“THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ART” 213

45. The fourth letter opens in the field of Vespignano. The circumstances of the finding of Giotto by Cimabue are well known.¹ Vasari’s anecdote of the fly painted upon the nose of one of Cimabue’s figures might, we think, have been spared, or at least not instanced as proof of study from nature “nobly rewarded.”² Giotto certainly never either attempted or accomplished any small imitation of this kind; the story has all the look of one of the common inventions of the ignorant for the ignorant; nor, if true, would Cimabue’s careless mistake of a black spot in the shape of a fly for one of the living annoyances of which there might probably be some dozen or more upon his panel at any moment, have been a matter of much credit to his young pupil. The first point of any real interest is Lord Lindsay’s confirmation of Förster’s attribution of the Campo Santo Life of Job, till lately esteemed Giotto’s, to Francesco da Volterra.³ Förster’s evidence appears incontrovertible; yet there is curious internal evidence, we think, in favour of the designs being Giotto’s, if not the execution. The landscape is especially Giottesque, the trees being all boldly massed first with dark brown, within which the leaves are painted separately in light: this very archaic treatment had been much softened and modified by the Giotteschi before the date assigned to these frescoes by Förster. But, what is more singular, the figure of Eliphaz, or the foremost of the three friends, occurs in a tempera picture of Giotto’s in the Academy of Florence, the Ascension, among the apostles on the left; while the face of another of the three friends is again repeated in the “Christ disputing with the Doctors” of the

¹ [Ruskin tells them in Giotto and his Works in Padua, § 4, and again in Mornings in Florence, § 66. Vasari’s story is that “Giotto, when he was still a boy, and studying with Cimabue, once painted a fly on the nose of a figure on which Cimabue himself was employed, and this so naturally, that when the master returned to continue his work, he believed it to be real, and lifted his hand more than once to drive it away before he should go on with the painting” (Lives of the Artists, i. 121 (Bohn’s translation, 1855).]

² [Sketches of the History of Christian Art, ii. 167.]

³ [See Modern Painters, vol. i. (Vol. III. p. 183), and Giotto and his Works in Padua, § 6. Lord Lindsay’s reference (ii. 168 n.) is to Ernst Förster’s Beiträge zur neuern Kunstge-Schichte, Leipzig, 1835, p. 115.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]