Page:The painters of Florence from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century (1915).djvu/74

52 with his family in the parish of S. Pietro Maggiore, and had lately finished the Pietà, now in the Accademia, signed with his name. "I, John of Milan, painted this picture in 1365." Early in the same year he accepted an order from the Prior of Santa Croce to decorate the Rinuccini Chapel with frescoes of the life of the Virgin and S. Mary Magdalene. In these eight subjects the traditional art of the Gaddi is enriched by the presence of fresh elements. A new type of features is introduced, the proportions of head and face are more correct, there is a certain sweetness and grace, which seems to have been the natural inheritance of Lombard artists, and a plentiful infusion of homely incidents partaking of the nature of genre. The busy movements and elaborately trimmed gowns of the maids who wash and dress the infant Virgin are as prominent as the dinner which the Apostles are in the act of eating at the Pharisee's table, or the cook and kitchen-fire which engross Martha's attention. Giovanni da Milano may possibly have been the painter of the scenes from the Virgin's life in the cloisters of S. Maria Novella, which Mr Ruskin has eloquently described in his "Mornings in Florence," and which are, no doubt, works by a Giottesque artist, but hardly, as he supposes, by the hand of Giotto himself. This Lombard master afterwards went to Rome, where he was employed in the Lateran from 1367 to 1370, and, according to Vasari, visited Assisi, and painted an important altar-piece in the Upper Church on his journey back to Milan.

Another follower of Giotto, who was also said to have worked in the Lateran, and who certainly painted in Santa Croce during Taddeo Gaddi's