Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1904 edition. Excerpt: ...special gifts and training to appreciate, there was a world of interest in his productions, for everyone who, in looking at them, would but at the same time think. It is not then enough simply to look on this picture or monument, and on that, and think that in so doing we have done it justice. It will be found, if we pause awhile and try to unravel a work as a whole, that we shall be amply repaid, --by meeting thoughts face to face, which are none the less real and valuable because it is some hundreds of years since they issued from the brain of the thinker. Unfortunately many great series of paintings are completely destroyed; some are much defaced, and can only be seen in fragments; others again having been for various reasons covered with whitewash, on discovery, have been cruelly " restored." Of this last there is a glaring instance in one of the chapels in Santa Croce in Florence, where a figure in one of the Giotteschi frescoes has been painted in again with the addition of a gens d'arme's cocked hat. But in spite of these many and various misfortunes, a considerable number of story series happily still remain, and can be examined in detail, and the thought of the artist in them deciphered and studied. Perhaps in its day Santa Croce, the head-quarters of the Franciscan Order in Florence, was as richly decorated as church could be, bare as it appears at the present time. In 1853 were discovered in its eastern chapels some of Giotto's finest works, and it is believed that there still exists, awaiting to be released from its present coating of whitewash, a series of frescoes, running all along the nave, under the clerestory, illustrating the Divine Comedy. It is supposed that at the time of a visitation of the plague, the whole church...
