fields and tended pastures; not rich nor lovely, but sunburnt and
sorrowful; becoming wilder every instant as the road winds into its
recesses, ascending still, until the higher woods, now partly oak and
partly pine, drooping back from the central crest of the Apennine,
leave a pastoral wilderness of scathed rock and arid grass, withered
away here by frost, and there by strange lambent tongues of earth-fed
fire.[4] Giotto passed the first ten years of his life, a
shepherd-boy, among these hills; was found by Cimabue near his native
village, drawing one of his sheep upon a smooth stone; was yielded up
by his father, "a simple person, a labourer of the earth," to the
guardianship of the painter, who, by his own work, had already made
the streets of Florence ring with joy; attended him to Florence, and
became his disciple.

[Footnote 3: Lord Lindsay, _Christian Art_, vol. ii. p. 166.]

[Footnote 4: At Pietra Mala. The flames rise two or three feet above
the stony ground out of which they spring, white and fierce enough to
be visible in the intense rays even of the morning sun.]

We may fancy the glance of the boy, when he and Cimabue stood side by
side on the ridge of Fiesole, and for the first time he saw the
flowering thickets of the Val d'Arno; and deep beneath, the
innumerable towers of the City of the Lily, the depths of his own
heart yet hiding the fairest of them all. Another ten years passed
over him, and he was chosen from among the painters of Italy to
decorate the Vatican.

The account given us by Vasari of the mode of his competition on this
occasion, is one of the few anecdotes of him which seem to be