His thoroughness recalls Giotto in certain of his frescoes.

From Giotto to Chagall. © 2Apr45; A186873.

In the next chapel, the Bardi, we find Giotto at work on a life of S. Francis, and here again Ruskin is essential.

It is almost with reluctance that a critic feels obliged to name this powerful but prosaic painter as the Giotto of the fifteenth century in Florence, the tutelary angel of an age inaugurated by Masaccio.

As the church of S. Francis at Assisi formed an epoch in the history of painting, by concentrating the genius of Giotto on a series of masterpieces, so the Duomo of Orvieto, by giving free scope to the school of Pisa, marked a point in the history of sculpture.

It is as if he had transferred the picture of Giotto into his Vision; for it is as a picture, not an action, that it is introduced.

Cimabue, of whom more is said, together with more of Giotto as a painter, in the chapter on the Accademia, had died in 1302, leaving Giotto far beyond all living artists, and Giotto, between the age of fifty and sixty, was now residing in Cimabue's house.

Cimabue, so runs a legend luckily not yet discredited, found the child Giotto among the sheep-folds on the solemn Tuscan hill-side, drawing with boyish art the outline of a sheep upon a stone.