nd-swept; they are the green lawns and pastures in vogue with the
whole international Middle Ages, but rendered with that braced,
selecting, finishing temper which _is_ the product of those stony
hills. Similarly the Tuscans must have been influenced by the grace,
the sparseness, the serenity of the olive, its inexhaustible vigour
and variety; yet how many of them ever painted it? That a people
should never paint or describe their landscape may mean that they have
not consciously inventoried the items; but it does not mean that they
have not aesthetically, so to speak _nervously_, felt them. Their
quality, their virtue, may be translated into that people's way of
talking of or painting quite different things: the Tuscan quality is a
quality of form, because it is a quality of mood.

IV.

This Tuscan, and more than Attic, quality--for there is something akin
to it in certain Greek archaic sculpture--is to be found, already
perfect and most essential, in the facades of the early mediaeval
churches of Pistoia. _Is to be found_; because this quality, tense and
restrained and distributed with harmonious evenness, reveals itself
only to a certain fineness and carefulness of looking. The little
churches (there are four or five of them) belong to the style called
Pisan-Romanesque; and their fronts, carved arches, capitals, lintels,
and doorposts, are identical in plan, in all that the mind rapidly
inventories, with the fronts of the numerous contemporary churches of
Lucca. But a comparison with these will bring out most vividly the
special quality of the Pistoia churches. The Lucchese ones (of some of
which, before their restoration, Mr. Ruskin has left some marvellous
coloured drawings at Oxford) run to picturesqueness and even
something more; they do better in the picture than in the reality,
and weathering and defacement has done much for them. Whereas the
little churches at Pistoia, with less projection, less carving in the
round, few or no animal or clearly floral forms, and, as a rule,
pilasters or half-pillars instead of columns, must have been as
perfect the day they were finished; the subtle balancings and tensions
of lines and curves, the delicate fretting and inlaying of flat
surface pattern, having gained only, perhaps, in being drawn more
clearly by dust and damp upon a softer colour of marble. I have
mentioned these first, because their apparent insignificance--tiny
flat facades, with very little decoration--m