ually take in the episodes of a painting
from left to right, but the painter definitely and deliberately intends
us so to take them in. For wherever two or three distinct episodes in
succession are represented on a single plane in the same picture--as
happens often in early art--they are invariably represented in the
precise order of the words on a written or printed page, beginning at
the upper left-hand corner, and ending at the lower right-hand angle. I
first noticed this curious extension of the common principle in the
mediaeval frescoes of the Campo Santo at Pisa; and I have since verified
it by observations on many other pictures elsewhere, both ancient and
modern. The Campo Santo, however, forms an exceptionally good museum of
such story-telling frescoes by various painters, as almost every picture
consists of several successive episodes. The famous Benozzo Gozzoli, for
example, of Noah's Vineyard represents on a single plane all the stages
in that earliest drama of intoxication, from the first act of gathering
the grapes on the top left, to the scandalised lady, the _vergognosa di
Pisa_, who covers her face with her hands in shocked horror at the
patriarch's disgrace in the lower right-hand corner.

Observe, too, that the very conditions of _technique_ demand this order
almost as rigorously in painting as in writing. For the painter will
naturally so work as not to smudge over what he has already painted: and
he will also naturally begin with the earliest episode in the story he
unfolds, proceeding to the others in due succession. From which two
principles it necessarily results that he will begin at the upper left,
and end at the lower right-hand corner.

I have skipped lightly, I admit, over a considerable interval between
primitive man and Benozzo Gozzoli. But consider further that during all
that time the uses of the right and left hand were becoming by gradual
degrees each day still further differentiated and specialised.
Innumerable trades, occupations, and habits imply ever-widening
differences in the way we use them. It is not the right hand alone that
has undergone an education in this respect: the left, too, though
subordinate, has still its own special functions to perform. If the
savage chips his flints with a blow of the right, he holds the core, or
main mass of stone from which he strikes it, firmly with his left. If
one hand is specially devoted to the knife, the other grasps the fork to
make up