There is another point also to be considered. The great age of church-building flourished at a time when other arts and commerce were but just beginning. Whence, out of the dark ages, sprang the skill and knowledge to build such fine and sculpturesque edifices, when other trades were in their infancy, and civic and communal life scarcely organized? It is indeed a subject of wonder how the artists of the early period of the rise of Art were trained. Here we find men almost in the dark ages, who were the most splendid architects, and at the same time sculptors, painters, and even poets. How, for instance, did Giotto, a boy taken from the sheep-folds, learn to be a painter, sculptor, and architect of such rank that the city of Florence chose him to be the builder of the Campanile? Did he learn it all from old Cimabue's frescoes, and half Byzantine _tavole_? and how did he prove to the city that he was a qualified architect? We find him written in the archives as _Magister_ Giotto, consequently he must have passed through the school and _laborerium_ of some guild where every branch of the arts was taught, and have graduated in it as a master. All these things will become more and more clear as we follow up the traces of the Comacine Guild from the chrysalis state, in which Roman art hybernated during the dark winter of the Middle Ages, through the grub state of the Lombard period, to the glorious winged flights of the full Gothic of the Renaissance. And first as to the chrysalis, at little Como. The origin of the name _Comacine Masters_ has caused a great deal of argument amongst Italian writers new and old. Some think it merely a place-name referring to the island of Comacina, in Lake Lario or Como; others take a wider significance, and say it means not only the city of Como, but all the province, which was once a Roman colony of great extension. Others again, among whom is Grotius, suggest that it is not a place-name at all, but comes from the Teutonic word _Gemachin_ or house-builders. As the Longobards afterwards called them in Italian _Maestri Casarii_, which means the same thing, there is perhaps something to be said for this hypothesis. The first to draw attention to the name _Magistri Comacini_, was the erudite Muratori, that searcher out of ancient MSS., who unearthed from the archives an edict, dated November 22, 643, signed by King Rotharis, in which are included two clauses treating of the _Magistri Comacini_ and their colleagues. The two clauses, Nos. 143 and 144, out of the 388 inscribed in crabbed Latin, are, when anglicized, to the following intent--