is a
curious visible type of it in the progress of ornamentation in
manuscripts, corresponding with the various changes in the higher
branch of art. In the course of the 12th and early 13th centuries, the
ornamentation, though often full of high feeling and fantasy, is
sternly enclosed within limiting border-lines;--at first, severe
squares, oblongs, or triangles. As the grace of the ornamentation
advances, these border-lines are softened and broken into various
curves, and the inner design begins here and there to overpass them.
Gradually this emergence becomes more constant, and the lines which
thus escape throw themselves into curvatures expressive of the most
exquisite concurrence of freedom with self-restraint. At length the
restraint vanishes, the freedom changes consequently into license, and
the page is covered with exuberant, irregular, and foolish
extravagances of leafage and line.

It only remains to be noticed, that the circumstances of the time at
which Giotto appeared were peculiarly favourable to the development of
genius; owing partly to the simplicity of the methods of practice, and
partly to the naivete with which art was commonly regarded. Giotto,
like all the great painters of the period, was merely a travelling
decorator of walls, at so much a day; having at Florence a _bottega_,
or workshop, for the production and sale of small tempera pictures.
There were no such things as "studios" in those days. An artist's
"studies" were over by the time he was eighteen; after that he was a
_lavoratore_, "labourer," a man who knew his business, and produced
certain works of known value for a known price; being troubled with no
philosophical abstractions, shutting himself up in no wise for the
reception of inspirations; receiving, indeed, a good many, as a matter
of course,--just as he received the sunbeams which came in at his
window, the light which he worked by;--in either case, without
mouthing about it, or much concerning himself as to the nature of it.
Not troubled by critics either; satisfied that his work was well done,
and that people would find it out to be well done; but not vain of it,
nor more profoundly vexed at its being found fault with, than a good
saddler would be by some one's saying his last saddle was uneasy in
the seat. Not, on the whole, much molested by critics, but generally
understood by the men of sense, his neighbours and friends, and
permitted to have his own way with the walls he