Excerpt from Old Pictures in Florence: With a Prefatory Note by William A. Sim Old Pictures in Florence (men and Women, 1855) has been aptly described as c a quaint heterogeneous causerz'e suggested to the writer on a sunny March morning, while he looked down from some high set villa's parapet over the city, radiant through its live translucent bath of air Yonder soars Giotto's Tower. His very name recalls many less famous followers, whose ghosts seem still to haunt street and square, bewait tng now a faded fresco, now a dim canvas. Their lover had patiently studied these path etic relics. i spent some most delightful time, wrote Rossetti to Allingham, with Browning at Paris, both in the evenings and at the Louvre, where {and throughout conversation) I found his knowledge of Early Italian Art beyond that of any one I ever met encyclopaedically beyond that of Ruskin himself. Though such worklacked the formal grace of Greek sculpture, it pursued a loftier ideal. Let the visible go to the dogs what matters 5? Myron's Athene and the Cnidian Aphrodite by Praxi teles represented a lim ited mundane loveliness, which meant submission, finality, arrested development. Cimabue, Em Angelica, Taddeo Gaddi, Duccio dared to be faulty: faulty because they embodied spiritual yearnings, steps, stages, phases of process in a soul's growth. Perspective was ill understood. Backgrounds became merely symbolic hints. A bluish expanse with impossible fishes stood for the sea. Yet admit all this defective execution, this contracted range of power, says Mrs. Jameson, how exquisitely beau tiful are certain of the remains of this early age, afierding in their simple genuine feeling examples of eazcellence which our modern painters begin to recognise, and which even the great Raphael did not disdain to admire and even to copy. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.