26 GIOTTO AND HIS WORKS IN PADUA

colours). In the early part of the fourteenth century the colours begin to grow paler; about 1330 the style is already completely modified; and at the close of the fourteenth century the colour is quite pale and delicate.

I have not carefully examined the colouring of early Byzantine work; but it seems always to have been comparatively dark, and in manuscripts is remarkably so; Giotto’s paler colouring, therefore, though only part of the great European system, was rendered notable by its stronger contrast with the Byzantine examples.

(B.) Greater breadth of mass. It had been the habit of the Byzantines to break up their draperies by a large number of minute folds. Norman and Romanesque sculpture showed much of the same character. Giotto melted all these folds into broad masses of colour; so that his compositions have sometimes almost a Titianesque look in this particular. This innovation was a healthy one, and led to very noble results when followed up by succeeding artists: but in many of Giotto’s compositions the figures become ludicrously cumbrous, from the exceeding simplicity of the terminal lines, and massiveness of unbroken form. The manner was copied in illuminated manuscripts with great disadvantage, as it was unfavourable to minute ornamentation. The French never adopted it in either branch of art, nor did any other Northern school; minute and sharp folds of the robes remaining characteristic of Northern (more especially of Flemish and German) design down to the latest times, giving a great superiority to the French and Flemish illuminated work, and causing a proportionate inferiority in their large pictorial efforts. Even Rubens and Vandyck cannot free themselves from a certain meanness and minuteness in disposition of drapery.

(C.) Close imitation of nature. In this one principle lay Giotto’s great strength, and the entire secret of the revolution he effected. It was not by greater learning, nor by the discovery of new theories of art, not by greater taste, nor by “ideal” principles of selection, that he became the

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