ding by the actual
representation of men and women in outline, tint, and attitude, the
rigid traditions of his predecessors, he put men's passions in their
faces--the melancholy looked sad, the gay glad. This result, to us so
simple, filled Giotto's lively countrymen, who had seldom seen it, with
astonishment and delight. They cried out as at a marvel when he made the
commonest deed even coarsely lifelike, as in the case of a sailor in a
boat, who turned round with his hand before his face and spat into the
sea; and when he illustrated the deed with the corresponding expression,
as in the thrill of eagerness that perceptibly pervaded the whole figure
of a thirsty man who stooped down to drink. But Giotto was no mere
realist though he was a great realist; he was also in the highest light
an idealist. His sense of harmony and beauty was true and noble; he rose
above the real into 'the things unseen and eternal,' of which the real
is but a rough manifestation. He was the first to paint a crucifixion
robbed of the horrible triumph of physical power, and of the agony which
is at its bidding, and invested with the divinity of awe and love.

Giotto's work did not end with himself; he was the founder of the
earliest worthy school of Italian art, so worthy in this very glorious
idealism, that, as I have already said, the men whose praise is most to
be coveted, have learned to turn back to Giotto and his immediate
successors, and, forgetting and forgiving all their ignorance,
crudeness, quaintness, to dwell never wearied, and extol without measure
these oldest masters' dignity of spirit, the earnestness of their
originality, the solemnity and heedfulness of their labour. It would
seem as if skill and polish, with the amount of attention which they
appropriate, with their elevation of manner over matter, and thence
their lowered standard, are apt to rob from or blur in men these highest
qualifications of genius, for it is true that judges miss even in the
Lionardo, Michael Angelo, and Raphael of a later and much more
accomplished generation, and, to a far greater extent, in the Rubens of
another and still later day, the perfect simplicity, the unalloyed
fervour, the purity of tenderness in Giotto, Orcagna, Fra Angelico, and
in their Flemish brethren, the Van Eycks and Mabuse.

The difference between the two classes of painters in not so wide as
that between the smooth and brilliant epigrammatic poets of Anne's and
the ruggedly ri