the scanty technical means of the
artist, every meagre line and thin dab of colour, every timid stroke of
brush or of pencil, went towards the merciless delineation not merely of
a body but of a soul. And the greater the artist, the more cruel the
portrait: cruellest in representation of utter spiritual baseness in the
two greatest of these idealistic decorators; Giotto, and his latest
disciple, Fra Angelico. Of this I should like to give a couple of
examples.

In Giotto's frescoes at Santa Croce--one of the most lovely pieces of
mere architectural decoration conceivable--there are around the dying
and the dead St. Francis two groups of monks, which are astoundingly
realistic. The solemn ending of the ideally beautiful life of sanctity
which was so fresh in the memory of Giotto's contemporaries, is nothing
beyond a set of portraits of the most absolutely mediocre creatures,
moral and intellectual, of creatures the most utterly incapable of
religious enthusiasm that ever made religion a livelihood. They gather
round the dying and the dead St. Francis, a noble figure, not at all
ecstatic or seraphic, but pure, strong, worn out with wise and righteous
labour, a man of thought and action, upon whose hands and feet the
stigmata of supernatural rapture are a mere absurdity. The monks are
presumably his immediate disciples, those fervent and delicate poetic
natures of whom we read in the "Fioretti di San Francesco." To represent
them Giotto has painted the likeness of the first half-dozen friars he
may have met in the streets near Santa Croce: not caricatures, nor
ideals, but portraits Giotto has attempted neither to exalt nor to
degrade them into any sort of bodily or spiritual interestingness. They
are not low nor bestial nor extremely stupid. They are in various
degrees dull, sly, routinist, prosaic, pedantic; their most noteworthy
characteristic is that they are certainly the men who are not called by
God. They are no scandal to the Church, but no honour; they are sloth,
stupidity, sensualism, and cunning not yet risen to the dignity of a
vice. They look upon the dying and the dead saint with indifference,
want of understanding, at most a gape or a bright look of stupid
miscomprehension at the stigmata: they do not even perceive that a saint
is a different being from themselves. With these frescoes of Giotto I
should wish to compare Fra Angelico's great ceremonial crucifixion in
the cloister chapel of San Marco of Florenc