"Though abundance of figures of saints were carved, and innumerable Madonnas painted throughout Italy, in the earlier days of the Christian church, they were either literal transcripts of common life, or mechanical copies or imitations of works furnished from the great store looms of the Asiatic Greeks. There were thousands--nay, tens of thousands of men, who wrote themselves artists, while not one of them had enough of imagination and skill to lift art above the low estate in which the rule and square of mechanical imitation had placed it. Niccolo Pisano appears to have been the first who, at Pisa, took the right way in sculpture: his groups, still in existence, are sometimes too crowded; his figures badly designed, and the whole defective in sentiment; but he gave an impulse--communicated through the antique--to composition, not unperceived by his scholars, who saw with his eyes and wrought with his spirit. The school which he founded produced, soon after, the celebrated Ghiberti, whose gates of bronze, embellished with figures, for the church of San Giovanni, were pronounced by Michael Angelo worthy to be the gates of Paradise. While the sister art took these large strides towards fame, Painting lagged ruefully behind; she had no true models, and she had no true rules; but 'the time and the man' came at last, and this man was Giovanni Cimabue." GIOVANNI CIMABUE. This great painter is universally considered the restorer of modern painting. The Italians call him "the Father of modern Painting;" and other nations, "the Creator of the Italian or Epic style of Painting." He was born at Florence in 1240, of a noble family, and was skilled both in architecture and sculpture. The legends of his own land make him the pupil of Giunta; for the men of Florence are reluctant to believe that he was instructed in painting by those Greek artists who were called in to embellish their city with miracles and Madonnas. He soon conquered an education which consisted in reproducing, in exact shape and color, the works of other men: he desired to advance: he went to nature for his forms; he grouped them with a new skill; he bestowed ease on his draperies, and a higher expression on his heads. His talent did not reside in the neat, the graceful, and the lovely; his Madonnas have little beauty, and his angels are all of one make: he succeeded best in the heads of the old and the holy, and impressed on them, in spite of the barbarism of his times, a bold sublimity, which few have since surpassed. Critics object to the fierceness of his eyes, the want of delicacy in the noses of his figures, and the absence of perspective in his compositions; but they admit that his coloring is bright and vigorous, his conceptions grand and vast, and that he loved the daring and the splendid. Nevertheless, a touch of the mechanical Greek School, and a rudeness all his own, have been observed in the works of this great painter. His compositions were all of a scriptural or religious