Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa: With Sixteen Illustrations in Colour by William Parkinson and Sixteen Other Illustrations, Second EditionHutton, Edward
History
Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa: With Sixteen Illustrations in Colour by William Parkinson and Sixteen Other Illustrations, Second Edition
Hutton, Edward
Art -- Italy -- Florence; Genoa (Italy) -- History; Tuscany (Italy) -- Description and travel
Vasari describes for us very delightfully the triumph of this picture,
when, so great was the admiration of the people for it that "it was
carried in solemn procession, with the sound of trumpets and other
festal demonstrations, from the house of Cimabue to the church,--he
himself being highly rewarded and honoured for it"; while, as he goes on
to tell us, when Cimabue was painting it, in a garden as it happened
near the gate of S. Pietro, King Charles of Sicily, brother of St.
Louis, saw the picture, and praising it, "all the men and women of
Florence hastened in great crowds to admire it, making all possible
demonstrations of delight. The inhabitants of the neighbourhood,
rejoicing in this occurrence, ever after called that place Borgo
Allegri,"--the name it bears to this day. However reluctant we may be to
find Vasari, that divine gossip, at fault, it might seem that Cimabue's
Triumph is a fable, or if, indeed, it happened, was stolen, for the
Rucellai Madonna is apparently the work of Duccio the Sienese.[103] Of
the works of Cimabue not one remains to us; we do not know, we have
certainly no means of knowing, whether he was, as Ghiberti tells us, a
painter in the old Greek manner, or whether, as Vasari suggests, he was
the true master of Giotto, in that to him was owing the impulse of life
which we find so moving in Giotto's work. And then Vasari, it seems, is
wrong in his account of Borgo Allegri, for that place was named not
after happiness, the happiness of that part of the city in their great
neighbour, but from a family who in those days lived thereabout and bore
that name.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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