, close under the shadow of the great marble Campanile. (Considerations of space compel me to curtail the usual gush about Arnolfo and Giotto.) This was our office. When I had got a Tuscan painter to plant our flag in the shape of a sign-board, I sailed forth into the street and inspected it from outside with a swelling heart. It is true, the Tuscan ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... Vasari, in his Lives of the Painters, tells how Giotto, when a student under Cimabue, once painted a fly on the nose of a figure on which the master was working, the fly being so realistic that Cimabue on returning to the painting attempted to brush ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... books of a gentleman's library, and all superbly bound. What does he know about them? He never read a book. He has marvellous pictures. What does he know of pictures? He doesn't know whether Gainsborough was a painter or a potter, or whether Giotto was a Greek or a Roman. He has books and pictures merely because he has money enough to buy them, and because it is understood that a fine house should have a library and a gallery. Is it otherwise with his glass and porcelain? What do you think that he could tell you of Dresden ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... the monologue is looking down upon Florence, in the valley beneath, from a villa on one of the surrounding heights. The startling bell-tower Giotto raised more than startles him. (For an explanation of this, see note under Stanza 2.) Although the poem presents a general survey of the old Florentine masters, the THEME of the poem is really Giotto, who received the affectionate homage of the Florentines, in his own day, ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... sublime illustration. Man's heart Is a mystery, doubtless. You trace it in art:— The Greek Psyche,—that's beauty,—the perfect ideal. But then comes the imperfect, perfectible real, With its pain'd aspiration and strife. In those pale Ill-drawn virgins of Giotto you see it prevail. You have studied all this. Then, the universe, too, Is not a mere house to be lived in, for you. Geology opens the mind. So you know Something also of strata and fossils; these show The bases of cosmical structure: ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... archaeology as a reviver of artistic and industrial culture will be realised at once if the essential part it played in the great Italian Renaissance is called to mind. Previous to the age of Cimabue and Giotto in Florence, Italian refinement had passed steadily down the path of deterioration. Graeco-Roman art, which still at a high level in the early centuries of the Christian era, entirely lost its originality during Byzantine times, and the dark ages settled down upon Italy in almost every walk ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... unusual degree; it was all one to him, whether he modelled in clay, or carved in wood, or stone, or built a house, or restored old bric-a-brac. He had inherited the old world roundness of artistic ability—his was the plastic renascent touch that might have developed into that of a Giotto or a Benvenuto. ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... and great heroes of chivalry all around you, and with those quaint and loving presentations of sacred stories that tell of a time when art was proud to be the meek handmaid of religion. Oh, my dear Lady Macleod, there is a 'Holy Family' of Giotto's—" ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... of technique, the art of the period was all but devoid of purpose, of thought, imagination, or spirituality. At such a moment it was matter for little surprise that ardent young intellects should go back for inspiration to the Gothicism of Giotto and the early painters. There, at least, lay feeling, aim, aspiration, such as did not concern itself primarily with any question of whether a subject were painted well or ill, if only it were first of all ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... not attempted by the Gothic races till the ancient specimens were discovered, whilst painting and architecture were of native growth amongst them. In the earliest specimens of the paintings of modern ages, as in those of Giotto and his associates in the cemetery at Pisa, this complexity, variety, and symbolical character are evident, and are more fully developed in the mightier works of Michel Angelo and Raffael. The contemplation of the works of antique art excites a feeling of elevated beauty, ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... antiquity and dignity. It is, perhaps, the most absolute bequest of past centuries which we have had, unchanged, in domestic use till the present time. You may see a loom like the Yankee one shown here in Giotto's famous fresco in the Campanile, painted in 1335; another, still the same, in Hogarth's Idle Apprentice, painted just four hundred years later. Many tribes and nations have hand-looms resembling our own; but these are exactly like it. Hundreds of ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... Anne Champneys felt that the glamour of Florence had departed with him. It was as if the sunshine had been withdrawn, along with that polished presence, that gem-like mind. She missed him to an extent that astonished her. She thought that even Giotto's Campanile looked bleak, the day ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... non-literal application of the scriptures. Her father very rarely read, but he had collected many books of reproductions, and he would sit and look at these, curiously intent, like a child, yet with a passion that was not childish. He loved the early Italian painters, but particularly Giotto and Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi. The great compositions cast a spell over him. How many times had he turned to Raphael's "Dispute of the Sacrament" or Fra Angelico's "Last Judgment" or the beautiful, complicated ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... which it fostered. The Italian Renaissance was little more than the harvest-time of medieval Italy, the glorious evening of a day which had dawned with the Fourth Crusade and had reached high noon in the lifetimes of Dante and Giotto. In the fifteenth century the aptitudes which had ripened in the intense and crowded life of turbulent republics were concentrated upon art and letters. The leisure and the security which the specialist demands ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... When Giotto was asked for his conception of a perfect building, he produced a circle. When Michael Angelo was appealed to, he designated the cross. On both bases may good architecture and good pictures be founded. If the extremities of the Greek cross be ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... his hand. Considering the date of his birth, 1387, and his conventual life, he was hardly less wonderful than his wonderful epoch. Here is the same convent, the same city; while instead merely of the works of Cimabue, Giotto, and Orgagna, there are masterpieces by all the painters who ever lived to study;—yet imagine the snuffy old monk who will show you about the edifice, or any of his brethren, coming out with a series of masterpieces! One might as well expect a new Savonarola, who was likewise a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... had mainly an aesthetic flavour, for Mrs. Coventry was famously "artistic." Her apartment was a sort of Pitti Palace au petit pied. She possessed "early masters" by the dozen—a cluster of Peruginos in her dining-room, a Giotto in her boudoir, an Andrea del Sarto over her drawing-room chimney-piece. Surrounded by these treasures, and by innumerable bronzes, mosaics, majolica dishes, and little worm-eaten diptychs covered with angular ...
— The Madonna of the Future • Henry James
... study of the fine arts of the Middle Ages. A few selected members of the Sixth had been told off to search through back numbers of The Studio and The Connoisseur for examples of the paintings of Cimabue and Giotto, and the large engraving of Botticelli's "Spring," which used to hang in Miss Beasley's study, now occupied a prominent position on the dining-room wall to afford a ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... Mr. Pater speaks in the case of Aurelius, were only confined to those evil-bearing trees: alas! it is all blossom with us moderns, good or bad alike, and purity or putrescence are all one to us, so that they shine. I suppose few regard Giotto's circle as his greatest work: would that more did. The lust of the eye, with Gautier as high-priest, is too much ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... Christianity. There was a time when his mind was full of Orsinis and Colonnas; after that he approached the Renaissance, and was fairly captivated by it. From inscriptions, tombs, and the first traces of Christian architecture he passed to nearer times; from the Byzantine paintings to Fiesole and Giotto, from these to artists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and so on; he fell in love with statues and pictures; his collections certainly increased, but the great work in Polish about the three Romes remained forever in ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... but of its character we have a pretty sensible idea from various other plays of the Creation handed down from the north-country cycles. In the best of them the predestined Adam is created after a fashion both to suggest his treatment by Giotto in the medallion at Florence, and his lineaments ...
— Everyman and Other Old Religious Plays, with an Introduction • Anonymous
... tapestry we have traced lightly from Egypt through Greece and Rome and, almost losing the thread in the Middle Ages, have seen it rising a virile industry, nursed in monasteries. It was when the stirrings of artistic life were commencing under the Van Eycks in the North and under Giotto and the Tuscans in the South that the weaving of tapestries reached a high standard of production and from that time until the Nineteenth Century has been an important artistic craft. The Thirteenth Century saw it started, the Fourteenth saw the beginnings of important factories, and the ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... because it was fought with bows and arrows, but it is more picturesque to the modern imagination just for that reason. Why else do the idiots in "MacArthur's Hymn" complain that "steam spoils romance at sea"? Why did Ruskin lament when the little square at the foot of Giotto's Tower in Florence was made a stand for hackney coaches? Why did our countryman Halleck at Alnwick Towers resent the fact that "the Percy deals in salt and hides, the Douglas sells red herring"? And why does the picturesque tourist, in general, object to the substitution of naphtha launches ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... than she, but with the same beautiful eyes—Clare's sister-in-law, 'Liza-Lu. Their pale faces seemed to have shrunk to half their natural size. They moved on hand in hand, and never spoke a word, the drooping of their heads being that of Giotto's "Two Apostles". ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... Forese da Rabatta and Master Giotto the painter coming from Mugello, each jestingly rallieth the other ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... the soul of things is still further helped by his system of continuous, unresolved melody. The melody which circumscribes itself like Giotto's O is almost as tangible a thing as a statue; it has almost contour. But this melody afloat in the air, flying like a bird, without alighting for more than a moment's swaying poise, as the notes ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... painting of the marriage of Mary and Joseph she receives the ring on her left hand. See woodcut in Mrs. Jameson's Legends of Madonna, p. 170. In the Marriage of the Blessed Virgin by Vanloo, in the Louvre, she also receives the ring on the left hand. Giotto, Taddeo Gaddi, Perugino, &c., have painted the "Sposalizio," but I have not copies by me to ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 215, December 10, 1853 • Various
... hand to guard and an authority to guide. That is merely to waste time. When you go back to Italy, you must begin at the beginning, if you are in earnest—not at the middle. Only ignorance measures art in terms of skill, for there are no degrees in art. None has transcended Giotto, because technique and draughtsmanship are accidents of time; they lie outside the soul of the matter. Art is in fact a static thing. It changes as the face of the sea changes, from hour to hour; but it does not progress. There are great and small artists and great and small ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... and creative aptitude are shown perceptibly later, on the average about the fourteenth year: Giotto, at ten; Van Dyck, ten; Raphael, eight; Guerchin, eight; Greuze, eight; Michaelangelo, thirteen; Albrecht Duerer, fifteen; Bernini, twelve; Rubens and Jordaens being ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... lyric poetry and the North-French and Celtic cycles of romance led up to the new European style of painting which did not come to perfection until two centuries later. (Nothing positive can be said about the influence of France on Italian art; the monumental character and the art of Cimabue, Giotto and the Sienese does not, however, suggest that they were much influenced by the art of miniature painting, but rather hints that they ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... After a photograph from the fresco by His friend Giotto, discovered under the whitewash on a watt of the Bargello palace; now in ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... taught, set fair pictures on the walls, and blazoned the roof with the blue of heaven and gold of the wakeful stars. In the span over the High Altar he set Blessed Benedict himself with the face of Prior Stephen, and round him the angel virtues; even as one Giotto, a shepherd lad, had limned them in the Church ...
— The Gathering of Brother Hilarius • Michael Fairless
... distinction between the colorist and chiaroscurist school is trenchant and absolute: and may soon be shown you so that you will never forget it. Here is a Florentine picture by one of the pupils of Giotto, of very good representative quality, and which the University galleries are rich in possessing. At the distance at which I hold it, you see nothing but a checker-work of brilliant, and, as it happens, even glaring colors. If you come near, you will find ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... commerce, of health, for instance, shocks, in most cases, the aesthetic sense, as something conventional or rhetorical, as a mere transparent allegory, or figure of speech, which could please almost no one. On the other hand, such symbolical representations, under the form of human persons, as Giotto's Virtues and Vices at Padua, or his Saint Poverty at Assisi, or the series of the planets in certain early Italian engravings, are profoundly poetical and impressive. They seem to be something more than ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... which must not be neglected in passing through Padua is a visit to the old Church of the Arena, situated at the rear of a garden of luxuriant vegetation, where it would certainly not be conjectured to be located unless one were advised of the fact. It is entirely painted in its interior by Giotto. Not a single column, not a single rib, nor architectural division interrupts that vast tapestry of frescoes. The general aspect is soft, azure, starry, like a beautiful, calm sky; ultramarine dominates; thirty compartments of large dimensions, indicated ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... sufficient rapidity. I went out early in the morning before breakfast, in company with a younger brother of the Dr. Nicholson of Penrith whom I have mentioned, who happened to be visiting us. We climbed to the top of Giotto's tower, and saw at once the terrible extent and very serious character of the misfortune. One-third, at least, of Florence, was under water, and the flood was rapidly rising. Coming down from our lofty observatory, we made our way ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... "Mother and Child," and the mother was his wife, and the child theirs. Another child came to them, and Giotto painted another picture, calling the older boy Saint John, and the wee baby Jesus. The years went by and we find still another picture of the Holy Family by this same artist, in which five children are shown, while back in the shadow is the artist himself, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... feet long, and eighty-six broad; the form, of it a rhomboid: the walls richly ornamented by Pietro d'Abano, who originally designed, and began to paint the figures round the sides: they have however been retouched by Giotto, who added the signs of the Zodiac to Peter's mysterious performances, which meant to explain the planetary influences, as he was a man deeply dipped in judicial astrology; and there is his own portrait among them, dressed like a Zoroastrian priest, with a planet in the ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... hundred feet high. The principal picture-gallery of Dresden is the finest in Germany, and contains between three and four thousand admirable examples of high art,—the work of such artists as Raphael, Holbein, Corregio, Albert Duerer, Rubens, Giotto, Van Dyck, and other masters already named in these pages. Among them all the favorite, as generally conceded, is Raphael's Madonna di San Sisto, believed to be one of the last and best examples produced ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... positive proofs to the contrary in the art of the Italians. The April freshness of Giotto, the piety of Fra Angelico, the virginal purity of the young Raphael, the sweet gravity of John Bellini, the philosophic depth of Da Vinci, the sublime elevation of Michael Angelo, the suavity of Fra Bartolommeo, the delicacy of the Della Robbia, the restrained fervor ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... a church procession. At other times, it took on a dull metallic lustre as polished silver mingled with the greenish-yellow tint of ripe lemons, indefinable, strange and delicate, and the sails would come crowding like the wings of the cherubim in the background of a Giotto picture. ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... of girls was taken to the city for shopping and the matinee. Among other errands, the art class visited a photograph dealer's, to purchase some early Italian masters. Patty's interest in Giotto and his kind was not very keen, and she sauntered off on a tour of inspection. She happened upon a pile of actors and actresses, and her eye brightened as she singled out a large photograph of an unfamiliar leading ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... transfiguring the face of the world as they went, kindling new life wherever they fell, miraculously transformed by the separate genius of every country from Norway to India, creating in Italy the whole of the great medieval art that stretches from Duccio and Giotto to Signorelli, and leaving to us here, as our most precious inheritances, such mere blurred and broken fragments of their glories as the cathedral churches of ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... angels of Giotto we see the commencement of a softer grace and a purer taste, further developed by some of his scholars. Benozzo Gozzoli and Orcagna have left in the Campo Santo examples of the most graceful and fanciful treatment. Of Benozzo's angels in the Ricardi Palace I have spoken ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... art was purely ecclesiastical in its origin. The exigencies of adaptation to altars, convent walls, or cathedral domes explain the choice of subjects, the composition, even perhaps the color schemes (as of frescoes, for instance); and yet all that makes a Giotto greater than a Pictor Ignotus is quite unaccounted for by ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... infinite wealth and astounding variety of Donatello's marble in the spacious courts of the cool Bargello. But her window at the hotel looked straight as it could look down the humming Calzaioli to the pierced and encrusted front of Giotto's campanile, with the cupola of San Lorenzo in the middle distance, and the facade of Fiesole standing out deep-blue against the dull red glare of evening in the background. If that were not enough to sate and enchant Herminia, she would indeed have been difficult. And with Alan by ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... the boy Giotto drawing on the sand. Ah! my friend, can one realize that meeting? Can one picture the generous glow with which the mature and courtly artist recognized unconscious genius struggling under the form of ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... part, I should like to say that I prefer Giovanni Bellini to Gaudenzio; but unless Giotto and Giorgione, I really do not know who the Italian painters should stand before him. Bernardino Luini runs him close, but great as Bernardino Luini was, Gaudenzio, in spite of not a little mannerism, ...
— Ex Voto • Samuel Butler
... all others on board were seized with terror, and with great delight sketched the towering waves which threatened every minute to swallow the vessel. Several writers tell the story that a great artist, Giotto, about to paint the crucifixion, induced a poor man to let him bind him upon a cross in order that he might get a better idea of the terrible scene that he was about to put upon the canvas. He promised faithfully that he would release his model in an hour, but to the latter's ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden |
