)
Before any knowledge of painting was brought to Florence, there were
already painters in Lucca, and Pisa, and Arezzo, who feared God and
loved the art. The keen, grave workmen from Greece, whose trade it
was to sell their own works in Italy and teach Italians to imitate
them, had already found rivals of the soil with skill that could
forestall their lessons and cheapen their crucifixes and
_addolorate_, more years than is supposed before the art came at all
into Florence. The pre-eminence to which Cimabue was raised at once
by his contemporaries, and which he still retains to a wide extent
even in the modern mind, is to be accounted for, partly by the
circumstances under which he arose, and partly by that extraordinary
_purpose of fortune_ born with the lives of some few, and through
which it is not a little thing for any who went before, if they are
even remembered as the shadows of the coming of such an one, and the
voices which prepared his way in the wilderness. It is thus, almost
exclusively, that the painters of whom I speak are now known. They
have left little, and but little heed is taken of that which men hold
to have been surpassed; it is gone like time gone--a track of dust
and dead leaves that merely led to the fountain.
Nevertheless, of very late years, and in very rare instances, some
signs of a better understanding have become manifest.
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