GIOTTO AND HIS WORKS IN PADUA 37

the Madonna in the small tempera pictures in the Academy at Florence is always completely divided into two narrow segments by her dark-blue robe.¹

20. And this is always to be remembered in looking at any engravings from the works of Giotto; for the injury they sustain in being deprived of their colour is far greater than in the case of later designers. All works produced in the fourteenth century agree in being more or less decorative; they were intended in most instances to be subservient to architectural effect, and were executed in the manner best calculated to produce a striking impression when they were seen in a mass.² The painted wall and the painted window were part and parcel of one magnificent whole; and it is as unjust to the work of Giotto, or of any contemporary artist, to take out a single feature from the series, and represent it in black and white on a separate page, as it would be to take out a compartment of a noble coloured window, and engrave it in the same manner. What is at once refined and effective, if seen at the intended distance in unison with the rest of the work, becomes coarse and insipid when seen isolated and near; and the more skilfully the design is arranged, so as to give full value to the colours which are introduced in it, the more blank and cold will it become when it is deprived of them.

In our modern art we have indeed lost sight of one great principle which regulated that of the Middle Ages, namely, that chiaroscuro and colour are incompatible in their highest degrees. Wherever chiaroscuro enters, colour must lose some of its brilliancy. There is no shade in a rainbow, nor in an opal, nor in a piece of mother-of-pearl, nor in a well-designed painted window; only various hues of perfect colour. The best pictures, by subduing their colour and conventionalizing their chiaroscuro, reconcile both in their diminished degrees; but a perfect light and shade

¹ [See the note of 1845 on this series of scenes from the life of Christ, in Vol. XII. p. 214 n.]

² [Compare Mornings in Florence, § 46 (Vol. XXIII. pp. 341-342).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]