Page:The painters of Florence from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century (1915).djvu/63

1335] by his strong personality; while the ready wit and practical turn of mind which they reveal are exactly what the study of his works would lead us to expect. A more serious instance of his power of satire is to be found in the song against Voluntary Poverty bearing his name, which Rumohr discovered in the Laurentian library. In these verses Giotto not only denounces the vice and hypocrisy often working beneath the cloak of monastic perfection, but honestly expresses his own aversion to poverty as a thing miscalled a virtue, and enumerates all the evils of the grace which he was so often called to glorify in his paintings. He concludes by declaring that voluntary poverty is nowhere enjoined by our Lord, whose words apply to his own holy life, and who became poor that we might be saved from the curse of avarice, not that we may fall into idle unworthy ways of living. The whole canzone is of great interest, coming as it does from the pen of the chosen painter of the Franciscan Order, and showing the independence of Giotto's character.

The extraordinary industry of the man is shown by the long list of panel pictures as well as wall-paintings which are mentioned by early writers. These have fared even worse than Giotto's frescoes. The picture of the Commune crowned and throned and attended by all the virtues, in the great hall of the Podesti, which Vasari describes as of very beautiful and ingenious invention, the small tempera painting of the Death of the Virgin, on which Michael Angelo loved to gaze, in the church of Ognissanti, the Madonna which was sent to Petrarch at Avignon, and which he left as his most precious possession to his noble friend Francesco di Carrara, have all perished. One panel,