ty, green, stencilled
grass and flowers of Botticelli, the faded tapestry work of Angelico;
making, as it were, the greenness greener, the freshness fresher, of
that real grass and those real trees. And not by the force of contrast,
but rather by the sense that as all this appears to me green and fresh
in the present, so likewise did it appear to those men of four centuries
ago: the fact of their having seen and felt, making me, all the more,
see and feel.

This is one of the peculiarities of rudimentary art--of the art of
the early Renaissance as well as of that of Persia and India, of
Constantinople, of every peasant potter all through the world: that,
not knowing very well its own aims, it fills its imperfect work with
suggestion of all manner of things which it loves, and tries to gain in
general pleasurableness what it loses in actual achievement; and lays
hold of us, like fragments of verse, by suggestiveness, quite as much
as by pictorial realisation. And upon this depends the other half of
the imaginative art of the Renaissance, the school of intellectual
decoration, of arabesques formed, not of lines and of colours, but of
associations and suggestions.

The desire which lies at the bottom of it--a desire masked as religious
symbolism in the old mosaicists and carvers and embroiderers--is the
desire to paint nice things, in default of painting a fine picture. The
beginning of such attempts is naturally connected with the use of gilding;
whether those gold grounds of the panel pictures of the fourteenth century
represented to the painters only a certain expenditure of gold foil, or
whether (as I have suggested, but I fear fantastically) their streakings
and veinings of coppery or silvery splendour, their stencillings of rays
and dots and fretwork, their magnificent inequality and variety of brown
or yellow or greenish effulgence, were vaguely connected in the minds of
those men with the splendour of the heaven in which the Virgin and the
Saints really dwell. It is the cunning use of this gilding, of tools
for ribbing and stencilling and damascening, which give half of their
marvellous exotic loveliness to Simone Martini's frescoes at Assisi and
his Annunciation of the Florentine Gallery; this, and the feeling for
wonderful gold woven and embroidered stuffs, like that white cloth of
gold of the kneeling angel, fit, in its purity and splendour, for the
robe of Grail king. The want of mechanical dexterity, however,