36 GIOTTO AND HIS WORKS IN PADUA

the handling is much broader than that of contemporary painters, corresponding somewhat to the character of many of the figures, representing plain, masculine kind of people, and never reaching anything like the ideal refinement of the conceptions even of Benozzo Gozzoli, far less of Angelico or Francia. For this reason, the character of his painting is better expressed by bold wood-engravings than in general it is likely to be by any other means.

Again, he was a very noble colourist;¹ and in his peculiar feeling for breadth of hue resembled Titian more than any other of the Florentine school. That is to say, had he been born two centuries later, when the art of painting was fully known, I believe he would have treated his subjects much more like Titian than like Raphael; in fact, the frescoes of Titian in the chapel beside the church of St. Antonio at Padua,² are, in all technical qualities, and in many of their conceptions, almost exactly what I believe Giotto would have done, had he lived in Titian’s time. As it was, he of course never attained either richness or truth of colour; but in serene brilliancy he is not easily rivalled; invariably massing his hues in large fields, limiting them firmly, and then filling them with subtle gradation. He had the Venetian fondness for bars and stripes, not unfrequently casting barred colours obliquely across the draperies of an upright figure, from side to side (as very notably in the dress of one of the musicians who are playing to the dancing of Herodias’ daughter, in one of his frescoes at Santa Croce);³ and this predilection was mingled with the truly mediaeval love of quartering.* The figure of

* I use this heraldic word in an inaccurate sense, knowing no other that will express what I mean,-the division of the picture into quaint segments of alternating colour, more marked than any of the figure outlines.⁴

¹ [On this point compare Vol. XXIII. pp. 350, 475.]

² [The Scuola del Santo; for other references to Titian’s frescoes there, see Vol. XII. p. 301, and Vol. V. p. 398.]

³ [For a further description of this fresco, see Mornings in Florence, § 60 n. (Vol. XXIII. p. 355).]

⁴ [Compare on this point Vol. XI. p. 25.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]