Page:The painters of Florence from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century (1915).djvu/31

 II

GIOTTO

1276-1335

" a village of Etruria," writes Lorenzo Ghiberti, the oldest historian of the Florentine Renaissance, "Painting took her rise." In other words, Giotto di Bondone was born in the year 1276, at Colle, in the Commune of Vespignano, a village of the Val Mugello fourteen miles from Florence. There the boy, who had been called Angiolo, after his grandfather, and went by the diminutive name of Angiolotto, or Giotto, kept his father's flocks on the grassy slopes of the Apennines, and was found one day by Cimabue as he rode over the hills, drawing a sheep with a sharp stone upon a rock. Full of surprise at the child's talent for drawing, the great painter asked him if he would go back with him to Florence, to which both the boy and his father, a poor peasant named Bondone, gladly agreed. Thus, at ten years old, Giotto was taken straight from the sheep-folds and apprenticed to the first painter in Florence. Such is the story told by Ghiberti and confirmed by Leonardo da Vinci, who, writing half a century before Vasari, remarks that Giotto, being born in the mountains, took Nature for his guide, and began by 11