"Giotto" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 by this great master. We are sure ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... is puzzled by inaccuracies of drawing, perspective, color. The early painters can hardly be expected to delight us at first: we are shocked by the unnatural proportions, the grotesque countenances. To cite an extreme case, the first view of Giotto's frescoes, where men and women with bodies of board, long jointless fingers, rigid plastered hair, and dark-rimmed slits for eyes whose oblique glance imparts an air of suspicion to the whole assembly, will suggest merely a notion of their grotesqueness. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... expressing 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 flit from strings ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... 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 ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... stronghold, into which he retreats from pillage. They are much like each other in external forms;—but Injustice, or Unrighteousness, sits in the gate of the one, veiled with forest branches, (see Giotto's painting of him); and Justice or Righteousness enters by the gate of the other, over strewn forest branches. Now, for example of this second kind of military architecture, look at Carlyle's account of Henry the Fowler, [1] and of his building military towns, ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... Patristic) acceptations of the phrase; because I confess that, letting authority 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 ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... the lower church of S. Francesco. High mass is being sung, with orchestra and organ and a choir of many voices. Candles are lighted on the altar, over-canopied with Giotto's allegories. From the low southern windows slants the sun, in narrow bands, upon the many-coloured gloom and embrowned glory of these painted aisles. Women in bright kerchiefs kneel upon the stones, and ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... remains very shadowy. A single drawing from his hand would be worth more than all that has ever been written about him. But if one would like to dream what his art was like, one may imagine it as combining with the dramatic power of Euphronius and the exquisite loveliness of the Aphrodite cup, Giotto's elevation of feeling and ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... point at which art was ready to speak, we find that the governing motive of her language was this same predilection for reality, and it was with this meaning that her typical artists found a voice. No artist ever sought for truth, both physical and spiritual, more resolutely than Giotto, and none ever spoke more distinctly the mind of his age and country; and as one generation follows another, art in Tuscany becomes more and more closely allied to the intellectual movement. The scientific predilection for form, for the representation ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... on the horizon ten years ago. Then, as from the slopes of San Miniato at sunset, gray, red-tiled Florence, with its Boboli gardens, full of nightingales, its old towers and cathedrals, and its soaring Giotto Campanile. Then Genoa, with its terraces and marble palaces, and that huge statue of Andre Doria. Then Naples, gleaming white in the eye of day over her pellucid depths of sea. The golden days of Italy floated by me. Then came the memories, glad or sad, of days that had ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... has his moods—he would say cruel and cutting things. For example, Medora had spent an afternoon patiently sketching the statue and the architecture at Columbus Circle. Tossing it aside with a sneer, the professor informed her that Giotto had once drawn a perfect circle with ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... which was a long way from the Senator's palace, for that quarter lies on the extreme outer edge of Venice, looking across the lagoon towards Murano. The door was opened for her by a hunchback, with a large, intellectual face, beardless and strongly modelled, such a face as Giotto would have taken as a model for a Doctor of the Church. The sad blue eyes looked up to Pina's with cold gravity; but when she explained that she came from the Palazzo Pignaver with a message, they brightened ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... necessary to render the series of Plates now published by the Arundel Society intelligible and interesting to those among its Members who have not devoted much time to the examination of mediaeval works. I have prefixed a few remarks on the relation of the art of Giotto to former and subsequent efforts; which I hope may be useful in preventing the general reader from either looking for what the painter never intended to give, or missing the points to which his ...
— Giotto and his works in Padua • John Ruskin
... world, and a road which would lead him to the Alps and to 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 ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... streets, planning rooms, dressing hair, 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 have wanted small furniture ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... the world, which, in his early boyhood, had been only a daring thought in the mind of a small, quick-eyed man—there it raises its large curves still, eclipsing the hills. And the well-known bell-towers—Giotto's, with its distant hint of rich colour, and the graceful-spired Badia, and the rest—he looked at them all from the shoulder of ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... 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
... greatest in the annals of the race. In it the foremost European universities were founded, the sublimest Gothic cathedrals were built, some of the world's finest works of handicraft were made; in it Cimabue and Giotto painted, Dante wrote, St. Thomas Aquinas philosophized, and St. Francis of Assisi lived. The motives, however, which originated and sustained this magnificent outburst of creative energy were otherworldly—they were not concerned with anticipations ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... the door and they went into the church. It was small, overcharged with ornaments. They saw the tomb of Bishop Spinelli and Giotto's Virgin, and then went into a hall gay with red flags with a white cross, on whose walls they could read the names of the Grand Masters of the Order of Malta. The majority of the names were French ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... councils like those of Nicea and Ephesus, in political popes like Gregory VII. and Innocent III., in Isidorian decretals, excommunications, interdicts, tortures, indulgences; the other in our mediaeval cathedrals, in the poetry of a Dante, the paintings of a Giotto and a Raphael, the sculpture of a Michael Angelo, the music of a Palestrina, and our politician might then ask himself which he thought had been the more beneficial as a social force. There still remain as our meagre heritage from these times of "faith," on the one hand ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... returned 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 now? Why, the Academy people ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... who is supposed to be an infant; yet I have no doubt that the old sculptors were right in doing so, and to my help in this matter comes the remembrance of Ruskin's answer to what Lord Lindsay says concerning the inability of Giotto and his school to paint young children: for he says that it might very well happen that Giotto could paint children, but yet did not choose to in this instance, (the Presentation of the Virgin), ...
— The World of Romance - being Contributions to The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, 1856 • William Morris
... untaught childish effort,—could find twice ten centuries too long for the astounding feat it achieved? Ten centuries, after all, make but a marvellous short course betwixt the archaic compositions of the third century and the compositions of Giotto ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... as the monkeys who make ropes of the pictures, to swing by. Then, every now and then at some old stable, or wine-cellar, or timber-shed, behind some forgotten vats or faggots, somebody finds a fresco of Perugino's or Giotto's, but doesn't think much of it, and has no idea of having people coming into his cellar, or being obliged to move his faggots; and so he whitewashes the fresco, and puts the faggots back again; and these kind of persons, therefore, ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... Maurice Denis have arrived at great talent by very different merits. M. Maurice Denis has abandoned Pointillism a few years ago, in favour of returning to a very strange conception which dates back to the Primitives, and even to Giotto. He simplifies his drawing archaically, suppresses all but the indispensable detail, and draws inspiration from Gothic stained glass and carvings, in order to create decorative figures with clearly marked outlines which are filled ...
— The French Impressionists (1860-1900) • Camille Mauclair
... 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
... grounds of distributive justice. There I am one with you. But you've also got an aesthetic side to your nature, which makes you worth arguing with upon the matter. I won't argue with your vulgar materialised socialist, who would break up the frieze of the Parthenon for road metal, or pull down Giotto's frescoes because they represent scenes in the fabulous lives of saints and martyrs. You know what a work of art is when you see it; and therefore you're worth arguing with, which your vulgar Continental socialist really isn't. The one cogent argument ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... XI sent a messenger to Giotto for a sample of his work the great artist drew a perfect circle with one sweep of his arm and gave it to the boy. Before his death Giotto executed many marvelous works of art, not one of them perfect, not even the magnificent bell tower at Florence, but all of them infinitely greater than ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney
... 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 glory of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... of individual genius 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 were bought by renouncing the Utopian visions of the past. But the growth of technical ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... brief visit), goes forth, in the summer time, to sketch scenery and costume among the Tuscan hills, and pour, if he can, the purple air of Italy over his canvas. He studies the old schools of art in the mountain towns where they were born, and where they are still to be seen in the faded frescos of Giotto and Cimabue, on the walls of many a church, or in the dark chapels, in which the sacristan draws aside the veil from a treasured picture of Perugino. Thence, the happy painter goes to walk the long, bright galleries of Florence, or to steal glowing colors ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... 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; ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... were not beginners, rather they were the most subtle artists of a convention—and all art is a convention—that was about to die. If one can see their work aright, it is beautiful; but it has lost touch with life, or is a mere satirical comment upon it, that Giotto, with his simplicity, his eager delight in natural things and in man, will supersede and banish. In him, Europe seems to shake off the art and fatality of the East, under whose shadow Christianity had grown up, to be altogether transformed and humanised by Rome, when she at the head really of humanism ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... the drawing incorrect, the design generally lame, and the colouring unnatural; yet there is merit in the expression: and the whole remains as a curious monument of the efforts made by this noble art immediately after her revival. [The History of Job by Giotto is much admired.] Here are some deceptions in perspective equally ingenious and pleasing; particularly the figures of certain animals, which exhibit exactly the same appearance, from whatever different points ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... 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 a shepherd ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... Padua overnight—and he will be very glad to do so, for that last five-hour lap from Milan to Venice is very trying, with all the disentanglement of registered luggage at the end of it before one can get to the hotel—and spend the next morning in exploring Padua's own riches: Giotto's frescoes in the Madonna dell'Arena; Mantegna's in the Eremitani; Donatello's altar in the church of Padua's own sweet Saint Anthony; and so forth; and then in the afternoon take the tram for ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... groinings—every foot of space, in short—with life and color; and how much more precious is one of those solemn pearly faces than a panel of alabaster or the most cunning mosaic of marbles! In the upper church alone there are twenty-two large frescoes of Cimabue and thirty of Giotto. Over these pours the light from fourteen large colored windows, unimpeded by side-aisles. When the sun beats upon these windows the church seems to be filled with a transparent mist softly tinted with a thousand rich hues. The deep-blue, star-sown vault sparkles and the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... the pundits of criticism we find statements like this of Ruskin on Giotto:—"For all his use of opalescent warm color, Giotto is exactly like Turner, as in his swift expressional power he is like Gainsborough!" Again, speaking of Turner's Fighting Temeraire, he says: "Of all pictures ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... notoriously, to work in which the striving hand was palpable,—whether it was a triumphant tour de force like Cellini's Perseus, in the Loggia—their daily banquet in the early days at Florence; or the half-articulate utterances of "the Tuscan's early art," like those "Pre-Giotto pictures" which surrounded them in the salon of Casa Guidi, "quieting" them if they were over busy, as Mrs Browning beautifully says,[32] more perhaps in her own ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... roses, partly Gothic and partly Saracenial. Strange paintings of hell and the devil, mostly taken from Dante's rhapsodies, cover the walls of these fantastic galleries, attributed to the venerable Giotto and Bufalmacco, whom Boccace mentions in ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... merry-makings and lost sight of him in the hurly-burly, and now suddenly I saw him leaning against a pillar a little apart, and looking at the eager crowd of youths and Simone that was its central figure. If I had been a painter like Messer Giotto it would have pleased me to paint in the same picture the faces of those two men, the one no more than beastly flesh, and the other, as it seemed to me, the iron lamp in which a sacred spirit burned unceasingly, purifying ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... that, beyond an effort after perfection 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 a subject at all—a subject involving manipulative ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... 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 ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... somewhat frigid process of re-edification. This so-called cell is a many-chambered and very ancient building, with a tower which is now embedded in the massive superstructure of the modern monastery. The German artists adorning it contrive to blend the styles of Giotto, Fra Angelico, Egypt, and Byzance, not without force and a kind of intense frozen pietism. S. Mauro's vision of his master's translation to heaven—the ladder of light issuing between two cypresses, and the angels watching ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... 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 see among ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... 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 perfect action of the imagination, ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... 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 ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... the 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 our own painters, the ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... 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 horror the painter ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... Giotto's Campanile, 300 feet high, the most beautiful of all the towers that I have seen in Europe. The square blocks of many colored marble with which its four sides are coated, produce a richness of effect that is indescribable. ...
— The Youthful Wanderer - An Account of a Tour through England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany • George H. Heffner
... had 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 ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... the constant exultation of the enemies of the Church, fretted and disgraced by angers of controversy, or weakened and distracted by irreconcilable heresy. On the contrary, the scriptural teaching, through their art, of such men as Orcagna, Giotto, Angelico, Luca della Robbia, and Luini, is, literally, free from all earthly taint of momentary passion; its patience, meekness, and quietness are incapable of error through either fear or anger; they ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... her hands as it bounded in ever diminishing saltations and with a finer skill than that of Giotto, drew perfect ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... early autumn of 1900. I was at Rome, where I went to investigate the relative artistic affinity between Pietro Cavallini and Giotto (whose position, I think, will have to be adjusted). There were as yet only a few visitors at the Hotel Russie, chiefly maiden ladies and casual tourists, besides a certain Scotch family and myself. Colonel Brodie, formerly of the 69th Highlanders, was a retired officer of that rather peppery ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... with the satisfaction naturally attending the contemplation of frescos discovered only since 1858, after having been hidden under plaster and whitewash for many centuries; but we could not believe that Giotto's fame was destined to gain much by their rescue from oblivion. They are in no wise to be compared with this master's frescos in the Chapel of the Annunziata,—which, indeed, is in every way a place of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... art, 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 independent and ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... option, and conversation not quite to match. Her conversation 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 saints on gilded backgrounds, our hostess enjoyed the dignity of a sort ...
— The Madonna of the Future • Henry James
... picture. You will wonder I preferred the solid wall to canvas, perhaps,—but so did the genuine old artists. Lippo Lippi, and Giotto, and—why, Orcagna painted on graveyard walls; and I can almost fancy, sometimes, that this room is a vault, a tomb, a dungeon, where they torture people. Turn to the place, good Mac, Shakespeare's tragedy of 'Macbeth,' Act Third, Scene Fourth, and read the scene to us, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... pictures of small merit if he takes for his standard the pictures of others. But if he will study from natural objects he will bear good fruit; as was seen in the painters after the Romans who always imitated each other and so their art constantly declined from age to age. After these came Giotto the Florentine who—not content with imitating the works of Cimabue his master—being born in the mountains and in a solitude inhabited only by goats and such beasts, and being guided by nature to his ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... Countess Martin, "I am not learned enough to admire Giotto and his school. What strikes me is the sensuality of that art of the fifteenth century which is said to be Christian. I have seen piety and purity only in the images of Fra Angelico, although they are very pretty. The rest, those figures of Virgins and angels, are voluptuous, ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... trivialities as these many a valuable hour may slip away, and the traveller who has gone to Italy to study the tactile values of Giotto, or the corruption of the Papacy, may return remembering nothing but the blue sky and the men and women who live under it. So it was as well that Miss Bartlett should tap and come in, and having commented on Lucy's leaving the door unlocked, and on her leaning out of the window ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... assert will go as far in power of style as its momentousness and his conviction will carry him. Disprove his assertion after it is made, yet its style remains. Darwin has no more destroyed the style of Job nor of Handel than Martin Luther destroyed the style of Giotto. All the assertions get disproved sooner or later; and so we find the world full of a magnificent debris of artistic fossils, with the matter-of-fact credibility gone clean out of them, but the form still splendid. ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... After the second day they return towards the city a short distance and establish themselves in what seems a more commodious abode, and which I consider incontrovertibly identified as the Villa Pasolini, or Rasponi, and which was in their day the property of the Memmi family, the famous pupils of Giotto. The site of this villa overlooks the Valley of the Ladies, which figures in the framework of the "Novelle," and in which then there was a lake to which Boccaccio alludes, now filled up by the alluvium of the Affrico, the author's ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... we still look upon these works of the older masters, from Giotto to the teacher of Raphael, with a sort of reverence, indeed with a certain predilection, if not that the faithfulness of their endeavor, and the grand earnestness of their serene voluntary limitation, compel our respect ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... alive I issued, scarce sure which. High overhead Giotto's tower soared; Behind, the Duomo rose all white and black; Then pealed a sudden jargoning of bells, And down the darkling street I wildly fled, Led by a little, cold, and wandering moon, Which seemed as lonely and ...
— Verses • Susan Coolidge
... 'son of the morning.' We need not elaborate the contrast with Christ's character. In Him is no falling from a high ideal, no fading of morning glory into a cloudy noon or a lurid evening. There is no black streak in that flawless white marble. Jesus draws the perfect circle, like Giotto's O, while all other lives show some faltering of hand, and consequent irregularity of outline. Greater than Solomon, with his over-clouded glories and his character worsened by self-indulgence, is Jesus, 'the Sun of righteousness,' the perfect round of whose lustrous ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... occasionally still run in country towns to-day, is an historic machine, one of great 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 thousands of men and ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... am led here to repeat what I have already observed in one of my lectures, that for the young the pill of knowledge should be silver-coated, and that while they are being instructed they should also be amused. In other words, interest your pupils, do not depress them. Giotto did not begin by rigidly elaborating a drawing of the crook of his shepherd's staff for weeks together; his drawings upon the sand and upon the flat stones which he found on the hillsides are said to have been of the picturesque sheep he tended, and all ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... represented so, for in Beato Angelico's 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
... worked magic. 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 wife and two children, ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... picture than five or six second or third-rate pictures, provided only, that you had examples of the best kind of work produced at that time. I would not have second-rate pictures. Multitudes of masters among the disciples of Giotto might be named; you might have one or two pictures of Giotto, and one or two pictures of the disciples ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... leaving him in full enjoyment of his masterly dialectic. People who set out from the hypothesis that Sir Edwin Landseer was the finest painter that ever lived will feel no uneasiness about an aesthetic which proves that Giotto was the worst. So, my friend, when he arrives very logically at the conclusion that a work of art should be small or round or smooth, or that to appreciate fully a picture you should pace smartly before it or set it spinning like a top, cannot guess why I ask him whether he has lately been to ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... High-warp 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 ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... 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 ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... he replied. "Toward the close of the thirteenth century I was living in Florence, being at that time married to a lady of wealthy family, and she insisted upon my having my portrait painted by Cimabue, who, as you know, was the master of Giotto. After my wife's death I departed from Florence, leaving behind me the impression that I intended soon to return; and I would have been glad to take the portrait with me, but I had no opportunity. It was in 1503 that I went back to Florence, and as soon as I could ...
— The Vizier of the Two-Horned Alexander • Frank R. Stockton
... 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. ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... 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 ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... beds and the rest." Before long Browning amused himself in picking up for a few pauls this or that picture, on seeing which an accomplished connoisseur, like Kirkup, would even hazard the name of Cimabue or Ghirlandaio, or if not that of Giotto, then ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... 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 master's. Giotto ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... light—first appears, how it bathes the sea and the hills in an ethereal glory not their own! What fair liquid tints of blue, and rose, and glorious gold! This period which, in art, began with Giotto and ended with Botticelli, culminated in Fra Angelico, who flooded the world of painting with a heavenly spiritualism not material, and gave his dreams of heaven the colours of the first pure rays ...
— Fra Bartolommeo • Leader Scott (Re-Edited By Horace Shipp And Flora Kendrick)
... retreat into the mountains—into Giotto's country, the Casentino—where we are to find a villa for almost nothing, and shall have our letters sent daily from Florence, together with books and newspapers. I look forward to it with joy. We promise one ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... more tomatoes for some years. But the place I best liked was the great open square of the Palazzo Vecchio, with the statues of David and of Perseus under the Loggia dei Lanzi, a retreat from sun and rain; and the Duomo and Giotto's Campanile, hard by. The pavements of Florence, smooth as the surface of stone canals, were most soothing and comfortable after the relentless, sharp cobble-stones of Rome; the low houses that bordered ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... endowment in an 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 ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... have been architects, artists, poets and statesmen. Christianity repeats itself through its friends in the Gothic Cathedral shaped in the form of the cross, in the Transfiguration of Raphael, the Duomo of Giotto, the Paradise Lost of Milton, the In Memoriam of Tennyson, the Emancipation Proclamation of Lincoln. Christianity has never formed any close friendships with jails, gallows or slave ships. Men like Gladstone and Lincoln always kept ...
— The Blot on the Kaiser's 'Scutcheon • Newell Dwight Hillis
... guidebook laws, it should not. When I take up my pen to write to you, I am thinking more of a white-moustached old Yankee at an hotel than about the things I have seen within the same 24 hours: the frescoes of Santa Croce, the illuminations of St. Marco; the white marbles of the tower of Giotto; the very Madonnas of Raphael, the very David of Michael Angelo. Throughout this tour, in pursuance of our theory of travelling, we have avoided the guide: he is the death-knell of individual liberty. Once only we broke through our rule and that was in favour of an extremely intelligent, ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... sort of work Michael Angelo did at this time: one represents a kneeling figure, evidently from a picture by Pesellino; the other, two standing figures, that might be after Ghirlandaio. The draperies have been specially studied. Another pen-drawing, in the Louvre, is a careful study from Giotto's fresco of the Resurrection of St. John in the Cappella Peruzzi ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd
... such a genius for poetry as to attract the friendship of Guido Cavalcante, a young noble of a philosophical as well as poetical turn of mind, who has retained a reputation with posterity: and it was probably at the same time he became acquainted with Giotto, who drew his likeness, and with Casella, the musician, whom he greets with so much tenderness in ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... Hiroshige, Giotto, Rembrandt, Titian; ask the master-photographers who can build harmonies of line and space and texture. But the secret is not revealed by ...
— Pictorial Photography in America 1921 • Pictorial Photographers of America
... give the true artist's sigh, as the little green and scarlet fragment lies there hopelessly, unapproachably perfect. Ignorantly to herself, the hands of the little pilgrim are knocking at the very door where Giotto and Cimabue knocked in the innocent child-life ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... partially quoted 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 ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... in his easy chair" or pointed to Hogarth, or afterwards dwelt on Claude's classic scenes, or spoke with rapture of Raphael, and compared the women at Rome to figures that had walked out of his pictures, or visited the Oratory of Pisa, and described the works of Giotto and Ghirlandaio and Massaccio, and gave the moral of the picture of the Triumph of Death, where the beggars and the wretched invoke his dreadful dart, but the rich and mighty of the earth quail and shrink before it; and in that land of siren ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... importance or advantage of this fact to the artist. For religious art, for art that appeals to the sum and total of a man's experience of beauty in life, a public cultivated in this sense is a necessity. Giotto and Fra Angelico enjoyed this almost to the same degree as AEschylus or Phidias; Michael Angelo and the great artists of the Renascence generally enjoyed it in a very great degree, and reaped an advantage comparable to that which Euripides ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... but, Ichabod! Gone is that last dear son of Italy, Who being man died for the sake of God, And whose unrisen bones sleep peacefully, O guard him, guard him well, my Giotto's tower, Thou marble lily of the lily town! let ...
— Poems • Oscar Wilde
... 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 ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... teach them to push into corners (or altogether get rid of) the irrelevant and trivial impressions which so often are bound to accompany the most delightful ones; very much as those occupants of the hotel room had done with some of its furniture. What if an electric tram starts from the foot of Giotto's tower, or if four-and-twenty Cook's tourists invade the inn and streets of Verona? If you cannot extract some satisfaction from the thought that there may be intelligent people even in a Cook's party, and that the ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... a wide reputation in Italy for her statues of the "Young Giotto," "St. Peter in Prison," ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... they realised:—Roman du Saint Graal et Lancelot du Lac, on vellum, in three folio volumes, with beautifully painted miniatures and initials, fourteenth century—eighteen hundred pounds; Psalterium Latinum, on vellum, fourteenth century, with paintings attributed to Giotto—fifteen hundred and thirty pounds; Vie du vaillant Bertrand du Guesclin, written on vellum in the fourteenth century, with miniatures in camaieu gris—fifteen hundred pounds; La Legende Doree, ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher
... first I went to Paris, Clutton, I think it was, gave a long discourse on the subject that beauty is put into things by painters and poets. They create beauty. In themselves there is nothing to choose between the Campanile of Giotto and a factory chimney. And then beautiful things grow rich with the emotion that they have aroused in succeeding generations. That is why old things are more beautiful than modern. The Ode on a Grecian Urn is more lovely ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... It is five centuries since he ceased writing and living here. After all commentaries, the Book itself is mainly what we know of him. The Book;—and one might add that Portrait commonly attributed to Giotto, which, looking on it, you cannot help inclining to think genuine, whoever did it. To me it is a most touching face; perhaps of all faces that I know, the most so. Lonely there, painted as on vacancy, ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... length he entered the church, which in those times stood open day and night to the piety of the people, and drew near the altar. Upon the walls on both sides were suspended rude images of the Saviour carved in wood, and blackened by time, and numerous antique scripture pieces by Giotto, Cimabue, and other fathers of the art, which seemed to start into momentary existence as Spinello's torch cast its red light upon them. At every step, his heart beat violently against his side, and appeared as if it would mount into his throat and choke him. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 399, Supplementary Number • Various
... Italian painting, it possesses also specimens of its later and most perfect productions. Examples of the pure Byzantine bring us to those of the Greco-Italian school, and these to the early Italian, represented (in its Umbrian branch) by Cimabue, by Giotto and his followers, the Gaddi, Cavallini, Giottino, Orgagna, and others; while of the Sienese we have Duccio, Simone di Martino, and Lorenzetti, with more of less note. Of the Ascetics we have, among others, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... artistic problem, and came now and then to the 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 direction was most ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... the "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 ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... Niccolo Pisano had finished his Sienna pulpit and with his son was engaged on his immortal works of sculpture. Orcagna had made a wonderful tabernacle for the Florentine church of San Michele, Cimabue had painted the Madonna which is now in the Rucellai chapel. Giotto had completed his work at Assisi and Rome and would soon give to the world the Florentine Campanile. Fra Sisto and Fra Ristoro had built the church Santa Maria Novella at Florence and Arnolfo di Cambio, while Dante was writing ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... year 1300, Giovanni Cimabue and Giotto, both of Florence, were the first to assert the natural dignity and originality of art, and the story of those illustrious friends is instructive and romantic. The former was a gentleman by birth and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume XII., No. 324, July 26, 1828 • Various
... face of poverty and manifold 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, ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... the ninth lower shaft, and that in the capitals of the shafts both of the upper and lower arcade: the costumes of the figures introduced in the sea facade being purely Giottesque, correspondent with Giotto's work in the Arena Chapel at Padua, while the costume on the other capitals is Renaissance-Classic: and the lions' heads between the arches change at the same point. And there are a multitude of other evidences ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... for culture, and devoted to the 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 mental feast ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... 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; but Vesalius and the anatomists who followed him put an end among thoughtful men ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... she is now no longer a mere ideal, a mere phantom. She clings to her new, unknown lover, as to one who will make her realize her own existence. It is an allegory of modern art—the art of Dante, Giotto, Raphael, Shakespeare and Goethe—receiving as its queen the ideal of Greek imagination and inspiring, as it were, the cold statue with the warm vitality of a higher conception of chivalrous ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... own, may be endowed by Nature with artistic or scientific genius, but if his patrimony is insufficient to enable him to triumph in the first struggles for development and to complete his education, or if he has not, like the shepherd Giotto, the luck to meet with a rich Cimabue, he must inevitably vanish in oblivion in the great prison of wage-slavery, and society itself thus loses treasures ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... remembered—and Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus among the Dominicans, had given to intellectual life that amazing lift into a higher region of thought, speculation, and inquiry which prepared the way for greater things by-and-by. It was at Assisi that Cimabue and Giotto received their most sublime inspiration and did their very best, breathing the air that St. Francis himself had breathed and listening day by day to traditions and memories of the saint, told peradventure by one or another who had seen him alive or even touched his garments ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... indeed, the valley of the Arno as it stands at present, thick set with tower and spire and palace. In order to arrive at the raison d'etre of Fiesole you must blot out mentally Arnolfo's vast pile, and Brunelleschi's dome, and Giotto's campanile, and Savonarola's monastery, and the tall and slender tower of the Palazzo Vecchio, rising like a shaft sheer into the air far, far below—you must blot out, in short, all that makes the world now congregate at Florence, and all Florence itself into the ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... is two hundred and fifty-six 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 ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... 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 man, with curling mustache and dimpled chin and large appealing eyes. He was ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... 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 fast on the cross, he stabbed him ...
— A Museum for Young Gentlemen and Ladies - A Private Tutor for Little Masters and Misses • Unknown
... 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 ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... Cimabue and Giotto," he added, "you would better read that also, for the work of these old painters will be the subject of our next lesson. For it, we will go to the ...
— Barbara's Heritage - Young Americans Among the Old Italian Masters • Deristhe L. Hoyt
... discontent with the pattern. There was an inclination toward something truer to nature, but, as yet, no great realization of it. The study of nature came in very slowly, and painting was not positive in statement until the time of Giotto and Lorenzetti. ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke
... landscape whose beauties could not be written in the sand? Will the golden age of the arts ever return? We are hardly moving towards it, I fear. For I have found a model for my Cimabue,—an artist too, and a true one; but no boy Giotto! Still I should like you to see it. I ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... various kinds of art, is to prevent the formation of any definite mood, and to set up what is most hostile to all mood, to all unity of being: comparison, analysis, classification. You may know quite exactly the difference between Giotto and Simon Martini, between a Ferrarese and a Venetian, between Praxiteles and Scopas; and yet be ignorant of the meaning which any of these might have in your life, and unconscious of the changes they might work in your being. And this, I fear, is often the case with connoisseurs and archaeologists, ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... had both seen the Babylonian sun set over the ruins of the Birs Nimrud, and had talked of Paris fashions while they did so; they had both leaned over the terraces of Bellosguardo, while the moon was full on Giotto's tower, and had discussed their dresses for the Veglione masquerade. It was not their style to care for these matters; they were pretty, to be sure, but they had seen so many ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... the Kutb Minar superior to Giotto's campanile at Florence in 'poetry of design and exquisite finish of detail'. He also held it to excel its taller Egyptian rival, the minaret of the mosque of Hasan at Cairo, in its nobler appearance, as well as in design and finish. To sum up, he held the Delhi monument to surpass any building ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... before the eye the last judgment and the region of hell, with its monstrous torments, its wells of flames, its ocean with seven bitter waves: ice, fire, blood ... a rudimentary rendering of legends interpreted in their turn by Dante in his poem, and Giotto in his fresco.[326] The thought of Giotto especially, when reading those sermons, recurs to the memory, of Giotto with his awkward and audacious attempts, Giotto so remote and yet so modern, childish and noble at the same time, who represents devils roasting the ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... order myself. Oh, I like it, you know. She's developing my mind like winking. Spent the whole morning at the Brera, mugging up these old Italian Johnnies. They really are clinkers, you know. RAPHAEL, eh?—and GIOTTO, and MANTEGNA, and all that lot. As HYPATIA says, for intensity of—er religious feeling, and—and subtlety of symbolism, and—and so on, they simply take the cake—romp in, and the rest nowhere! I'm getting quite the connoisseur, I can ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, December 12, 1891 • Various
... can use the pencil to greater ends under cover of the motley, and encase bitter truths with the gilt of a printed jest. Like Giotto and his legendary feat, he can draw you a perfect circle with his pen—and perhaps he is the only man in the country who can do it. His is the rare gift that in him sense of fun, of dignity, and of art is equal. He will brook nothing more serious in his sallies than chaff and banter; ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... 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
... popular. The Italian artists made these with great refinement. Sometimes stucco was employed instead of genuine carving, and occasionally the work was embossed on leather. They were painted in heraldic colours, and gold, and nothing could be more decorative. Even Giotto produced certain works of this description, as well as ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... lands, and taking long walks alone: during which (as well as when I was in Ireland) I made such sketches as will make you throw down your brush in despair. I wish you would ask at Molteno's or Colnaghi's for a new Lithographic print of a head of Dante, after a fresco by Giotto, lately discovered in some chapel {90b} at Florence. It is the most wonderful head that ever was seen—Dante at about twenty-seven years old: rather younger. The Edgeworths had a print in Ireland: got by great ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... The frescoes by Giotto, sadly repainted, in the fourth chapel on the left, must be noted. They represent the four Evangelists with their symbols over them, and the four Latin fathers of the Church, S. Jerome, S. Ambrose, S. Austin, and S. Gregory. Certain fragments of a thirteenth-century ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton
... his surroundings. The proof of the universality of art is in these manifestations, of which the logical outcome was the complete and splendid art of Greece. Through the sequence of Byzantine art we come to Giotto, who, a shepherd's son under the skies of Italy, was reinspired at the source of nature, and became the first painter as we to-day know painting. From Giotto descends in direct line the great family of artists who, in the service of ...
— McClure's Magazine, January, 1896, Vol. VI. No. 2 • Various
... da Rabatta and Master Giotto the painter coming from Mugello, each jestingly rallieth the other on his scurvy ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... green and blue, from the gold of the Cosmati's mosaics: childish, dreary, all stiff and agape, but so solemn and pathetic, and full of the greatest future. For out of those Cosmati mosaics, and those barbarous frescoes of the old basilicas, will come Giotto and all the Renaissance; and out of those Church songs will come Dante; they are all signs, poor primitive rhymes and primitive figures, that the world is teeming again, and will bear, for centuries to come, new spiritual wonders. Hence the importance, the venerableness of all ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... under-currents of the noisy town. Sunlight, lovely full sunlight, lingered warm and still on the balcony. It caught the facade of the cathedral sideways, like the tips of a flower, and sideways lit up the stem of Giotto's tower, like a lily stem, or a long, lovely pale pink and white and green pistil of the lily of the cathedral. Florence, the flowery town. Firenze—Fiorenze—the flowery town: the red lilies. The Fiorentini, the flower-souled. Flowers with good roots in ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... translated by Dr. Nugent, v. ii. b. iii c. vii. p 113, where he mentions "having heard the words Paix, paix, Satan! allez, paix! in the court of justice at Paris. I recollected what Dante said, when he with his master Virgil entered the gates of hell: for Dante, and Giotto the painter, were together in France, and visited Paris with particular attention, where the court of justice may be considered as hell. Hence it is that Dante, who was likewise perfect master of the French, made use of that expression, and I have often been ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... 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 ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... distance between Cimabue, 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 ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... sanctity dependent on a singular repose and grace of gesture, consummating itself in the floating, flying, and above all, in the dancing groups. That is not Angelico's inspiration. It is only a peculiarly tender use of systems of grouping which had been long before developed by Giotto, Memmi, and Orcagna; and the real root of it all is simply—What do you think, children? The beautiful ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... 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, ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... 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 renderings of the Adoration of the Magi, ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... destined, the one to hold the names of the living members of the Brotherhood, the other to commemorate those who had passed away (empty this last save for the one poor name of 'Charles Richards'); the copies of Giotto's Paduan Virtues—faith, fortitude, charity, and the like—which broke the long wall at intervals. The cynic in the onlooker tried to assert itself against the feeling with which the air ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the same weakness, and this not the weakness of a child who is taking much pains to do something beyond his strength, and whose intention can be felt through and above the imperfections of his performance (as in the case of the two Apostles' heads by Giotto in our gallery), but of one who is not even conscious of weakness save by way of impatience that his work should cost him time and trouble at all, and who is satisfied if he can turn it out well enough to take in patrons who have themselves ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... he goes to paint the Last Supper," they said to each other; and we think of it as already the most famous picture in the world before it was begun. Every one knew that he had the most famous picture in his brain, that he was born to paint it, to initiate the High Renaissance; from Giotto onwards all the painters had been preparing for that, Florence herself had been preparing for it. It makes no difference that for centuries it has been a shadow on the wall; it is still the most famous painting in the world ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... Tschaikowsky; of Gutenberg, Kossuth, and Napoleon; of Isaiah and Plato, Leonardo and Dante—with the wild strains of the gypsy orchestra floating across Second Avenue, and to the southward a glimpse aloft in a rarer, purer air of builders clambering on the cupola of a neighboring Giotto's tower built of steel? Who dares say that the city is unpoetic? It is one of the most ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... 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 phrase in question, and it has struck me as ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... 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 of ware on the flying ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... the stage, of whom you ought to know more than his mere name. This man was called Dante. He was the son of a Florentine lawyer who belonged to the Alighieri family and he saw the light of day in the year 1265. He grew up in the city of his ancestors while Giotto was painting his stories of the life of St. Francis of Assisi upon the walls of the Church of the Holy Cross, but often when he went to school, his frightened eyes would see the puddles of blood which told of the terrible and endless warfare that raged ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... 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: ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... are very irksome, and they are not to be persisted in alone; neither is it necessary to acquire perfect power in any of them. An entire master of the pencil or brush ought, indeed, to be able to draw any form at once, as Giotto his circle; but such skill as this is only to be expected of the consummate master, having pencil in hand all his life, and all day long,—hence the force of Giotto's proof of his skill; and it is quite possible to draw very beautifully, without attaining even an approximation to ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... more than another, whose work it is desirable that you should examine in Florence, supposing that you care for old art at all, it is Giotto. You can, indeed, also see work of his at Assisi; but it is not likely you will stop there, to any purpose. At Padua there is much; but only of one period. At Florence, which is his birthplace, you can see pictures by him of every date, and every kind. But you had surely better ...
— Mornings in Florence • John Ruskin |
