attempt at exaltation. "And leaving her and his sons in the cave,
Joseph went forth to seek a Hebrew midwife in the village of
Bethlehem. But as I was going, said Joseph, I looked up into the air,
and I saw the clouds astonished, and the fowls of the air stopping in
the midst of their flight. And I looked down towards the earth and saw
a table spread, and working-people sitting around it; but their hands
were on the table, and they did not move to eat. But all their faces
were fixed upwards." (Protevangelion, xiii. 1-7.)

It would, of course, be absurd to endeavour to institute any
comparison between the various pictures of this subject, innumerable
as they are; but I must at least deprecate Lord Lindsay's
characterising this design of Giotto's merely as the "Byzantine
composition." 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.

* * * * *

XVII.

THE WISE MEN'S OFFERING.

This is a subject which has been so great a favourite with the
painters of later periods, and on which so much rich incidental
invention has been lavished, that Giotto's rendering of it cannot but
be felt to be barren. It is, in fact, perhaps the least powerful of
all the series; and its effect is further marred by what Lord Lindsay
has partly noted, the appearance--perhaps accidental, but if so,
exceedingly unskilful--of matronly corpulence in the figure of the
Madonna. The unfortunate failure in the representation of the legs and
chests of the camels, and the awkwardness of the attempt to render the
action of kneeling in the foremost king, put the whole composition
into the class-