GIOTTO AND HIS WORKS IN PADUA 27

head of the progressive schools of Italy. It was simply by being interested in what was going on around him, by substituting the gestures of living men for conventional attitudes, and portraits of living men for conventional faces, and incidents of every-day life for conventional circumstances, that he became great, and the master of the great. Giotto was to his contemporaries precisely what Millais is to his contemporaries,-a daring naturalist, in defiance of tradition, idealism, and formalism.¹ The Giottesque movement in the fourteenth, and Pre-Raphaelite movement in the nineteenth centuries, are precisely similar in bearing and meaning: both being the protests of vitality against mortality, of spirit against letter, and of truth against tradition: and both, which is the more singular, literally links in one unbroken chain of feeling; for exactly as Niccola Pisano and Giotto were helped by the classical sculptures discovered in their time,² the Pre-Raphaelities have been helped by the works of Niccola and Giotto at Pisa and Florence:³ and thus the fiery cross of truth has been delivered from spirit to spirit, over the dust of intervening generations.

13. But what, it may be said by the reader, is the use of the works of Giotto to us? They may indeed have been wonderful for their time, and of infinite use in that time; but since, after Giotto, came Leonardo and Correggio, what is the use of going back to the ruder art, and republishing it in the year 1854? Why should we fret ourselves to dig down to the root of the tree, when we may at once enjoy its fruit and foliage? I answer, first, that in all matters relating to human intellect, it is a great thing to have hold of the root: that at least we ought to see it, and taste it, and handle it; for it often happens that the root is wholesome when the leaves, however fair, are useless or poisonous.

¹ [Compare what Ruskin was writing elsewhere at this period (1854) of Millais and the Pre-Raphaelite movement: Vol. XII. pp. 157, 360.]

² [See the reference to Niccola’s study of a Greek sarcophagus, in Val d’ Arno (Vol. XXIII. pp. 17, 20).]

³ [See, again, Vol. XII. p. xliv.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]