To recapitulate, there were three ways, all imperfect, open to a young and progressive painter who like Giotto di Bondone was forming a style about the year 1300. He might with the Sienese evade the issue of passion and naturalism, choosing for gracefulness, he might try over again the great adventure of his master Cimabue, endeavoring to bring emotion into the old unfit forms, or he might, like Pietro Cavallini, let emotion take care of itself and work academically towards better structure, drapery, light, and shade. His choice was absolutely momentous for modern painting, and I want you to feel that the issue was quite consciously and vividly before him, for he had spent much of his youth as a humble assistant in the basilica at Assisi, where frescoes in the vehement Tuscan manner of Cimabue and in the dignified Roman style of the Isaac Master were being painted side by side. His decision was to combine the merits of the two manners—to seek, like his master, sincerity and depth of emotion, but to embody it in the new and nobler forms of the Roman school. This decision virtually fixed the character of Christian art in Italy—it was to be warm and humanistic, but it was to revive much of that abstract nobility which old Rome had inherited from Greece. Thus Italian painting at the outset took a classic stamp which when true to itself it has never lost. In fundamental ideas of beauty, there is no real difference between Giotto, Masaccio, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Titian, Michelangelo. [Illustration: FIG. 8. “The Isaac Master.” Esau before Isaac. Fresco.—_Upper Church, Assisi._ ] Giotto di Bondone,[7] according to the best information we have on a disputed point, was born in 1266, at the village of Colle, in the lovely valley of the Mugello. His people were prosperous and his way smooth. I see no reason for doubting the charming legend told by Ghiberti that Cimabue found the lad Giotto by the roadside diligently scratching the outlines of a sheep on a slate, and that that was the beginning of their association. In any case, we may surmise that he was early with Cimabue as apprentice and eventually went with the Master to Assisi to grind colors, clean brushes, and paint under direction. To be at that moment in the Franciscan Basilica was to be at the greatest creative center of the world. It seems to me likely that Giotto may have had a considerable part in the actual painting of the Old and New Testament stories in the nave, and I believe we may find his earliest designs in certain frescoes of the upper rows. The Lamenting over Christ’s Body, for example, singularly combines the energy of Cimabue with the dignity of Cavallini, and there are significant echoes of the composition in Giotto’s later version of the same theme at Padua. Tradition also ascribes to Giotto, maybe correctly, the Resurrection and Pentecost on the entrance wall.[8]