What would we do without our picture-books, I wonder? Before we knewhow to read, before even we could speak, we had learned to love them.We shouted with pleasure when we turned the pages and saw the spottedcow standing in the daisy-sprinkled meadow, the foolish-looking oldsheep with her gambolling lambs, the wise dog with his friendly eyes.They were all real friends to us.
Then a little later on, when we began to ask for stories about thepictures, how we loved them more and more. There was the little girl inthe red cloak talking to the great grey wolf with the wicked eyes; thecottage with the bright pink roses climbing round the lattice-window,out of which jumped a little maid with golden hair, followed by thegreat big bear, the middle-sized bear, and the tiny bear. Truly thosestories were a great joy to us, but we would never have loved themquite so much if we had not known their pictured faces as well.
Do you ever wonder how all these pictures came to be made? They had abeginning, just as everything else had, but the beginning goes so farback that we can scarcely trace it.
Children have not always had picture-books to look at. In the long-agodays such things were not known. Thousands of years ago, far away inAssyria, the Assyrian people learned to make pictures and to carve themout in stone. In Egypt, too, the Egyptians traced pictures upon thewalls of their temples and upon the painted mummy-cases of the dead.Then the Greeks made still more beautiful statues and pictures inmarble, and called them gods and goddesses, for all this was at a timewhen the true God was forgotten.
Afterwards, when Christ had come and the people had learned that thepictured gods were not real, they began to think it wicked to makebeautiful pictures or carve marble statues. The few pictures that weremade were stiff and ugly, the figures were not like real men and women,the animals and trees were very strange-looking things. And instead ofmaking the sky blue as it really was, they made it a chequered patternof gold. After a time it seemed as if the art of making pictures wasgoing to die out altogether.
Then came the time which is called 'The Renaissance,' a word whichmeans being born again, or a new awakening, when men began to draw realpictures of real things and fill the world with images of beauty.
Now it is the stories of the men of that time, who put new life intoArt, that I am going to tell you--men who learned, step by step, topaint the most beautiful pictures that the world possesses.
In telling these stories I have been helped by an old book called TheLives of the Painters, by Giorgio Vasari, who was himself a painter. Hetook great delight in gathering together all the stories about theseartists and writing them down with loving care, so that he shows usreal living men, and not merely great names by which the famouspictures are known.
It did not make much difference to us when we were little childrenwhether our pictures were good or bad, as long as the colours werebright and we knew what they meant. But as we grow older and wiser oureyes grow wiser too, and we learn to know what is good and what ispoor. Only, just a