“THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ART” 203

keenness; for in none of them can there be a perfection or balance of all human attributes;-the great colourist becomes gradually insensible to the refinements of form which he at first intentionally omitted; the master of line is inevitably dead to many of the delights of colour; the study of the true or ideal human form is inconsistent with the love of its most spiritual expressions. To one it is intrusted to record the historical realities of his age; in him the perception of character is subtle, and that of abstract beauty in measure diminished; to another, removed to the desert, or enclosed in the cloister, is given, not the noting of things transient, but the revealing of things eternal. Ghirlandajo and Titian painted men, but could not angels; Duccio¹ and Angelico painted Saints, but could not senators. One is ordered to copy material form lovingly and slowly-his the fine finger and patient will: to another are sent visions and dreams upon the bed-his the hand fearful and swift, and impulse of passion irregular and wild. We may have occasion further to insist upon this great principle of the in-communicableness and singleness of all the highest powers;² but we assert it here especially, in opposition to the idea, already so fatal to art, that either the aim of the antique may take place together with the purposes, or its traditions become elevatory of the power, of Christian art; or that the glories of Giotto and the Sienese are in any wise traceable through Niccola Pisano to the venerable relics of the Campo Santo.

35. Lord Lindsay’s statement, as far as it regards Niccola himself, is true.³

“His improvement in Sculpture is attributable, in the first instance, to the study of an ancient sarcophagus, brought from Greece by the ships of Pisa in the eleventh century, and which, after having stood beside the

¹ [To Duccio (about 1260-1340), who filled in the school of Siena the place of Cimabue and Giotto, Ruskin does not refer elsewhere than here and in § 44, below.]

² [See below, § 52, p. 223.]

³ [For Ruskin’s own account of Niccola Pisano and his work, see Val d’ Arno (1874), passim. In § 264 of that book he quotes and “ratifies, as far as my knowledge

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