In this public act of joy the people of Florence recognised and paid enthusiastic honour to the art arisen among them from the dead.

If we rightly consider the matter, it is not a little wonderful that a whole community should thus have hailed the presence in their midst of a new spirit of power and beauty.

It proves the widespread sensibility of the Florentines to things of beauty, and shows the sympathy which, emanating from the people, was destined to inspire and brace the artist for his work.[124] In a dark transept of S.Maria Novella, raised by steps above the level of the church, still hangs this famous "Madonna" of the Rucellai--not far, perhaps, from the spot where Boccaccio's youths and maidens met that Tuesday morning in the year of the great plague; nor far, again, from where the solitary woman, beautiful beyond belief, conversed with Machiavelli on the morning of the first of May in 1527.[125] We who can call to mind the scenes that picture has looked down upon--we who have studied the rise and decadence of painting throughout Italy from this beginning even to the last work of the latest Bolognese--may do well to visit it with reverence, and to ponder on the race of mighty masters whose lineage here takes its origin.
Cimabue did not free his style from what are called Byzantine or Romanesque mannerisms.

To unpractised eyes his saints and angels, with their stiff draperies and angular attitudes, though they exhibit stateliness and majesty, belong to the same tribe as the grim mosaics and gaunt frescoes of his predecessors.

It is only after careful comparison that we discover, in this picture of the Rucellai for example, a distinctly fresh endeavour to express emotion and to depict life.