Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: GIOTTO CHAPTER I INTRODUCTORY THERE are few characters of any real importance in the history of Italian art, concerning whom we possess less certain or genuine information than we do in regard to Giotto di Bondone. Notwithstanding the fame and celebrity that have been universally accorded him as one of the greatest and most striking personalities in the artistic annals of the Christian world, we are left to found our ideas of his private life and of his career as an artist, almost entirely upon tradition, and such of his works as have been spared us through the centuries that have elapsed since he laid aside his brush. As to authentic notices concerning his life and work, we have been bequeathed the unsatisfactory legacy of a few scattered documents, which afford no further enlightenment than to establish one or two relatively unimportant dates connected with certain periods of his artistic activity—records mostly of an official or legal nature, and which cast no light whatever upon the personality of the man himself. In attempting, therefore, to construct anything ap- preaching an ordered or probable account of his life, we are forced to fall back almost entirely upon such internal evidence as we may gather from his works, the narratives of his earlier biographers being too mixed with the qualities of error and imagination to be of any real service to us. Under such circumstances, it is easily apparent that the most conscientious and well-meaning attempt in this direction can lay claim to nothing beyond a certain appearance of probability, so far must the elements of conjecture and uncertainty enter into every endeavour to put together a connected story of his life. As to a review of his career as an artist, however, we are less devoid of substantial ma...