nk surfaces, which could only be
rendered interesting by covering them with mosaic or painting.

The Italians were not at the time capable of doing this for
themselves, and mosaicists were brought from Constantinople, who
covered the churches of Italy with a sublime monotony of Byzantine
traditions. But the Gothic blood was burning in the Italian veins; and
the Florentines and Pisans could not rest content in the formalism of
the Eastern splendour. The first innovator was, I believe, Giunta of
Pisa, the second Cimabue, the third Giotto; the last only being a man
of power enough to effect a complete revolution in the artistic
principles of his time.

He, however, began, like his master Cimabue, with a perfect respect
for his Byzantine models; and his paintings for a long time consisted
only of repetitions of the Byzantine subjects, softened in treatment,
enriched in number of figures, and enlivened in gesture. Afterwards he
invented subjects of his own. The manner and degree of the changes
which he at first effected could only be properly understood by actual
comparison of his designs with the Byzantine originals;[6] but in
default of the means of such a comparison, it may be generally stated
that the innovations of Giotto consisted in the introduction, A, of
gayer or lighter colours; B, of broader masses; and, C, of more
careful imitation of nature than existed in the works of his
predecessors.

[Footnote 6: It might not, I think, be a work unworthy of the Arundel
Society, to collect and engrave in outline the complete series of
these Byzantine originals of the subjects of the Arena Chapel, in
order to facilitate this comparison. The Greek MSS. in the British
Museum would, I think, be amply sufficient; the Harleian MS. numbered
1810 alone furnishing a considerable number of subjects, and
especially a Death of the Virgin, with the St. John thrown into the
peculiar and violent gesture of grief afterwards adopted by Giotto in
the Entombment of the Arena Chapel.]

A. _Greater lightness of colour._ This was partly in compliance with a
tendency which was beginning to manifest itself even before Giotto's
time. Over the whole of northern Europe, the colouring of the eleventh
and early twelfth centuries had been pale: in manuscripts, principally
composed of pale red, green, and yellow, blue being sparingly
introduced (earlier still, in the eighth and ninth centuries, the
letters had often been coloured with black and yellow