o be a building
of the twelfth century. Its simple beauty, which the seawind and the sun
have kissed for seven hundred years, seems to give character to the
whole plain, so ample and green, beyond the wont of Italy; but, indeed,
here we are on the threshold of the Maremma, that beautiful, wild,
deserted country that man has not yet reclaimed from Death, where the
summer is still and treacherous in its loveliness, where in winter for a
little while the herdsmen come down with their cattle from the
Garfagnana, and the hills musical with love songs. On the threshold of
that treacherous summer, as it were, this lonely church stands on guard.
Within, she is beautiful, in the old manner, splendid with antique
pillars caught about now with iron; but it is perhaps the frescoes, that
have faded on the walls till they are scarcely more than the shadows of
a thousand forgotten sunsets, that you will care for most. They are the
work of Giunta Pisano, or if, indeed, they are not his they are of his
school,--a school already decadent, splendid with the beauty that has
looked on death and can never be quite sane again. No one, I think, can
ever deny the beauty of Giunta's work; it is full of a strange subtilty
that is ready to deny life over and over again. He is concerned not with
life, but chiefly with religion, and with certain bitter yet altogether
lovely colours which evoke for him, and for us too, if we will lend
ourselves to their influence, all the misery and pessimism of the end of
the Middle Age, its restlessness and ennui, that find consolation only
in the memory of the grotesque frailty of the body which one day Jesus
will raise up. All the anarchy and discontent of our own time seems to
me to be expressed in such work as this, in which ugliness, as we might
say, has as much right as beauty. It is, I think, the mistake of much
popular criticism in our time to assert that these "primitive" painters
were beginners, and could not achieve what they wished. They were not
beginners, rather they were the most subtle artists of a convention--and
all art is a convention--that was about to die. If one can see their
work aright, it is beautiful; but it has lost touch with life, or is a
mere satirical comment upon it, that Giotto, with his simplicity, his
eager delight in natural things and in man, will supersede and banish.
In him, Europe seems to shake off the art and fatality of the East,
under whose shadow Christianity had grown up,