74 GIOTTO AND HIS WORKS IN PADUA

merely as the “Byzantine composition.”¹ It contains, indeed, nothing more than the materials of the Byzantine composition; but I know no Byzantine Nativity which at all resembles it in the grace and life of its action. And, for full a century after Giotto’s time, in Northern Europe, the Nativity was represented in a far more conventional manner than this;-usually only the heads of the ox and ass are seen, and they are arranging, or holding with their mouths, the drapery of the couch of the Child, who is not being laid in it by the Virgin, but raised upon a kind of tablet high above her in the centre of the group. All these early designs, without exception, however, agree in expressing a certain degree of languor in the figure of the Virgin, and in making her recumbent on the bed. It is not till the fifteenth century that she is represented as exempt from suffering, and immediately kneeling in adoration before the Child.

¹ [Vol. ii. p. 188.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]