The later work of Giotto at Florence falls into two distinct divisions, the one consisting of his frescoes and his great panel picture of the Coronation of the Virgin, the other of his sculpture and architecture, both of which last have as their sole remaining example, the Campanile, in the Piazza del Duomo, better known as "Giotto's tower." The limits of my space compel me to speak very briefly upon each of these divisions, which I regret the less because they are by far the best known and most frequently written about of Giotto's works; and when Mr. Ruskin has put forth his whole strength in description, an inferior writer may be well pardoned for unwillingness to make his inferiority manifest. With this brief word of apology then, I speak first of the frescoes in the Santa Croce.

Giotto painted four chapels here, but the only remaining frescoes are those in the chapels of the Peruzzi and the Bardi, the former containing scenes from the lives of St. John the Evangelist and St. John the Baptist, the latter representations of the life and death of St. Francis. Both these chapels have suffered a good deal from restoration, especially that of the Bardi, which has been so coarsely repainted as to have entirely lost all beauty of colour, and which I shall not therefore dwell upon in detail.

The top fresco on the right hand wall of the Peruzzi Chapel, has also been quite ruined by coarse repainting, and when examined with a good glass shows a coarse black line round every portion of the composition, not unlike that used by the disciples of a certain modern school of decorative painting, who seek to gain the effect which their incompetence otherwise denies them by outlining their compositions in this manner.

The two lower frescoes on the right hand wall, however, representing respectively the Healing of Drusiana by St. John, and the Ascension from the grave of that Evangelist, though they have been a good bit restored, have had the restoration, carefully and sparingly done, and retain still a beauty of colour as great as is to be found in any of Giotto's works. The chief differences observable between these frescoes and those of the earlier years are such as we might expect to find in the later work of an earnest painter, and are briefly as follows:—First, a loss of the semi-burlesque spirit observable in the Arena Chapel, and not wholly absent from the four great frescoes of the Lower Church at Assisi. All is grave and dignified in treatment; the action proceeds in a still vivid, but not eager, manner; it is the difference between the Stabat Mater played on the organ, and "The Campbells are coming," on the bagpipes of a Highland regiment. Allied to this change, and dependent upon it, is the loss of a good deal of the incidental drama of the composition, a certain diminution of interest in the spectators, who are now more parts of the general scene, and less individual characters affected in different ways by what is happening. The composition gains, perhaps, in dramatic unity, gains certainly if judged by the canons of later art, but loses in dramatic intensity, and, it seems to me, in truth to life. Again, there is much more composition, and that of a more elaborate kind, than in the Arena work: the figures are larger proportionately to the fresco in which they are placed, and possessed of a uniform grace and dignity which were absent from the earlier frescoes. Increased knowledge of form and power of arrangement, is seen in the figures of the men, and the treatment of the draperies; the latter especially, while still being drawn with comparative breadth and simplicity, have gained in beauty of line, and slightly in attention to the form beneath them. Lastly, there is to be noticed an advance in the treatment of colour which is the most important of all the changes. It is with the greatest diffidence I speak upon this point, as it is nearly impossible, in the dim light of this chapel (whose only window is covered with a yellow curtain), to be sure of what is the painter's original work and what is restoration; but while making every allowance for error, it seems to me that there is here shown, in places where the work is almost certainly genuine, a great increase in the power of gradation of colour, a capability of making each portion more beautiful in itself, besides being beautiful as a part of the whole. There is not found in these frescoes (in the Peruzzi), any longer those broad masses of comparatively ungradated tint which are so common in the Arena series; and there is further to be found an extension of the scale of colouring, a power of combining more delicate and more varied hues than in the earlier frescoes.

The whole tone of the picture is sharper and more mellow than before, and though this is by no means an unmixed gain, for much of the crystalline purity and freshness of the earlier pictures is lost thereby, yet on the whole the gain is greater than the loss, much in the same way that though we may regret the absence of the bright eye and ardent impetuosity of youth, we must needs give greater honour to manhood which has fulfilled the promise, though it may have lost something of the freshness, of "the wild gladness of morning."

On the left hand wall of this chapel there are also three frescoes of which the uppermost is of comparatively little importance; the remaining two are—first, The Birth of John; second, The Daughter of Herodias dancing before Herod. The lower of these is a good deal faded, but (I believe) not at all restored, and both are of exceeding beauty. In the first, the picture is divided into two parts by pillars supporting the section of a house similar to those of which Giotto generally formed his interiors. The larger portion of the fresco represents the mother of the Evangelist lying upon her bed surrounded by friends and attendants, and in the smaller part the nurse is presenting the infant to the father, who is apparently deep in thought. The figure of the nurse holding out the child, and all the attendants and friends who press round the bed, are full of interest, and the whole composition of the picture very fine.

More beautiful, however, to me, is the lowest fresco of Herodias, if it were only for the figure of the violin (for it is a sort of violin) player, a figure whose grace and truth of action has, I think, never been surpassed.

In this picture the daughter of Herodias is represented twice, the first time in the main body of the fresco, dancing in front of the table at which the king is seated, while in the centre an attendant brings in the Baptist's head upon a dish, and offers it to the king; and again on the extreme right of the fresco, where, in a sort of inner room, the dancer kneels to her mother, and presents her with the head.

There are in the Bardi Chapel frescoes of Sta. Chiara and St. Louis, also by Giotto; but both have been restored especially the latter,[72] which is wholly ruined thereby. Formerly in the Baronzelli Chapel, but now in a small room close to the sacristy, hangs the greatest masterpiece of our artist upon panel; indeed the only one of his works executed in that manner which can fairly be called worthy of his powers.[73] This is the famous Coronation of the Virgin, a picture in five compartments, the four outer ones of which represent a choir of angels with various musical instruments, and an attendant company of saints, prophets, and martyrs, while the centre division shows the Virgin dressed as a bride seated upon a throne, and bending her head to receive the crown from Christ.

It is wholly beyond my power to convey to my readers any idea of the exceeding loveliness of this work, and no description could, I think, give more than a faint shadow of its beauty. Descriptions of pictures are stupid things at the best, and when the attempt is made to describe a work whose beauty consists less in any hard tangible perfection of form and colour, than in a delicate purity of feeling and an intense belief in the subject treated of, when we have to catalogue as beauties, the expressions of a choir of angels, and the raptures of the surrounding saints, words seem totally inadequate to the task.

Perhaps some faint idea of the picture may be gained by likening it to the Paradise of Fra Angelico, which hangs in the Uffizi Gallery, and which is probably familiar to most of my readers, if only through the medium of the innumerable copies which have been made of the figures of the playing and singing angels which surround its frame. Fancy these Angelico figures enlarged slightly and made human, instead of angelic; fancy them arranged in rows, one above the other, the first row kneeling, and the second standing behind them, while further in the background, tier above tier, rise the heads of prophets and martyrs almost to the top of the golden background. Put two pictures of this sort on each side of a central one of Christ and the Virgin, lower Fra Angelico's key of colour just a little, till his pinks, blues, and yellows have shades of neutral colour toning them down, let the types of the saints and angels be rather heavier in the jaw, and broader in the face than his, and then you have the bones, so to speak, of Giotto's Coronation.

More than this I cannot tell you of the beauty of this picture, and it were useless to dwell upon the tender gravity of the singing angels, the devotion of the listening saints, the exquisite balance of the groups, and the pure brightness of the colouring. In a picture the whole of whose effect depends upon such subtle combination of faith and skill as does this Coronation, it is worse than useless to attempt to catalogue its merits as if for an auctioneer's programme. It is best to say, simply, that in a devotional age a great painter put forth his whole strength, to embody his faith in the loveliest design he could conceive, and that the result was worthy of him.

In the cloisters of the S. Maria Novella there are some frescoes attributed to Giotto much injured by damp, and one, the Birth of the Virgin, spoilt by restoration; one, however, remains, of great beauty, which in its leading figures is as fine as any of Giotto's work; this is the Meeting of Joachim and Anna at the Golden Gate. The leading figures here are fortunately comparatively uninjured by the damp, though Anna's blue robe has lost a little of its colour; the faces are full of expression, tender and loving to a degree, and the attitudes of both figures both graceful and natural. In this work the painter has gained a nearer approach to female beauty than in any other fresco which I have seen. After a long and careful examination of these frescoes I am unwillingly forced to come to the conclusion that they are not by Giotto, but are later works of his school. I say unwillingly, for it is with the greatest reluctance that I differ on this point from Mr. Ruskin, who has in one of his small series, called Mornings in Florence, expatiated very enthusiastically upon the merit of these works. The technical reasons which have most certainly lead me to this conclusion can hardly be stated so as to interest the general reader, but the main points which are evident upon the surface of the matter are—1st, the comparative crudeness and poorness of colour in three out of the four frescoes, a crudity which is scarcely to be accounted for by any amount of restoration. The colour is not so much violent as it is weak and uninteresting; 2nd, the exaggeration in gesture never used by Giotto in subordinate figures, and a certain wilful ugliness of attitude which I have never found in that painter's works; 3rd, the difference in the drawing of the drapery, which is sharp and thin in its folds, the folds being far more numerous than in Giotto's work, and their angles much more abrupt. The last difference is one of beauty. As far as I know Giotto was incapable of drawing a face of the slender rounded type such as Anna's in the second of these frescoes which I have referred to. Both the drawing of that face and its delicate modelling belong to another and a later hand than his. Lastly I may state for whatever it is worth, that I heard only a few days since that it is probably the case, according to the best opinion of the archÆologists, that the cloister in which these frescoes are, is of a later date than that of Giotto's death. If this be so of course it sets the matter at rest, but whether it be so or not I think a careful examination of the frescoes will satisfy any one interested in the matter that they cannot fairly be attributed to our artist. It must be remembered that the work of the Giotteschi, as they are called, is exceedingly puzzling and confused and liable to be mistaken very easily even by one who is devoting his whole attention to the subject. Mr. Ruskin has in two former instances been led to attribute works to Giotto which are not by that artist according to almost indisputable evidence: the instances I allude to are, one in speaking of the frescoes at Avignon as by this artist, the other in attributing to him a picture now discovered to be by Lorenzo Monaco in the Uffizi Gallery.

THE CAMPANILE.

From my window au troisiÈme, in the Piazza del Duomo, the look-out this gray April afternoon cannot be called altogether gay. The sellers of flowers and oranges have withdrawn well into the shelter of their little awnings, through which the rain slowly trickles upon the bright mass of fruit; in the great square, the restless population of Florence move aimlessly to and fro with cloaks muffling their faces; there are five close cabs stationed just beneath my window, the drivers of which sit on their respective boxes, beneath the shelter of four large green umbrellas and one blue one; behind them the Baptistery lifts its conical roof by the side of the scaffolding which marks the restoration of the cathedral, and beyond and above everything the Campanile[74] in the square of the Signoria raises its grim castellated head, dark and threatening. One building alone refuses to succumb to the influences of cloud and rain, refuses to lose its beauty or be deprived of its colours; its delicate traceries, and its shades of red, yellow, black, white, and green marble still standing out clearly perceptible through the heavy atmosphere. This is the building with the account of which closes the story of Giotto's life; this is the last and greatest achievement of that great genius who joined to his skill of hand a heart tender enough to enter into every human weakness, and sympathies which extended to the animal and vegetable creation, and drew, with as much simple fidelity and honest enjoyment the dog watching the sheep and the oxen drawing the wain, as the sufferings of the Saviour, or the faith of the disciples.

In shape the Campanile is a square tower without buttress of any kind, rising 292 feet straight from the pavement of the piazza. It has four stories, but does not diminish towards the top, the only difference being that the windows increase in size, and in this way an appearance of superior lightness is gained by the upper stories. The style of the architecture is Gothic in so far as it makes use of the pointed arch, but can hardly be described as such without giving a false impression to those who are accustomed to the Gothic of the north; and who think of that style as one of varied, if somewhat gloomy, masses, of irregular arches, pinnacles, and buttresses; colourless save for the lichen that grows between the grey stones, and owing their beauty more to the unwearied inventiveness of their builders' fancy than to any symmetrical unity of design.

It seems to me that this Campanile, as does the cathedral, partakes much more of the Lombardic element than the Gothic, especially in its use of coloured marbles, which are here employed throughout the whole surface of the tower. One thing is certain, that whatever be the style of the architecture it has a character of its own which renders it a thing apart. In the course of many years' travel in every quarter of the globe, I have come upon but one building which had at all the same sort of power over the imagination which is possessed by this tower of Giotto. That structure was the Taj, at Agra, which in its exquisiteness of finish, its delicacy of involved ornament, its perfectly unsullied whiteness, and above all, in its completeness of design, resembled the Florentine Campanile, though for beauty of proportion, no less than for that of colour, the Indian tomb must yield precedence to the Italian bell-tower. The Taj, too, owes much of its effect to the beauty of its surroundings; to the stately entrance, the long paved approach of white marble, the great daÏs of the same, on which the tomb stands, and last, not least, to thick rows of dark cypress trees which surround it to right and left, and toss their fretted spires towards the sky, a hundred feet below the great dome. The Campanile has no such proud surroundings, no such adventitious helps to its beauty, but stands in simple strength, in the busiest square in Florence, in the midst of the fruit-sellers and flower-sellers, where the street boys can play at hide-and-seek round its base, and wonder idly perhaps at the inlaid marbles. In either case the surroundings are such as one should be loth to change; for the tomb which marks the pride and love of an Eastern monarch, the quiet inclosed garden, with its marble terraces and clustering groups of cypress; and for the Campanile—which was the last gift of a great artist to his native city—the busy square, the thronging people, the hundred cries of Florence sounding about its base, and fading into a faint scarce-heard murmur long ere they reach the great overhanging battlements, round whose massive sculpture resound only the whispering of the breeze and the fluttering of white-winged birds.

The building is in four stories, the two lowest of which are entirely without windows, the first being adorned with bas-reliefs by Giotto, and with statues by Donatello and others. Intermediate between the lowest series of bas-reliefs and the statues, are four series of bas-reliefs, each seven in number, representing the beatitudes, the works of mercy, the virtues, and the sacraments.

The second and third stories have each two pointed-arched windows of the same size and design, each of which is divided in the usual Gothic manner by a centre shaft. This shaft is of exquisite delicacy, in design a richly carved spiral, ending in a capital, from which spring two trefoiled arches. The sides of these windows are also enriched with a similar shaft, then a rich border of mosaic, inclosed again by a spiral, terminating in a second pointed arch which forms the outer border to the window, above which is a triangular canopy thickly carved. The whole of these windows, with the exception of the mosaic band, are executed in white marble, and surrounded by slabs of green serpentine and red porphyry.

The fourth story has but one window, rather larger than both those in the second or third story, and divided by two spirals instead of one. It is noticeable that the sides and canopy of this highest aperture are comparatively simple in form and devoid of sculpture, which practically ceases with the third story. Giotto was too thorough an artist to put elaborate sculpture at a height where it could not be seen, and preferred, instead of substituting coarser work, to depend for the beauty of this upper story, almost entirely upon the effect of boldly designed mosaic. Instead, therefore, of a single narrow band of mosaic above the arch of the window, there are in the fourth story four comparatively wide ones, and above this the triangular space beneath the plain arch is filled with the same work, as are also the spaces beside and above the canopy. Above the canopy is a still broader band of mosaic, on which the jagged arches of the battlements seem to rest; and above these again, a last band of mosaic is surmounted by a gallery of white marble about six feet high, pierced with quartre-foils along its whole length.

It is wholly impossible to describe the delicacy and finish which the crest of this campanile possesses; the eye is led on from story to story, the mosaic being used more and more freely, the sculpture more sparingly, as the ascent is made, till at last the sculpture ends in one perfectly shaped window, and the mosaic blossoms forth like a flower into fullest beauty. Gradually the massive base, with its dark bas-reliefs, changes into lighter sculpture, with backgrounds of blue marble, then into figures of the saints, prophets, and patriarchs, breaking the uniformity of which are two long vertical pierced panels of quartre-foils in circles, serving to give light to the interior, but not telling as windows, then two rich bands of mosaic carry on the effect up to the first range of windows. There is no difference between the first and second stories, except that the lower one has a rich band of sculpture beneath the window, which is replaced by plain marble in the second; but above the second, as I have said, the sculpture ceases to be the main feature, the mosaic takes its place, and succeeds in carrying out the unison of rich work and lightness of effect in a way which is as novel as it is beautiful.

A few words must be said of the famous range of bas-reliefs, the lowest, all of which were designed by Giotto, though he only lived to execute two. This series is twenty-eight in number, exclusive of those on the small half towers which form the corners of the Campanile. They represent first the creation of man and woman, then the gradual development of knowledge, the gradual increase of man's power over nature, and discovery of his own capacities. Of three of these, illustrations are given which may be relied upon for fidelity to the main points of the design, though they do little justice to the exquisite delicacy of the work.

These bas-reliefs are in lozenge form, about eighteen inches in height and slightly less in breadth, and entirely surround the tower; nearly the whole of these were sculptured by Luca della Robbia and Andrea Pisano, to whom was entrusted the carrying out of Giotto's designs.

I shall not endeavour here to classify these reliefs according to their authorship for two reasons; one, that the carrying out of Giotto's design, whether by Andrea Pisano, Luca della Robbia, or any other sculptor, is as to each special relief a pure matter of conjecture, and is besides little connected with the subject I have in hand; and the other reason is that this classification, though attempted with great ingenuity, and after close investigation by Mr. Ruskin, in his pamphlet on the "Shepherd's Tower," appears to me to have yielded no satisfactory results, but rather to have involved the subject in further obscurity, insomuch as it has led him to attribute various reliefs in the series to Giotto's own hand, wholly on internal evidence, and that moreover in my judgment of a most unsatisfactory nature. I content myself, therefore, with observing that the three first frescoes of the series and the one representing the drunkenness of Noah are almost certainly the work of a different hand to that of the rest of the bas-reliefs, and that that hand has probably modified Giotto's original design to a considerable extent in the relative importance of the landscape portions of the composition.

In these last designs of Giotto's life, there is a curious recurrence to the ideas of his earliest time, a curious delight in depicting natural objects, and treating his subject from the humorously dramatic point of view; such as indeed he never altogether lost, but which lies very much in the shade in the later frescoes of this master. In fact, in some of these bas-reliefs, the comic element almost entirely predominates, as, for instance, in that which is entitled Logic, in which two furious disputants stand face to face, the countenances inflamed with passion, one apparently being just on the eve of proceeding to the argumentum ad hominem, the other rapping an open book querulously with his finger. Others show a depth of perception of character which perhaps would hardly have been expected from the artist, as in the relief of Arithmetic, where a master is instructing two of his pupils in that gentle science. One of the boys is evidently intelligent enough, and bends happily over his book; the other is of a heavy bovine type, and is listening with a puzzled expression to the master's explanation. Of all the designs, perhaps the finest are simply narrative, and of such, the three first of the series, the creation of Adam, the creation of Eve, and the relief called The First Arts, are singularly beautiful. It should be noticed here that Giotto's knowledge of, and skill in depicting, trees, made great advances from the time of the frescoes in the Arena to that of these reliefs. No doubt something must be allowed for the genius of those who executed the reliefs; but if they were done from Giotto's designs, and there is a concensus of opinion that such was the case, the advance is a very marked one. I am the more inclined to believe in this progress as in the drawing of the brambles, in the great fresco of St. Francis wedding Poverty in the Lower Church of Assisi, there are the elements of such leaf and bough drawing as are seen here; and even at Assisi, the advance from the Arena, in the drawing is very evident. Especially fine in design, and as far as it goes, true to nature, is the drawing of the vine in the relief of Noah's Drunkenness, or as it is sometimes called, the Convention of Wine. The drawing of the leaves and grapes, and their disposition in the panel, is perhaps the finest piece of good sculptural design to be found at such an early date; and I should have selected this relief for reproduction, had it not been, owing to Giotto's intense perception of the essential meaning of his subject, so unpleasing in the degradation of the drunken figure, as to unfit it for purposes of illustration.

Our artist's sympathy with animal life, also revives in these works in its full force, and may be seen in many instances. Look for example at the fresco of ploughing, where the driver is guiding the oxen by the simple, yet perfectly efficient plan, of twisting the tail round his wrist, and pulling it one way or the other, when he wishes to turn. Or look at the puppy in the bas-relief of Shepherd Life, as he sits outside the patriarch's tent watching the sheep file past. What a sense of comical responsibility and mischief there is in his face, the quintessence, so to speak, of puppydom. Or look, for another kind of truth, at the action of the horse in the fresco of Riding, and the manner in which the rider is urging him with hand and voice at the same time, and the wind is blowing out his mantle behind. There is a curious circumstance with regard to this last design, which I discovered by chance a few weeks ago when walking in the sculptor's rooms of the British Museum. That is, that there is a figure in one of the great friezes there, not that of the Parthenon, but the next in beauty, that of the Erectheum, which is almost identical in the figure of its man and his action with this of Giotto's. The very lines of the cloak blowing out behind are almost identical, and the grasp of the rider's knees, the pose of his figure and the outstretched arm (what is left of it in the Greek sculpture, it has been taken just below the elbow) are all exactly similar. The whole spirit of the Greek frieze is as vivid in Giotto's work as it is in the original sculpture, executed more than a thousand years before. It merely shows the extraordinary unity of all good art, that a mediÆval Italian, working purely from nature and life, should be able to arrive by himself, at a representation which has all the feeling of that which is acknowledged to be the finest art the world has ever seen. It must be noticed that where Giotto falls short of his Grecian predecessor, is chiefly in the nobility of the types both of man and horse. Giotto's horse is going, and his man is urging him as certainly as in the frieze, but his horse is comparatively a common every-day cabhorse and is going in something of the same rocking-time manner we may see in Hyde Park any day of the week. And the man is like most of Giotto's men, a very ordinary individual, somewhat of what hunting men call "a tailor," perhaps, though he is evidently accustomed to riding. The Grecian sculptor has refined the types of both man and horse, and given the latter a grand sweeping action, such as would be promptly stopped by the police, if indulged in within the limits of the park. This difference, however, is a difference in aim, not a difference in feeling; the beauty of line, and the meaning of the scene are given with almost as much intensity by our artist as by the unknown sculptor who preceded him. Most unfortunately I only found this similarity too late to permit me to make use of it in the book; for a drawing of these two figures side by side would have shown the likeness and dissimilarity more than pages of description.

RIDING. BAS-RELIEF DESIGNED BY GIOTTO.
On the Campanile, Florence.