that panel--some ten feet high by six or seven wide--which is not
wrought in gold and colour with the fineness of a Greek manuscript.
There is not such an elaborate piece of ornamentation in the first page
of any Gothic king's missal, as you will find in that Madonna's
throne;--the Madonna herself is meant to be grave and noble only; and
to be attended only by angels.

And here is this saucy imp of a lad declares his people must do without
gold, and without thrones; nay, that the Golden Gate itself shall have
no gilding that St. Joachim and St. Anne shall have only one angel
between them: and their servants shall have their joke, and nobody say
them nay!

It is most wonderful; and would have been impossible, had Cimabue been
a common man, though ever so great in his own way. Nor could I in any
of my former thinking understand how it was, till I saw Cimabue's own
work at Assisi; in which he shows himself, at heart, as independent of
his gold as Giotto,--even more intense, capable of higher things than
Giotto, though of none, perhaps, so keen or sweet. But to this day,
among all the Mater Dolorosas of Christianity, Cimabue's at Assisi is
the noblest; nor did any painter after him add one link to the chain of
thought with which he summed the creation of the earth, and preached
its redemption.

He evidently never checked the boy, from the first day he found him.
Showed him all he knew: talked with him of many things he felt himself
unable to paint: made him a workman and a gentleman,--above all, a
Christian,--yet left him--a shepherd. And Heaven had made him such a
painter, that, at his height, the words of his epitaph are in nowise
overwrought: "Ille ego sum, per quem pictura extincta revixit."