their school at Assisi there may be found a faint memory of the splendour that had so unfortunately passed away, it is rather the shadow of the statues we find there—­in the Abraham of the upper church of S. Francesco, for instance—­than the more lyrical and mortal loveliness of the unknown painters of Imperial Rome.  Yet it is there, in that lonely and beautiful church full of the soft sweet light of Umbria, that Giotto perhaps learned all that was needed to enable him not only to recreate the art of painting, but to decide its future in Italy.

Here in the Accademia in the Sala dei Maestri Toscani you may see an altarpiece that has perhaps come to us from his hands, amid much beautiful languid work that is still in the shadow of the Middle Age, or that, coming after him, has almost failed to understand his message, the words of life which may everywhere be found in his frescoes in Assisi, in Florence, in Padua, spoiled though they be by the intervention of fools, the spoliation of the vandals.

Those strange and lovely altarpieces ruthlessly torn from the convents and churches of Tuscany still keep inviolate the secret of those who, not without tears, made them for the love of God:  once for sure they made a sunshine in some shadowy place.  Hung here to-day in a museum, just so many specimens that we number and set in order, they seem rude and fantastic enough, and in the cold light of this salone, crowded together like so much furniture, they have lost all meaning or intention.  They are dead, and we gaze at them almost with contempt; they will never move us again.  That rude and almost terrible picture of Madonna and Saints with its little scenes from the life of our Lord, stolen from the Franciscan convent of S. Chiara at Lucca, what is it to us who pass by?  Yet once it listened for the prayers of the little nuns of S. Francis, and, who knows, may have heard the very voice of Il Poverello.  That passionate and dreadful picture of St. Mary Magdalen covered by her hair as with a robe of red gold, does it move us at all?  Will it explain to us the rise of Florentine painting?  And you, O learned archaeologist, you, O scientific critic, you, O careless and curious tourist, will it bring you any comfort to read (if you can) the inscription—­

    “Ne desperetis, vos qui peccare soletis
    Exemploque meo vos reperate Deo.”

Those small pictures of the life of St. Mary, which surround her still with their beauty, do you even know what they mean?  And if you do, are they any more to you than an idle tale, a legend, which has lost even its meaning?  No, we look at these faint and far-off things merely with curiosity as a botanist looks through his albums, like one who does not know flowers.