To understand what the genius of Giotto meant to his own day we must consider the stiff unreality of former art, just as we cannot realize the greatness of Columbus by thinking of a modern voyage from the Continent to America, but only by recalling the primitive navigation of his time. Giotto, like Columbus, had many imitators and followers, some of them famous names, but the pioneer work that he had done for art was commemorated at the Renaissance when, by the orders of Lorenzo de Medici, a Latin epitaph was placed on his tomb containing these words: ‘Lo! I am he by whom dead Art was restored to life ... by whom Art became one with Nature.’ It would be impossible to condense satisfactorily in a few short paragraphs the triumphant history of Renaissance painting, the rapid development of which Giotto and his ‘school’ had made practicable, or even to give a slight sketch of the artists on whom that history depends. Never before has so much genius been crowded into so few years; but before we leave this pre-eminent age in modern Art, there is one arresting figure who must be described, a man who more than any other embodies the spirit of the Renaissance at its best, Leonardo da Vinci, ‘foremost amongst the supreme masters of the world’. [Sidenote: Leonardo da Vinci] Leonardo ‘the Florentine’, as he liked to call himself, was born in the fortified village of Vinci midway between Florence and Pisa. The illegitimate son of a notary, born as it would seem to no great heritage, he was yet early distinguished amongst his fellows. ‘The richest gifts of Heaven,’ says Vasari, ‘are sometimes showered upon the same person, and beauty, grace, and genius, are combined in so rare a manner in one man that, to whatever he may apply himself, every action is so divine that all others are left behind him.’ This reads like exaggeration until we turn to the facts that are known about Da Vinci’s life, and find he is all indeed Vasari described--a giant amongst his fellows in physique and intellect, and still more in practical imagination. So strong was he that with his fingers he could bend a horseshoe straight, so full of potent charm for all things living that his presence in a room would draw men and women out of sadness, while in the streets the wildest horses would willingly yield to his taming power. Of the cruelty that rests like a stain on the Middle Ages there was in him no trace--rather that hot compassion for suffering and weakness so often allied with strength. It is told of him as of St. Francis that he would buy the singing-birds sold in cages in the street that he might set them free.