the best introduction to it would
be the elementary practice of painting every study on a golden ground.
This at once compels you to understand that the work is to be
imaginative and decorative; that it represents beautiful things in the
clearest way, but not under existing conditions; and that, in fact,
you are producing jeweler's work, rather than pictures. Then the
qualities of grace in design become paramount to every other; and you
may afterwards substitute clear sky for the golden background without
danger of loss or sacrifice of system: clear sky of golden light, or
deep and full blue, for the full blue of Titian is just as much a
piece of conventional enameled background as if it were a plate of
gold; that depth of blue in relation to foreground objects being
wholly impossible.

82. There is another immense advantage in this Byzantine and Gothic
abstraction of decisive form, when it is joined with a faithful desire
of whatever truth can be expressed on narrow conditions. It makes us
observe the vital points in which character consists, and educates the
eye and mind in the habit of fastening and limiting themselves to
essentials. In complete drawing, one is continually liable to be led
aside from the main points by picturesque accidents of light and
shade; in Gothic drawing you must get the character, if at all, by a
keenness of analysis which must be in constant exercise.

83. And here I must beg of you very earnestly, once for all, to clear
your minds of any misapprehension of the nature of Gothic art, as if
it implied error and weakness, instead of severity. That a style is
restrained or severe does not mean that it is also erroneous. Much
mischief has been done--endless misapprehension induced in this
matter--by the blundering religious painters of Germany, who have
become examples of the opposite error from our English painters of the
Constable group. Our uneducated men work too bluntly to be ever in the
right; but the Germans draw finely and resolutely wrong. Here is a
"Riposo" of Overbeck's for instance, which the painter imagined to be
elevated in style because he had drawn it without light and shade, and
with absolute decision: and so far, indeed, it is Gothic enough; but
it is separated everlastingly from Gothic and from all other living
work, because the painter was too vain to look at anything he had to
paint, and drew every mass of his drapery in lines that were as
impossible as they were stiff, an