112 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING

the lions’ manes and beards are represented by rings of solid rock, as smooth as a mirror!

85. There are indeed one or two other conditions of noble conventionalism, noticed more fully in the Addenda [§§ 68-71]; but you will find that they always consist in stopping short of nature, not in falsifying nature; and thus in Giotto’s foliage, he stops short of the quantity of leaves on the real tree, but he gives you the form of the leaves represented with perfect truth. His foreground also is nearly always occupied by flowers and herbage, carefully and individually painted from nature; while, although thus simple in plan, the arrangements of line in these landscapes of course show the influence of the master-mind, and sometimes, where the story requires it, we find the usual formulæ overleaped, and Giotto at Avignon painting the breakers of the sea on a steep shore with great care,¹ while Orcagna, in his Triumph of Death,² has painted a thicket of brambles mixed with teazles, in a manner worthy of the best days of landscape art.

86. Now from the landscape of these two men to the landscape of Raphael, Leonardo, and Perugino, the advance consists principally in two great steps: The first, that distant objects were more or less invested with a blue colour,-the second, that trees were no longer painted with a black ground, but with a rich dark brown, or deep green. From Giotto’s old age, to the youth of Raphael, the advance in, and knowledge of, landscape, consisted of no more than these two simple steps; but the execution of landscape became infinitely more perfect and elaborate. All the flowers and leaves in the foreground were worked out with the same perfection as the features of the figures; in the middle distance the brown trees were most delicately defined against the sky; the blue mountains in the extreme distance were exquisitely thrown into aërial gradations, and the sky and

¹ [See Vol. IX. p. 273 n., where it is pointed out that these frescoes are by Simone Martini, and not (as was once thought) by Giotto.]

² [For other references to this fresco at Pisa, see below, p. 146.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]