Giotto left many followers,[12] not one of whom at all understood his greatness. Like his friend Dante, he was distantly admired, but really loved only in bits. As perceptive a person as the artist biographer Vasari lavishes praise upon Giotto for his more trivial inventions—the Christ Child struggling out of the arms of the High Priest, for example. So Giotto’s followers picked unintelligently from his great accomplishment, choosing what the master himself would least have valued—his simple contours without his significant mass, his variety and vivacity without his warmth and restraint. On their own account they added complication. The sparse economy of Giotto’s best work could never have appealed to Florence at large. Something richer and gayer was wanted, more like Florentine life itself as it became after the general loosening up of manners and morals following the plague of 1348. Its chronicler, the author of the “Decameron,” fairly represents the new spirit. The best of the younger painters have indeed something of Boccaccio’s mentality—his light touch, his charm, his panoramic richness, his fluid and undisciplined grace. Thus arises what I may call the panoramic style of fresco painting—superficial, full of episodes and accessories, still religious in theme, but mundane in spirit, often cleverly conceived, and very superficially felt. These artists had grasped neither the meaning of Giotto’s drawing nor the beauty of his decorative formulas, they saw only his variety and energy. Meanwhile a great Sienese painter, Ambrogio Lorenzetti, a profound admirer of Giotto, had worked out a nobly spectacular form of painting in which the stage setting was elaborate and realistic. He painted much in Florence about 1334 and his novelties allured the new men. So we find fresco painting tending in a scenic direction, and panel painting following the same course more conservatively—not merely in Florence and Siena, but throughout Northern Italy as well. [Illustration: FIG. 25. Giotto’s Assistant at Assisi. Flight into Egypt. Compare Figure 14.—_Lower Church, Assisi._ ] [Illustration: FIG. 26. Taddeo Gaddi. St. Joachim Meets St. Anna. Compare FIG. 13_a_.—_Baroncelli Chapel, Santa Croce._ ]