In these two little communal republics were discovered and worked out to perfection all our ideals of humanistic beauty. Florence saw God, His Divine Son, the Blessed Virgin, and the saints quite as Athens had seen the gods of Olympus, the demi-gods, and the heroes simply as men and women of the noblest physical and moral type. Both agreed in magnifying and idealizing the people one ordinarily sees. For greater beauty, Athens represented them nude or lightly draped; for greater dignity, Florence chose the solemn garb of the Roman forum. Whether pagan or Christian, the guardians of a people’s morality were to be above haste, excitement, or any transient emotion. They were to express intensities of feeling, but a feeling more composed, permanent, and disciplined, than that of every day. Judgment and criticism count for as much in both arts as emotional inspiration. The great Florentine artist is a thinker; he is often poet and scientist, sculptor and architect, besides being a painter. Behind his painting lies always a problem of mind, and as sheer personalities the greatest painters of Siena, Venice, and Lombardy often seem mere nobodies when compared even with the minor Florentines. We should know something about a city that produced personality so generously, and before considering Giotto, the first great painter Florence bred, we shall do well to look at Florence as he saw it about the year 1300, being a man in the thirties. Florence was then as now a little city, its population about 100,000 souls, but it was growing. The old second wall of about two miles’ circuit was already condemned in favor of a turreted circuit of over six. Up the Arno the forest-clad ridge of Vallombrosa was much as it is today; down the valley the jagged peaks of the Carrara mountains barred the way to the sea. The surrounding vineyards and olive orchards by reason of encroaching forest were less extensive than they are now, but through every gate and from every tower one could see smiling fields guarded by battlemented villas. In the city, the fortress towers of the old nobility, partizans mostly of the foreign Emperor, rose thickly, but already dismantled at their fighting tops, for the people, meaning strictly the ruling merchant and manufacturing classes, had lately taken the rule from the old nobles. Many of these had fled; some had been banished, as was soon to be that reckless advocate of the emperor, Dante Alighieri, an excellent poet of love foolishly dabbling in politics. Other patricians sulked in their fortress palaces. Some shrewdly got themselves demoted and joined the ruling trade guilds. Of these guilds a big four, five, or six, governed the city, while a minor dozen had political privilege. Only guild members voted for the city officers. The guilds combined the function of a trade union and an employer’s association, including all members of the craft from the youngest apprentice to the richest boss-contractor. Such a guild as the notaries,