VESTIBULE--_Florentine School._ ROOM I--_Florentine School._ " II--_Sienese School._ " III--_Florentine School._ " IV--_Schools of Lombardy and Parma._ " V--_Ferrarese and Bolognese Schools._ " VI--_Umbrian School._ " VII--_Venetian & Allied Schools._ " VIII--_Paduan School._ OCTAGON.--_Venetian School._ ROOM IX--_Paolo Veronese, etc._ " X--_Dutch School._ " XI--_Early Flemish School._ " XII--_Dutch School._ " XIII--_Flemish School._ " XIV--_Spanish School._ " XV--_German School._ " XVI--_French School._ " XVII--_French School._ EAST AND WEST VESTIBULES } _English_ ROOMS XVIII, XIX, XX, XXI} _School._ ROOM XXII--_Turner Gallery._ ROOM A--_Drawings._ ROOM B--_Pictures by Turner, etc._] [Illustration] THE EARLY FLORENTINE SCHOOL "The early efforts of Cimabue and Giotto are the burning messages of prophecy, delivered by the stammering lips of infants" (RUSKIN: _Modern Painters_, vol. i. pt. i. sec. i. ch. ii. § 7). Give these, I exhort you, their guerdon and glory For daring so much, before they well did it. The first of the new, in our race's story, Beats the last of the old; 'tis no idle quiddit. BROWNING: _Old Pictures in Florence_. On entering the Gallery from Trafalgar Square, and ascending the main staircase, the visitor reaches the North Vestibule. What, he may be inclined to ask, is there worth looking at in the quaint and gaunt pictures around him here? The answer is a very simple one. This vestibule is the nursery of Italian art. Here is the first stammering of infant painting. Accustomed as we are at the present day to so much technical skill even in the commonest works of art, we may be inclined to think that the art of painting--the art of giving the resemblances of things by means of colour laid on to wood or canvas--is an easy one, of which men have everywhere and at all times possessed the mastery. But this of course is not the case. The skill of to-day is the acquired result of long centuries of gradual improvement; and the pictures in this vestibule bear the same relation to the pictures of our own time as the stone huts of our forefathers to the Gallery in which we stand. The poorness of the pictures here is the measure of the richness of others. To feel the full greatness of Raphael's Madonna (1171), one should first pause awhile before the earliest Italian picture here (564), the gaunt and forbidding Madonna by Margaritone of Arezzo, With the grave-clothes garb and swaddling barret (Why purse up mouth and beak in a pet so, You bald old saturnine poll-clawed parrot?) (_R. Browning_).