Page:The painters of Florence from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century (1915).djvu/33

1335] Last Judgment, St. Francis receiving the Stigmata, and several scenes from the Passion are represented, as well as a Crucifixion and Madonna in which we see his first attempts at rendering natural gesture and expression. We find the qualities in a still higher degree in another charming little panel, the Presentation of Christ in the Temple, which was long in England, and is now in Mrs. Gardner's collection at Boston. A larger and better known work is the Madonna and Angels, in the Academy at Florence, which, although decidedly archaic in type and proportion, has a vigour and reality, a human life and warmth, that is wholly wanting in Cimabue's Madonna in the same room. The two pictures, hanging as they do side by side, afford a living proof of the truth of Dante's famous lines: "Credette Cimabue nella pintura, Tener lo campo, ed ora ha Giotto il grido" But it is to Assisi that we must turn for a fuller record of the great master's training and development.

Here, in the old Umbrian city where St. Francis had lived and died, was the great double church which the alms of Christendom had raised above his burial-place. In 1228, two years only after the beloved teacher's death, the work was begun; first the Lower Church, with the massive pillars, low round arches and heavy vaulting that told the mediæval Christian of his pilgrimage through this vale of tears; then, a few years later, the Upper Church, with lofty Gothic arches, slender shafts and jewelled windows, radiant and luminous like some vision of the New Jerusalem. The architect of this noble building, in which Tuscan, Romanesque and Tuscan-Gothic are so happily com-