faithful rendering. The great secret of the Venetians was their
simplicity. They were great colourists, not because they had peculiar
secrets about oil and colour, but because when they saw a thing red,
they painted it red; and ... when they saw it distinctly, they painted
it distinctly. In all Paul Veronese's pictures, the lace borders of the
table cloths or fringes of the dresses are painted with just as much
care as the faces of the principal figures; and the reader may rest
assured that in all great art it is so. Everything in it is done as well
as it _can_ be done. Thus in the picture before us, in the background is
the Church of San Miniato, strictly accurate in every detail; on the top
of the wall are oleanders and pinks, as carefully painted as the church;
the architecture of the shrine on the wall is well studied from
thirteenth-century Gothic, and painted with as much care as the pinks;
the dresses of the figures, very beautifully designed, are painted with
as much care as the faces: that is to say, all things throughout with as
much care as the painter could bestow. It necessarily follows that what
is most difficult (_i.e._ the faces) should be comparatively the worst
done. But if they are done as well as the painter could do them, it is
all we have to ask; and modern artists are under a wonderful mistake in
thinking that when they have painted faces ill, they make their pictures
more valuable by painting the dresses worse.

"The painting before us has been objected to because it seems broken up
in bits. Precisely the same objection would hold, and in very nearly the
same degree, against the best works of the Venetians. All faithful
colourists' work, in figure-painting, has a look of sharp separation
between part and part.... Although, however, in common with all other
works of its class, it is marked by these sharp divisions, there is no
confusion in its arrangement. The principal figure is nobly principal,
not by extraordinary light, but by its own pure whiteness; and both the
Master and the young Giotto attract full regard by distinction of form
and face. The features of the boy are carefully studied, and are indeed
what, from the existing portraits of him, we know those of Giotto must
have been in his youth. The head of the young girl who wears the garland
of blue flowers is also very sweetly conceived.

"Such are the chief merits of the picture. Its defect is that the equal
care given to the whole of it