Page:The painters of Florence from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century (1915).djvu/76

54 to life, in the presence of the Emperor Constantine and his court. The perspective and chiaroscuro are little inferior to Giotto's own, and the hilly landscape with its classical buildings and long line of ruined arches form a picturesque background to the whole composition. The gentle melancholy and seriousness of the young master's nature, to which Vasari alludes, is more apparent in the beautiful Pietà which he painted for the church of S. Romeo, now in the corridor of the Uffizi. The general lines of the composition recall Giotto's Pietàs at Padua and Assisi, but the grief of the mourners is less passionate and more restrained. The holy Mother gazes tenderly at her Son's face, and St. John, standing behind with clasped hands, looks down upon them with deep distress and affection, while two Florentine ladies, the donors of the picture, kneel with folded arms at the foot of the cross, and St. Benedict and St. Zenobius, robed in full pontificals, lay their hands upon them in blessing. Cavalcaselle ascribes two paintings of the Nativity and Crucifixion in the crypt of the Strozzi Chapel in Santa Maria Novella to this artist, as well as the fragments of an allegorical fresco, with a view of the Palazzo Vecchio, representing the Expulsion of Walter of Brienne, Duke of Athens, from Florence, which Giottino painted in the Palace of the Podestà, according to Vasari and Villani, when he was only twenty, and which were still to be seen a few years ago, in the Via del Diluvio. On his return from Rome, Giottino visited Assisi, but no trace of his work now remains in the great Franciscan basilica. The charming frescoes on the life of St Nicholas in the Chapel of the Sacrament,