"Giotto" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... and ate no 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 them ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... Giovanni Pisano, and in 1317 were jointly appointed architects of their native town, for which they designed the Porto Romana, the church and convent of St Francis, and other buildings. On the recommendation of the celebrated Giotto, who styled them the best sculptors of the time, they executed in 1330 the tomb of Bishop Guido Tarlati in the cathedral of Arezzo, which Giotto had designed. It was esteemed one of the finest artistic works of the 14th century, but unfortunately was destroyed ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... highest glory in freedom, in letters, in art. 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 patiently and bravely amidst ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... doubtless true of sculpture and painting. It is impossible to over-estimate the 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 ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... 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 ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... 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 ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... 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 ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... 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 ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... Augustus John, Beardsley, Courbet, Daumier, Maillol, Chavannes and Millet, particularly Cezanne, Van Gogh, Rodin and Blake, has been marked. The Silver Birch group has never tired of extolling the great names of Rembrandt, Duerer, El Greco, Van Eyck, Goya, Leonardo, Michael Angelo, Tintoretto, Giotto and Mantegna[110]. ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... latter part of this account which the early masters seized as the motif of the Dispute in the Temple, and interpreted as meaning that the boy Christ assumed the position of teacher and preacher to the doctors. In the paintings of Duccio and Giotto, he is sitting on a platform, with the mien and gesture of a learned doctor; while other artists place him on a sort of throne or pulpit. It was left to modern art to conceive the true significance of the event, and to put before ...
— Child-life in Art • Estelle M. Hurll
... 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, ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... 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 from the ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... that the Storys had taken an apartment for them (in the Via Bocca di Leone), and they arrived to find lighted fires and lamps. Their journey had included a week's visit at Assisi, studying the rich art of Cimabue and Giotto in the church of the great Franciscan monastery. Mrs. Browning visited studios in Rome and found that of Mr. Crawford more interesting to her than Mr. Gibson's, but no artist is "as near" to her, as she herself ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... Chantrey's Scott, Houdon's Voltaire, Powers's Jackson?—Heroic? what more 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... witty sketch; consummately dashed off, as nobody but Voltaire could; "round as Giotto's O," done at one stroke. Of which the prose facts are only as follows. Luiscius, Prussian Resident, not distinguished by salary or otherwise, had, at one stage of these negotiations, been told, from head-quarters, He might, in casual extra-official ways, if it seemed furthersome, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle
... important. In the middle of the fifteenth century he 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 own of classical stories: or, if he painted religious incidents, ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... a group of statues which adorn the Campanile, the great Bell tower designed by Giotto for the Cathedral. Not counting the numerous reliefs, there are sixteen statues in all, four on each side of the tower, and in themselves they epitomise early Florentine sculpture. Donatello's statues of Jeremiah, Abraham, and St. John the Baptist offer no difficulties of nomenclature, but the ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... 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 connected by arcs, a circle will result, ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... at 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 faade 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 in the statues of the ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... are, 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
... attempted to prove that it is due to a Mendelian unit. The evidence alleged is inadequate to prove that the trait is inherited in any particular way, but the pedigrees cited by these three investigators, and the boyhood histories of such artists as Benjamin West, Giotto, Ruskin and Turner, indicate ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... great intellect and scholarly attainments had made him well known in Florence, although he was only a young man. He was high in the esteem of many learned men and had a great many poets and artists for his friends. Among them were the artist named Giotto and the poet called Guido Cavalcante. So well did he appear in their eyes and to the men of the city of Florence who ran its affairs that in the year 1300 Dante was made one of the Priors of Florence, that is, one of the chief rulers of ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... 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 ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... Saturday, a party 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 ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... of buildings designed and decorated by one master, or by groups of artists interpreting the spirit of a single period. Such supreme monuments of the national genius are not very common, and they are therefore the more precious. Giotto's Chapel at Padua; the Villa Farnesina at Rome, built by Peruzzi and painted in fresco by Raphael and Sodoma; the Palazzo del Te at Mantua, Giulio Romano's masterpiece; the Scuola di San Rocco, illustrating the Venetian Renaissance ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... 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 ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... 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
... theories of its gospel, have not been, to 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 are able, without offence, to say all ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... Poggibonsi, San Gemignano, Volterra, Siena itself—all gained through the invocation of her name; they need only look at the church which rose over her grave. The grand schemes for a marble facade were never carried out, and it is brown unfinished stone until this day. But for the inside Giotto was summoned to decorate the walls of the nave. Giotto came—that is to say, he did not come, German research having decisively proved—but at all events the nave is covered with frescoes, and so are two chapels in the left transept, and the arch into the choir, and there are scraps in the choir ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster
... 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 ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... city-state and the wealth 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 ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... Here, then, before we proceed further with the story of his art, which is practically the story of his busy life, there are some points on which we shall not waste time in lingering. We saw how Perugino, like Giotto himself and almost every great master of Italian painting, had perfected his knowledge and trained his eye and hand in the practice of fresco-painting; and we have next to notice that he obtained fame among his contemporaries, ...
— Perugino • Selwyn Brinton
... forfeiture is paid. Nor were I even here; if, able still To sin, I had not turn'd me unto God. O powers of man! how vain your glory, nipp'd E'en in its height of verdure, if an age Less bright succeed not! imbue thought To lord it over painting's field; and now The cry is Giotto's, and his name eclips'd. Thus hath one Guido from the other snatch'd The letter'd prize: and he perhaps is born, Who shall drive either from their nest. The noise Of worldly fame is but a blast of wind, That blows from divers points, and shifts its name Shifting the point it blows from. ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... the 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 is out of the question; and driving-how I at ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... and the minimum of individual distinction; while small artists, with a feeble hold upon character, habitually resort to extreme quaintnesses and singularities of circumstance, in order to confer upon their weak portraitures some vigor of outline. It takes a Giotto to draw readily a nearly perfect O; but a nearly perfect triangle any one can draw. Shakspeare is able to delineate a Gentleman,—one, that is, who, while nobly and profoundly a man, is so delicately individualized, that the impression of him, however vigorous and commanding, cannot ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... 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, translated ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher
... detain them long. They 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 ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... modern master, and work back gradually, otherwise the eye 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. By and by we shall grow used to the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... 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 a little, and the man at once stood aside ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... itself is, I doubt not, 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
... Giotto was chosen to erect it (the Campanile), on the ground, avowedly, of the universality of his talents, with the appointment of Capo Maestro, or chief Architect (chief Master I should rather write), of the Cathedral and its dependencies, a yearly salary of one hundred gold florins, and the ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin
... beheld 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... 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 to its climax by a joke ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... this explanation of the tears with a murmured sound of somewhat enigmatic intonation. Her thin dark face settled into a repose that had a little grimness in it. She began putting the flowers into a vase that stood between the reproduction of a Giotto Madonna and a Japanese devil-hunt, both results of the study of art taken up during the past winter by her mother's favorite woman's club. Mrs. Emery watched the process in the contemplative relief which follows an emotional outbreak, and her eyes wandered to the objects on either side the vase. ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... houses, making kettles, laying out 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 for their ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... 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, under circumstances the ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... 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 as an ...
— Everyman and Other Old Religious Plays, with an Introduction • Anonymous
... find anything about 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
... 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
... 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 Chavannes ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... deposited bluey on the foot-board and himself on the seat. Then the chestnuts tossed their heads, and the buggy resumed its way, surging across the crab-holes like a canoe on rough water. My soul went forth in a paean of joy, for, exactly as the perfect circle of a flying scrawl bespoke Giotto, this action bespoke Stewart of Kooltopa, now masquerading under a pair of strange horses. Here was my opportunity. Figuratively, I would put Alf in a basket, with a note pinned to his bib, and leave him on ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... 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
... with innumerable stars and 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 ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... 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
... the recent private purchases. The Duke of Northumberland procured in Rome, in 1850, the whole of Camuccini's famous collection. It contained seventy-four pictures, and many of them of great value. Among them was a small, but precious picture by Giotto,—a beautiful little Raphael,—three undoubted works of Titian,—and, most precious of all, a picture, formerly in the Ludovisi collection, painted jointly by Giovanni Bellini and Titian. It is the Descent of the Gods to taste ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... 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, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... detail of the 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
... spirit and are the coloured image of his secret soul, and his pupil, Benozzo Gozzoli, the last of the Mediaeval painters; if we also except his precursors: Cimabue, the survivors of the rigid Byzantines, Giotto—who thawed those fixed and puzzling figures, Orcagna, Simone di Martino, Taddeo Gaddi—all the very early painters—how much dexterous trickery do we find among the great painters, mimicking the religious note, and producing ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... painting out of hand—I mean, at all events, 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 ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... 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 because it is the masterpiece of Leonardo. There was a fate against the ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... 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 the land of ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... builder or architect, and sometimes only giving advice, while elsewhere he is sculptor or woodworker. The painter, the mosaicist, and the designer for intarsia are confused in a similar manner. Borsieri calls Giovanni de' Grassi, the Milanese painter (known as Giovanni de Melano at first, a pupil of Giotto and Taddeo Gaddi; pictures of his are in the Academy, Florence, and in the cloister of S. Caterina Milan), "an excellent architect"; and he also worked in relief, besides conducting very important architectural works. He says that about 1385 Giovanni Galeazzo opened an academy of fine ...
— Intarsia and Marquetry • F. Hamilton Jackson
... enough ones she often made, very likely. On the other hand, the American, who liked to talk to her in his own tongue, and to make her chatter to him in return, would tell her many a story of the old master painters, of Cimabue and the boy Giotto, of Lionardo da Vinci, and half a dozen others; old, old tales of the days when, as we sometimes fancy, looking back through the mist of centuries, there were giants on the earth, but all new and fresh to our little Madelon, and with a touch ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... dealers come to be imaged, in my mind, 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 ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... keenly and who study what they have seen, naturally come first; nor does the poet usually describe what his contemporary painter attempts not to paint. An exception might, perhaps, require to be made for Dante, who would seem to have seen and described many things left quite untouched by Giotto, and even by Raphael; but in estimating Dante we must be careful to distinguish the few touches which really belong to him, from the great mass of colour and detail which we have unconsciously added thereto, borrowing from our own experience and from innumerable pictures and poems which, at ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... 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 ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... 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 another to be industrious ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... 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 interest in Florence before the legitimate publication: but they told me it was to be ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... 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 surprised ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... century 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
... 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 ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... company. Its friends 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 good company; ...
— The Blot on the Kaiser's 'Scutcheon • Newell Dwight Hillis
... book on art for children (1907). Contains sketches of eighteen Italian painters from Giotto to Paul Veronese, based on Vasari, and attractively written. Sixteen color and eight black and white reproductions. NEW YORK ...
— A Mother's List of Books for Children • Gertrude Weld Arnold
... 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 ...
— The Madonna of the Future • Henry James
... 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 faith ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... 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 Fusina. This approach ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... 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 ...
— The French Impressionists (1860-1900) • Camille Mauclair
... 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
... 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, and was studying engineering in a night school. ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... this term was booked 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 ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... 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 old stand where they sell the same old cake ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... secret to himself, that if he labored without ceasing, without tiring, he might produce something which would at all events be art, which would stand wholly apart from the objects shaped like books, printed with printers' ink, and called by the name of books that he had read. Giotto, he knew, was a painter, and the man who imitated walnut-wood on the deal doors opposite was a painter, and he had wished to be a very humble pupil in the class of the former. It was better, he thought, to fail in ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... own. They continued, then, to employ no other method of colouring save that of distemper for panels and for canvases, which method had been introduced by Cimabue in the year 1250, when he was working with those Greeks, and had been afterwards followed by Giotto and by the others of whom we have spoken up to the present; and they were still adhering to the same manner of working, although the craftsmen recognized clearly that pictures in distemper were wanting in a certain softness and liveliness, which, if ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 3 (of 10), Filarete and Simone to Mantegna • Giorgio Vasari
... department of the painting-shop at Price's. You may have observed the 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 disc, and with a single unerring flip of the finger pushed ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... 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 ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... 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 surely was ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... 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 for ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... 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 of ...
— The Gathering of Brother Hilarius • Michael Fairless
... of Theology and Heavenly truth. Nor did his love in any way interfere with the studies or activities of his life. His sonnets early gained him fame as a poet, and the lovely portrait of him—painted by Giotto, on the walls of the Bargello, at the age of twenty-four side by side with Brunetto Latini and Corso Donati, and holding in his hand a pomegranate, the mystic type of good works—shows that he was already ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... 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
... 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
... Thus Giotto or Fra Angelico would have at once admitted theologically that God was too good to be painted; but they would always try to paint Him. And they felt (very rightly) that representing Him as a rather quaint old man with ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... 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 would be so outraged that they would ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... 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. ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... 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 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
... 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 mere symbolism, ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... 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 ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... traits and character. He dashes down his creation with the quickness of thought, and with as much confidence that Messrs. Oldbuck, Crepin, and Jabot will leap into the very existence he wishes them to assume, as Giotto had, when, with a single sweep of his arm, he drew his magic circle. It may be objected, that the comparison between the two Englishmen and the two Continentals is hardly equal. Doyle and Leech lost, doubtless, much of their freedom by drawing with hard pencils upon ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... it that 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 ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... 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, ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... 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 art, began ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... from within, large, clear, lustrous, with a meaning in them so profound and serious that it was almost sorrowful,—like the eyes of Giotto's ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... 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 ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 215, December 10, 1853 • Various
... superbia qui si paga il fio: Ed ancor non sarei qui, se non fosse Che, possendo peccar, mi volsi a Dio. Oh vana gloria dell'umane posse, Com' poco verde in su la cima dura Se non e giunta dall'etadi grosse! Credette Cimabue nella pintura Tenor lo campo; ed ora ha Giotto il grido, Si che la fama di colui s' oscura. Cosi ha tolto l'uno all'altro Guido La gloria della lingua; e forse e nato Chi l'uno e l'altro caccera di nido. Non e il mondan romore altro ch' un fiato Di vento ch' or vien quinci ed or vien quindi, E muta ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... slowly across Europe, and till the middle of the twelfth century there was no general decline. But the best was over in France before the twelfth century was out. Gothic architecture is juggling in stone and glass. In Italy Giotto followed Cimabue; and Giotto could not always resist the temptation to state the particular and leave the universal out. He sometimes tells us facts instead of expressing emotions. In the full Renaissance the coarsest feeling sufficed to flavour ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... Seccombe, speaks of his 'genuine lyric fire, a poetic energy, and above all an intensity remote from his contemporaries and suggestive (as Cimabue in his antique and primitive manner is suggestive of Giotto and Angelico) of ...
— The Rowley Poems • Thomas Chatterton
... of Sta. Maria Novella could only be seen at an angle, the exquisite Campanile rose fair and full against the sky. She enjoyed this most graceful tower very much, and, I think, preferred it even to Giotto's noble work. Its quiet religious grace was grateful to her spirit, which seemed to be yearning for peace from the cares that had so vexed and heated the world about her for a ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... picture of "St. Francis Preaching to the Birds," was a little boy, he took care of his father's sheep in the fields. One day a noted painter, Cimabue, found Giotto drawing a sheep on a flat rock with colored stones. The picture of the sheep was so lifelike that the great man asked the boy, Giotto, to go with him and become an artist. He went, and one day ...
— The Children's Book of Celebrated Pictures • Lorinda Munson Bryant
... do so much work in the house, for she was beginning to find a difficulty in bearing before her the mysterious casket, fuller and larger every day, whose splendid outline could be detected through the folds of her ample smocks. These last recalled the cloaks in which Giotto shrouds some of the allegorical figures in his paintings, of which M. Swann had given me photographs. He it was who pointed out the resemblance, and when he inquired after the kitchen-maid he would say: ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... been no aid to visualization comparable to the cinema. If a Florentine wished to visualize the saints, he could go to the frescoes in his church, where he might see a vision of saints standardized for his time by Giotto. If an Athenian wished to visualize the gods he went to the temples. But the number of objects which were pictured was not great. And in the East, where the spirit of the second commandment was widely accepted, the portraiture of concrete things ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... marble, and 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 seemed ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 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. ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton
... blossom while missing the evil fruit, of which 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 ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... said, clapping her hands as it bounded in ever diminishing saltations and with a finer skill than that of Giotto, drew perfect circles on the ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... loved her to the point of weakness. The king was buried with all solemnity in the church of Santa Chiara, which he had himself founded and dedicated to the Holy Sacrament, enriching it with magnificent frescoes by Giotto and other precious relics, among which is shown still, behind the tribune of the high altar, two columns of white marble taken from Solomon's temple. There still lies Robert, represented on his tomb in the dress of a king and in a monk's frock, on the right of the monument to his son Charles, ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - JOAN OF NAPLES—1343-1382 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... 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 people who have been made the heirs of so priceless a work of art as the sublime ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... her communes that she has acquired all she has ever had of liberty: through her workmen in wool or silk, through her merchants of Genoa, Florence, Venice, and Pisa, that she has acquired her wealth; through her artists, plebeian and republican, from Giotto to Michael Angelo, that she has acquired her renown; through her navigators,—plebeian,—that she has given a world to humanity; through her Popes—sons of the people even they—that until the twelfth century she aided ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... 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! ...
— Poems • Oscar Wilde
... transient frenzy. In religion itself have we not similar variety of expression? Those faces gathered under the trees or in a public thoroughfare—the expression of emotion there is not that which we witness, say, in Santa Croce, at prime, when the first light falls through the windows on Giotto's frescoes, Herod and Francis, St. Louis and the Soldan, and on the few, the still worshippers—but dare we assert that this alone is sincere, ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... Flemish painters never showed any disposition to paint, for its own sake, other scenery than of their own land (compare Vol. III. Chap. XIII. Sec. 20), the sincerely religious ones continually used Alpine distances, bright with snow. In like manner Giotto, Perugino, Angelico, the young Raphael, and John Bellini, always, if, with any fitness to their subject, they can introduce them, use craggy or blue mountain distances, and this with definite expression of love towards ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... 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 glory ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various |
