r Francia. For this reason, the character of his painting is
better expressed by bold wood-engravings than in general it is likely
to be by any other means.

Again, he was a very noble colourist; and in his peculiar feeling for
breadth of hue resembled Titian more than any other of the Florentine
school. That is to say, had he been born two centuries later, when the
art of painting was fully known, I believe he would have treated his
subjects much more like Titian than like Raphael; in fact, the
frescoes of Titian in the chapel beside the church of St. Antonio at
Padua, are, in all technical qualities, and in many of their
conceptions, almost exactly what I believe Giotto would have done, had
he lived in Titian's time. As it was, he of course never attained
either richness or truth of colour; but in serene brilliancy he is not
easily rivalled; invariably massing his hues in large fields, limiting
them firmly, and then filling them with subtle gradation. He had the
Venetian fondness for bars and stripes, not unfrequently casting
barred colours obliquely across the draperies of an upright figure,
from side to side (as very notably in the dress of one of the
musicians who are playing to the dancing of Herodias' daughter, in one
of his frescoes at Santa Croce); and this predilection was mingled
with the truly mediaeval love of _quartering_.[12] The figure of the
Madonna in the small tempera pictures in the Academy at Florence is
always completely divided into two narrow segments by her dark-blue
robe.

[Footnote 12: I use this heraldic word in an inaccurate sense, knowing
no other that will express what I mean,--the division of the picture
into quaint segments of alternating colour, more marked than any of
the figure outlines.]

And this is always to be remembered in looking at any engravings from
the works of Giotto; for the injury they sustain in being deprived of
their colour is far greater than in the case of later designers. All
works produced in the fourteenth century agree in being more or less
decorative; they were intended in most instances to be subservient to
architectural effect, and were executed in the manner best calculated
to produce a striking impression when they were seen in a mass. The
painted wall and the painted window were part and parcel of one
magnificent whole; and it is as unjust to the work of Giotto, or of
any contemporary artist, to take out a single feature from the series,
and represent i