32 GIOTTO AND HIS WORKS IN PADUA

ornamentation in manuscripts, corresponding with the various changes in the higher branch of art. In the course of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, the ornamentation, though often full of high feeling and fantasy, is sternly enclosed within limiting border-lines;-at first, severe squares, oblongs, or triangles. As the grace of the ornamentation advances, these border-lines are softened and broken into various curves, and the inner design begins here and there to overpass them. Gradually this emergence becomes more constant, and the lines which thus escape throw themselves into curvatures expressive of the most exquisite concurrence of freedom with self-restraint. At length the restraint vanishes, the freedom changes consequently into license, and the page is covered with exuberant, irregular, and foolish extravagances of leafage and line.¹

17. It only remains to be noticed, that the circumstances of the time at which Giotto appeared were peculiarly favourable to the development of genius; owing partly to the simplicity of the methods of practice, and partly to the naïveté with which art was commonly regarded. Giotto, like all the great painters of the period, was merely a travelling decorator of walls, at so much a day; having at Florence a bottega, or workshop,² for the production and sale of small tempera pictures. There were no such things as “studios,” in those days. An artist’s “studies” were over by the time he was eighteen; after that he was a lavoratore, “labourer,” a man who knew his business, and produced certain works of known value for a known price; being troubled with no philosophical abstractions, shutting himself up in no wise for the reception of inspirations; receiving, indeed, a good many, as a matter of course,-just as he received the sunbeams which came in at his window, the light which he worked by;-in either case, without mouthing about it, or much concerning himself as to the nature of it. Not troubled by critics either; satisfied that his work

¹ [Compare Stones of Venice, vol. iii. (Vol. XI. pp. 8-9).]

² [Compare Vol. XXIII. p. lvii.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]