Knights of the Art | Page 6

of the stranger's
offer. It seemed a golden chance, and he gladly gave his consent.
Why, of course, the boy should go to Florence if the gracious master
would take him and teach him to become a painter. The home would be
lonely without the boy who was so full of fun and as bright as a
sunbeam. But such chances were not to be met with every day, and he
was more than willing to let him go.
So the master set out, and the boy Giotto went with him to Florence to
begin his training.
The studio where Cimabue worked was not at all like those artists'
rooms which we now call studios. It was much more like a workshop,
and the boys who went there to learn how to draw and paint were

taught first how to grind and prepare the colours and then to mix them.
They were not allowed to touch a brush or pencil for a long time, but
only to watch their master at work, and learn all that they could from
what they saw him do.
So there the boy Giotto worked and watched, but when his turn came to
use the brush, to the amazement of all, his pictures were quite unlike
anything which had ever been painted before in the workshop. Instead
of copying the stiff, unreal figures, he drew real people, real animals,
and all the things which he had learned to know so well on the grey
hillside, when he watched his father's sheep. Other artists had painted
the Madonna and Infant Christ, but Giotto painted a mother and a baby.
And before long this worked such a wonderful change that it seemed
indeed as if the art of making pictures had been born again. To us his
work still looks stiff and strange, but in it was the beginning of all the
beautiful pictures that belong to us now.
Giotto did not only paint pictures, he worked in marble as well. To-day,
if you walk through Florence, the City of Flowers, you will still see its
fairest flower of all, the tall white campanile or bell- tower, `Giotto's
tower' as it is called. There it stands in all its grace and loveliness like a
tall white lily against the blue sky, pointing ever upward, in the grand
old faith of the shepherd-boy. Day after day it calls to prayer and to
good works, as it has done all these hundreds of years since Giotto
designed and helped to build it.
Some people call his pictures stiff and ugly, for not every one has wise
eyes to see their beauty, but the loveliness of this tower can easily be
seen by all. `There the white doves circle round and round, and rest in
the sheltering niches of the delicately carved arches; there at the call of
its bell the black-robed Brothers of Pity hurry past to their works of
mercy. There too the little children play, and sometimes stop to stare at
the marble pictures, set in the first story of the tower, low enough to be
seen from the street. Their special favourite is perhaps the picture of the
shepherd sitting under his tent, with the sheep in front, and with the
funniest little dog keeping watch at the side.

Giotto always had a great love for animals, and whenever it was
possible he would squeeze one into a corner of his pictures. He was
sixty years old when he designed this wonderful tower and cut some of
the marble pictures with his own hand, but you can see that the memory
of those old days when he ran barefoot about the hills and tended his
sheep was with him still. Just such another little puppy must have often
played with him in those long-ago days before he became a great
painter and was still only a merry, brown-faced boy, making pictures
with a sharp stone upon the smooth rocks.
Up and down the narrow streets of Florence now, the great painter
would walk and watch the faces of the people as they passed. And his
eyes would still make pictures of them and their busy life, just as they
used to do with the olive-trees, the sheep, and the clouds.
In those days nobody cared to have pictures in their houses, and only
the walls of the churches were painted. So the pictures, or frescoes, as
they were called, were of course all about sacred subjects, either stories
out of the Bible or of the lives of the saints. And as there were few
books, and the poor people did not know how to read, these frescoed
walls were the only story-books they had.
What a joy those pictures of Giotto's must have been, then, to those
poor