dent existence. It had no
direct reference to nature; the pictorial representation of individual
traits was quite outside its scope; a few signs fixed by convention
sufficed. A fish--derived from the acrostic _ichtbus--_symbolized
the Saviour; a cross was the visible token of redeeming grace. And
so through several hundred years. The twelfth century saw the
beginnings of a change in the direction of spiritual and intellectual
emancipation. The teachings and example of Francis of Assisi
brought men to the consciousness of themselves and to a realization
of the worth and significance of the individual life. The work of
Giotto is the expression in art of the new spirit.

Of necessity Giotto founded his work upon the accepted forms of
the Byzantine tradition. But Giotto was a man of genius and a
creative mind. In the expression of his fresh impulse and vital
feeling, the assertion of new-found individuality, he tried to
_realize_ as convincingly and vividly as possible the situation with
which he was dealing; and with this purpose he looked not back
upon art but out upon nature. Where the Byzantine convention had
presented but a sign and remote indication of form by means of flat
color, Giotto endows his figures with life and movement and
actuality by giving them a body in three dimensions; his forms exist
in the round. Until his day, light and shade had not been employed;
and such perspective as he was able to achieve he had to discover
for himself. For the first time in Christian painting a figure has
bodily existence. Giotto gives the first evidence, too, of a sense of
the beauty of color, and of the value of movement as a means of
added expressiveness. His power of composition shows an immense
advance on his predecessors. In dealing with traditional subjects, as
the Madonna and child, he follows in general the traditional
arrangement. But in those subjects where his own inventiveness is
given free play, as in the series of frescoes illustrating the life of St.
Francis, he reveals an extraordinary faculty of design and a dramatic
sense which is matched by a directness and clarity of expression.

Not only in the technique of his craft was Giotto an innovator, but
also in the direction of naturalness and reality of feeling. He was the
first to introduce portraits into his work. His Madonnas and saints
are no longer mere types; they are human and individual, vividly felt
and characterized by immediate and present actualit