Page:The painters of Florence from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century (1915).djvu/32

12 drawing the sheep and goats which he herded on the rocks around him.

Another version of the incident is given by an early commentator of Dante, who wrote towards the end of the fourteenth century, a few years before Ghiberti. According to him Giotto was apprenticed to a wool-merchant of Florence, but, instead of going to work, spent his time in watching the artists in Cimabue's shop; upon which Bondone applied to the great master, who consented to teach the boy painting. The natural vivacity and intelligence of the young student soon made him as great a favourite in Cimabue's workshop as in his native village, while his extraordinary aptitude for drawing became every day more apparent. The legends of his marvellous skill, the stories of the fly that Cimabue vainly tried to brush off his picture, of the round O which he drew before the Pope's envoy with one sweep of his pencil, are proofs of the wonder and admiration which Giotto's first attempts to follow nature more closely excited among his contemporaries. No doubt the boldness and originality of his genius soon led him to abandon the purely conventional style of art then in use, and to seek after a more natural and lifelike form of expression. And early in his career he was probably influenced by the example of the sculptor Giovanni Pisano, whose fiery energy and strong dramatic sense were tending in the same direction, and who was actively engaged on his great works in Tuscany and Umbria at this time.

The earliest examples of Giotto's style that remain to us are some small panels at Munich, in which the