40 GIOTTO AND HIS WORKS IN PADUA

with patience. It will never be an utter or a degrading fall; that is reserved for those who, like vulgar translators, wilfully quit the hand of their master, and have no strength of their own.

23. Lastly. It is especially to be noticed that these works of Giotto, in common with all others of the period, are independent of all the inferior sources of pictorial interest. They never show the slightest attempt at imitative realization: they are simple suggestions of ideas, claiming no regard except for the inherent value of the thoughts. There is no filling of the landscape with variety of scenery, architecture, or incident, as in the works of Benozzo Gozzoli or Perugino; no wealth of jewellery and gold spent on the dresses of the figures, as in the delicate labours of Angelico or Gentile da Fabriano. The background is never more than a few gloomy masses of rock, with a tree or two, and perhaps a fountain; the architecture is merely what is necessary to explain the scene; the dresses are painted sternly on the “heroic” principle of Sir Joshua Reynolds-that drapery is to be “drapery, and nothing more,”¹-there is no silk, nor velvet, nor distinguishable material of any kind: the whole power of the picture is rested on the three simple essentials of painting-pure Colour, noble Form, noble Thought.

We moderns, educated in reality far more under the influence of the Dutch masters than the Italian, and taught to look for realization in all things, have been in the habit of casting scorn on these early Italian works, as if their simplicity were the result of ignorance merely. When we know a little more of art in general, we shall begin to suspect that a man of Giotto’s power of mind did not altogether suppose his clusters of formal trees, or diminutive masses of architecture, to be perfect representations of the woods of Judea, or of the streets of Jerusalem: we shall begin to understand that there is a symbolical art which

¹ [For this quotation from the Discourses, see Vol. XI. p. 417 n.; compare Vol. XXII. p. 402, and below, p. 249.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]