Page:The painters of Florence from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century (1915).djvu/62

40 was short and insignificant in appearance, were riding out to Vespignano, they were caught in a shower of rain, and forced to borrow cloaks and hats from the peasants. "Well, Giotto," said the lawyer, as they trotted back to Florence, clad in these old clothes and bespattered with mud from head to foot, "if a stranger were to meet you now, would he ever suppose that you were the first painter in Florence?" "Certainly he would," was Giotto's prompt reply, "if beholding your worship he could imagine for a moment that you had learnt your A. B. C." And the novelist Sacchetti relates how the great master rode out to San Gallo one Sunday afternoon with a party of friends, after the manner of Florentine citizens, more for pleasure than devotion, and how they fell in with a herd of swine, one of whom ran between Giotto's legs and threw him down. "After all, the pigs are quite right," said the painter, as he scrambled to his feet and shook the dust off his clothes, "when I think how many thousands of crowns I have earned with their bristles, without ever giving them even a bowl of soup!" The same writer records how on another of these joyous Sunday expeditions Giotto stopped with his friends at the church of the Servi friars, to study the paintings on the walls. One of his companions remarked that St. Joseph was always represented as grave and melancholy, upon which Giotto replied, "Can you wonder, considering his relationship to the Child?" a repartee which seems to have afforded the company infinite amusement. These tales sound trivial in themselves, but are of interest as showing the deep impression left upon the great painter's contemporaries, not only by his talents, but