Lorenzo ‘the Magnificent’ himself we can remember for the genuine love of nature and poetry apparent in his sonnets, but his claim to remain immortal in the world’s history must rest, not on his literary achievements, but on his generous patronage and appreciation of scholars and artists, as well as on the political wisdom that made him the first statesman of his day. [Sidenote: Giotto] If the literature of the Renaissance was mainly experimental in character, painting was pre-eminently its finished glory--the representation of that sense of beauty in nature and in human life from which the Middle Ages had turned away, as from a snare set by the Devil to distract souls from Paradise. Here again, in painting, there is a twofold aspect: the artist mind seeking in the past as well as aspiring to the future for inspiration to guide his brush. It was in the life of St. Francis, ‘the little Brother of Assisi’, that Giotto, the great forerunner of the ‘new’ art, found that sense of humanity idealized that spurred him to break away from the old conventional Byzantine models, stiff, decorative, and inhuman, in order to attempt the realization of life as he saw it around him in the street and field. Cimabue, a famous Florentine painter, had found Giotto as a shepherd lad, cutting pictures of the sheep grouped round him with a stone upon the rockside. He carried the boy away to be his apprentice, but the pupil soon excelled the master and not merely Florence but all Italy heard of his wondrous colours and designs. ‘He took nature for his guide,’ says Leonardo da Vinci; and many are the tales of this kindly peasant genius, small and ugly in appearance but full of the joy and humour of the world that he studied so shrewdly. The Angevin King Robert of Naples once asked him to suggest a symbol of his own turbulent Southern kingdom, whereupon the artist drew a donkey saddled, sniffing at another saddle lying on the ground. ‘Such are your subjects,’ he remarked, ‘that every day would seek a new master.’ No politician could have made a more fitting summary of mediaeval Naples. Giotto’s chief fame to-day lies in his frescoes of the life of St. Francis on the walls of the double chapel at Assisi and in the Franciscan Church of Santa Croce in Florence. Most of them, damaged by the action of time and weather on the rough plaster, have been repaired to their disadvantage, though a few remain unharmed to show the painter’s clear, delicate colouring and boldness of outline. To the average sightseer to-day they seem perhaps just legendary pictures, more or less crude in design, but when Giotto painted we must remember that the crowds who watched his brush in breathless admiration read as they gazed the story of the most human of saints--a man who had but lately walked amongst the Umbrian hills, and whose words and deeds were to them more vivid than many a living utterance.