However this may be, like other Italians of his age, Giovanni got the better of his Greek education, which seems to have consisted in one artist copying another without ever adding any thing to the practice of his master. He consulted nature, he corrected in part the rectilinear forms of his design, he gave expression to the heads, he folded the drapery, and he grouped the figures with much greater art than the Greeks. His talent did not consist in the graceful. His Madonnas have no beauty, his angels in the same piece have all the same forms. Wild as the age in which he lived, he succeeded admirably in heads full of character, especially in those of old men, impressing an indescribable degree of bold sublimity, which the moderns have not been able greatly to surpass. Vast and inventive in conception, he executed large compositions, and expressed them in grand proportions. His two great altar-pieces of the Madonna, at Florence, the one in the church of the Dominicans, the other in that of the Trinity, with the grand figures of the prophets, do not give so good an idea of his style as his fresco paintings in the church of Assisi, where he appears truly magnificent for the age in which he lived. In these histories of the Old and New Testament, such as remain, he appears an Ennius, who, amid the rudeness of Roman epic poetry, gave flashes of genius not displeasing to a Virgil. Vasari speaks of him with admiration for the vigour of his colouring, and justly so of the pictures in the ceiling. They are still in a good state of preservation, and although some of the figures of Christ, and of the Virgin in particular, retain much of the Greek manner, others representing the Evangelists, and Doctors instructing the Monks of the Franciscan Order, from their chairs, exhibit an originality of conception and arrangement that does not appear in contemporary works. The colouring is bold, the proportions are gigantic even in the distance, and not badly preserved; in short, painting may there be said to have almost advanced beyond what the mosaic worker at first attempted to do. The whole of these, indeed, are steps in the progress of the human intellect not to be recounted in one history, and form beyond question the distinguishing excellence of the Florentine artist, when put into competition with either the Pisans or the Sienese. Nor do I perceive how, after the authority of Vasari, who assigns the work of the ceiling to Cimabue, confirmed by the tradition of five centuries, P. della Valle is justified at this day, in ascribing that painting to Giotto, a painter of a milder genius. If he was induced to prefer other artists to Cimabue, because they gave the eyes less fierceness, and the nose a finer shape, these circumstances appear to me too insignificant to degrade Cimabue from that rank which he enjoys in impartial history.[47] He has moreover asserted, that Cimabue neither promoted nor