people by emotional appeal. In consequence painting produced many themes, but, as yet, only after the Byzantine style. The painter was more of a workman than an artist. The Church had more use for his fingers than for his creative ability. It was his business to transcribe what had gone before. This he did, but not without signs here and there of uneasiness and discontent with the pattern. There was an inclination toward something truer to nature, but as yet no great realization of it. The study of nature came in very slowly.

The advance of Italian art in the Gothic age was an advance through the development of the imposed Byzantine pattern. When people began to stir intellectually the artists found that the old Byzantine model did not look like nature. They began not by rejecting it but by improving it, giving it slight movements here and there, turning the head, throwing out a hand, or shifting the folds of drapery. The Eastern type was still seen in the long pathetic face, oblique eyes, green flesh-tints, stiff robes, thin fingers, and absence of feet; but the painters now began to modify and enliven it. More realistic Italian faces were introduced; architectural and landscape backgrounds encroached upon the Byzantine gold grounds; even portraiture was taken up. The painters were taking notes of natural appearances. No one painter began this movement. The whole artistic region of Italy was at that time ready for the advance.

Cimabue seems the most notable instance in early times of a Byzantine-educated painter who improved upon the traditions. He has been called the father of Italian painting; but Italian painting had no father. Cimabue was simply a man of more originality and ability than his contemporaries, and departed further from the art teachings of the time without decidedly opposing them. He retained the Byzantine pattern, but loosened the lines of drapery somewhat, turned the head to one side, and infused the figure with a little appearance of life.

Cimabue's pupil, Giotto, was a great improver on all his predecessors because he was a man of extraordinary genius. He would have been great in any time, and yet he was not great enough to throw off wholly the Byzantine traditions. He tried to do it. He studied nature in a general way, changed the type of face somewhat, and gave it expression and nobility. To the figure he gave more motion, dramatic gesture, life. The drapery was cast in broader, simpler masses with some regard for line, and the form and movement of the body were somewhat emphasized through it. In methods Giotto was more knowing, but not essentially different from his contemporaries; his subjects were from the common stock of religious story, but his imaginative force and invention were his own. Bound by the conventionalities of his time, he could still create a work of nobility and power. He came too early for the highest achievement. He had genius, feeling, fancy—almost everything except accurate knowledge of the laws of nature and of art. His art was the best of its time, but it was still lacking, nor did that of his immediate followers go much beyond it technically.

SYDNEY COLVIN — 'ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA'

Giotto, relatively to his age one of the greatest and most complete of artists, fills in the history of Italian painting a place analogous to that which seems to have been filled in the history of Greek painting by Polygnotus. That is to say, he lived at a time when the resources of his art were still in their infancy, but considering the limits of those resources his achievements were the highest possible. At the close of the Middle Age he laid the foundations upon which all the progress of the Renaissance was afterwards securely based. In the days of Giotto the knowledge possessed by painters of the human frame and its structure rested only upon general observation and not upon any minute, prolonged, or scientific study; while to facts other than those of humanity their observation had never been closely directed. Of linear perspective they possessed few ideas, and these elementary and empirical, and scarcely any ideas at all of aërial perspective or of the conduct of light and shade.

As far as painting could ever be carried under these conditions, so far it was carried by Giotto. In its choice of subjects his art is entirely subservient to the religious spirit of his age. Even in its mode of conceiving and arranging those subjects, it is in part still trammeled by the rules and consecrated traditions of the past. Thus it is as far from being a perfectly free as from being a perfectly accomplished form of art. Many of those truths of nature to which the painters of succeeding generations learned to give accurate and complete expression, Giotto was only able to express by way of imperfect symbol and suggestion. But in spite of these limitations and shortcomings, and although he had often to be content with expressing truths of space and form conventionally or inadequately, and truths of structure and action approximately, and truths of light and shadow not at all, yet among the elements over which he had control he maintained so just a balance that his work produces in the spectator less sense of imperfection than that of many later and more accomplished masters. He is one of the least one-sided of artists, and his art, it has been justly said, resumes and concentrates all the attainments of his time not less truly than all the attainments of the crowning age of Italian art are resumed and concentrated in Raphael.

In some particulars the painting of Giotto was never surpassed,—in the judicious division of the field and massing and scattering of groups, in the union of dignity in the types with appropriateness in the occupations of the personages, in strength and directness of intellectual grasp and dramatic motive, in the combination of perfect gravity with perfect frankness in conception, and of a noble severity in design with a great charm of harmony and purity in color. The earlier Byzantine and Roman workers in mosaic had bequeathed to him the high abstract qualities of their practice—their balance, their impressiveness, their grand instinct of decoration; but while they had compassed these qualities at an entire sacrifice of life and animation, it is the glory of Giotto to have been the first among his countrymen to breathe life into art, and to have quickened its stately rigidity with the fire of natural incident and emotion.

It was this conquest, this touch of the magician, this striking of the sympathetic notes of life and reality, that chiefly gave Giotto his immense reputation among his contemporaries, and made him the fit exponent of the vivid, penetrating, and practical genius of emancipated Florence. His is one of the few names in history which, having become great while its bearer lived, has sustained no loss of greatness through subsequent generations.

JOHN RUSKIN — 'GIOTTO AND HIS WORKS IN PADUA'

In the one principle of close imitation of nature lay Giotto's great strength and the entire secret of the revolution he effected. It was not by greater learning, nor by the discovery of new theories of art; not by greater taste, nor by "ideal" principles of selection that he became the head of the progressive schools of Italy. It was simply by being interested in what was going on around him, by substituting the gestures of living men for conventional attitudes, and portraits of living men for conventional faces, and incidents of every-day life for conventional circumstances, that he became great, and the master of the great.

JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS — 'RENAISSANCE IN ITALY'

The tale told about Giotto's first essay in drawing might be chosen as a parable: he was not found beneath a church roof tracing a mosaic, but on the open mountain, trying to draw the portrait of the living thing committed to his care. What, therefore, Giotto gave to art was, before all things else,