Page:The history of medieval Europe.djvu/658

 6o2 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE in the earlier fashion, Giotto tried to have them tell an actual human story either from the Bible or the life of St. Francis. He put in monks such as people saw every day, and beds and trees and rocks and other familiar objects. Often these were crudely executed or scarcely more than indi- cated, like the scenery in an Elizabethan drama. Indeed, when Giotto tries to picture both the inside and the outside of a house at once, the result is something that looks very much like a theatrical stage. And that suggests the secret of his success ; he was not so much realistic as he was dra- matic; he put action into his pictures and held the attention of the observer. Niccola of Pisa had found bits of classical sculpture to inspire him, but there were no ancient paint- ings available for Giotto to study. Instead he struck out a new path by himself. Such originality was to be character- istic of Renaissance painting, and by the next century of its sculpture. Giotto also was a forerunner of the later ar- tists in his versatility, for he designed the stately campanile which stands by the cathedral at Florence. Leonardo da Vinci, probably the greatest all-round genius that the Italian Renaissance produced, tells us that " after Masaccio Giotto the art of painting declined again be- cause every one imitated the pictures that were already done. Thus it went until Tommaso of Florence, nicknamed Masaccio, showed by his perfect works how those who take for their standard anything but nature, the mis- tress of all masters, weary themselves in vain." Masaccio also illustrates the precocious genius of many Italian art- ists, since his short life was bounded by the years 140 1 and 1429. Nevertheless his frescoes were the inspiration of the greatest masters for the rest of the century, during which the art advanced to the highest point in Leonardo da Vinci and his fellows. With Masaccio the early Renaissance at Florence may The early be regarded as definitely opened. Contemporary JJpfJjJ^ with him was the great architect Brunelleschi, and it was also in the first half of the fifteenth cen- tury that the art of sculpture profited by the genius of three