The following text was automatically extracted from the image on this page using optical character recognition software:
important, Dante admitted that he was influenced by Virgil and the other ancient writers,
and sent the cultured people of the time scurrying to find examples of'the culture of
the ancients. And they found them, read them, and changed their mode of life according
to them. The Church was no longer the sole arbiter of all things; people were reading and
thinking for themselves. In fact, many of the important men of the time were non-believ-
ers, though they still retained the forms of the Church.
This revival of art and science, and culture spread rapidly; it was. no longer confined
to a select few. The princes of the various kingdoms and city-states became patrons of
all manner of arts and sciences, and it was under their patronage that such men as Michel
Angelo and Leonardo developed.
In 1276 Giotto was born, the first great Florentine painter. And in order to understand
him we must see some other conditions of the time. In the first place, painting in the
Middle Ages had been conventionalized. Almost everything that was done in painting was
done by rule. Another thing is that the churches of the Gothic period were built with
many windows but almost no wall space. In Italy, however, in going back to classical
builders for models, the architects of the Renaissance discovered the Roman round arch,
thick, heavy walls, and the dome. This type of building was by no means as sublime as the
Gothic, but it was more massively powerful, and it had great empty wall-spaces.
This wall space offered a fine field -for painting, and this painting in turn offered a
good field for the education of the people. The Chinese have a proverb that one picture
is worth ten-thousand words, and the Churchmen of the Renaissance evidently thought so
too, for they commissioned the painters of the-time to paint Biblical scenes in these
spaces, thereby both teaching the people and causing a great period of painting to de-
velop. Giotto was one of the men who-painted frescos in these wall spaces, and, as I
have said, the first great Florentine painter.
Giotto was a farmer boy, and he tended the-flocks of sheep on the hillsides of Tuscany.
He was an observant young fellow and-he-watched the form of his sheep, of people whom he
saw, of all nature. When finally he came to paint, he used nature as a basis, though he
couldn't quite get away from the conventional-rules of the Middle Ages, But with Giotto
and his work as an inspiration, other painters began to break more and more with the con-
----------
