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In the design for Santa Croce, Arnolfo had shown a preference for the Gothic forms, then newly imported into Italy, and he now projected a design for the new Cathedral in which the pointed should take the place of the round arch, the stone vaulted roof should be substituted for the flat timber ceiling, and the façade should form a splendid screen, adorned with gable and pinnacle, rich with carving, glowing with mosaics and shining with gold. That the Florentines approved his project is evident from a decree passed before the work had been long in progress, in which "Master Arnolfo" is declared to be exempt from any civic tax during his life, because of his design for the Cathedral, "since" reads the Chronicle, "judging from the magnificent and visible beginnings of the new church, the Commune and people of Florence are like to have a more beautiful and honorable temple than any other in the region of Tuscany."

But before the work had far advanced the building came almost to a standstill, for the strife of parties, which had been but temporarily smothered, broke out anew in Florence, and for some thirty years work on the Cathedral was suspended. Meantime Arnolfo had died, but he left the building so far advanced that his successors would find little difficulty in continuing the main parts of the construction according to his design.

In 1331, however, a portion of the communal tax was set apart for the prosecution of the work, and Giotto di Bondone, already the most famous painter of all Italy, was appointed architect of the Cathedral. "It is not often," says Mrs. Jameson, "that a man takes up a new trade when he is approaching sixty, or even goes into a new path out of his familiar routine. But Giotto seems to have turned without a moment's hesitation from his paints and panels to the less easily wrought materials of the builder and sculptor, without either faltering from the great enterprise or doubting his own power to do it."

"To his new charge," writes Mr. C. E. Norton, "Giotto gave himself with the effectual ardor of genius. No written record of his work on the Duomo remains, but the walls themselves seem to bear witness to it. Stretches on the north and south, running eastward from the façade, more beautiful in composition and design than the later work joined to it, may be assigned with probability to the period of his oversight.

"But Giotto's labor was not limited to the Duomo alone. He now designed and speedily began the construction of the most exquisite building of modern times, the one in which the quality of classic art is most completely and beautifully harmonized with the spirit and fancy of modern times. The unsurpassed bell-tower of the Duomo, known and admired by all men as the Campanile of Giotto, is the most splendid memorial of the arts of Florence. In 1334, scarcely three months after his appointment, the foundations of the Campanile were laid with great pomp and ceremony. The tower, so quickly begun, was so vigorously lifted that it may have reached somewhat more than a third of its proposed height, when in 1337 Giotto died." He was buried in the unfinished Cathedral on the side nearest the Campanile.

"In its first appeal to the stranger's eye," says Mr. Ruskin in writing of the Campanile, "there is something unpleasing; a mingling, it seems to him, of over severity with over minuteness. But let him give it time, as he should all other consummate art. I remember well how, when a boy, I used to despise that Campanile, and think it meanly smooth and finished. But I have since lived beside it many a day, and looked out upon it from my windows by sunlight and moonlight, and I shall not soon forget how profound and gloomy appeared to me the savageness of the Northern Gothic when I afterwards stood, for the first time, beneath