This lovely lady was the wife of one of the painter's patrons, Giovanni Tornabuoni, through whom he received the commission for a series of frescoes in the choir of the Santa Maria Novella, Florence. The subjects chosen were sacred, but since Ghirlandajo, no more than his neighbours, knew what the Virgin or her contemporaries looked like, he saw no reason why he should not compliment some of the great ones of his own city and his own time by painting them in to represent the different characters of Holy Writ. So, as one of the ladies attendant upon Elizabeth when Mary comes to visit her, we have this signora of the fifteenth century. The artist made another picture of her, the one here shown, but in the same dress and posed the same as she had been for the church fresco. This accounts for its dignity and simplicity. It would seem like a bas-relief cut out of marble were it not for its wonderful colouring. It is in the Rudolf Kann Collection, Paris. This artist's other pictures are "Adoration of the Shepherds," "Adoration of the Magi," "Madonna and Child with Saints," "Three Saints and God the Father," "Coronation of the Virgin," and "Portrait of Old Man and Boy." XVIII GIOTTO (DI BORDONE) (Pronounced Jot-to) _Florentine School_ 1276-1337 _Pupil of Cimabue_ Giotto painted upon wood, and in "distemper"--the mixture of colour with egg or some other jelly-like substance. We know nothing of his childhood except that he was a shepherd, as we learn from a story told of him and his teacher, Cimabue. The story runs that one day while Giotto was watching his sheep, high up on a mountain, Cimabue was walking abroad to study nature, and he ran across a shepherd boy who was drawing the figure of a sheep, with a piece of slate upon a stone. In those days we can imagine how rare it was to find one who could draw anything, ever so rudely. Immediately Cimabue saw a chance to make an artist and he asked the little shepherd if he would like to be taught art in his studio. Giotto was overjoyed at the opportunity, and at once he left the mountains for the town, the shepherd's crook for the brush. In those days the studio of one like Cimabue was really a workshop. Artists had to grind their own colours, prepare their own panels upon which to paint, and do a hundred other things of a workman rather than an artist kind in connection with their painting. Such a studio was crowded with apprentices--boys who did these jobs while learning from the master. Their teaching consisted in watching the artist and now and then receiving advice from him. It was into such a shop as this, in Florence, that Giotto went, and soon he was to become greater than his master. Even so, we cannot think him great, excepting for his time, because his pictures, compared with later art, are crude, stiff, and strange.