they have gone through
it all so often, they are so familiar with it, they don't look at it any
longer; they gaze about listlessly, they would yawn if they were not too
well bred for that. The others, meanwhile, the sainted pilgrims, the men
whose journey over the sharp stones and among the pricking brambles of
life's wilderness finds its final reward in this admission into the
presence of the Holiest, kneel one by one, with various expressions: one
with the stupid delight of a religious sightseer; his vanity is
satisfied, he will next draw a rosary from his pocket and get it blessed
by Christ Himself; he will recount it all to his friends at home.
Another is dull and gaping, a clown who has walked barefoot from
Valencia to Rome, and got imbecile by the way; yet another, prim and
dapper; the rest indifferent looking restlessly about them, at each
other, at their feet and hands, perhaps exchanging mute remarks about
the length of time they are kept waiting; those at the end of the
kneeling procession, St. Peter Martyr and St. Giovanni Gualberto
especially, have the bored, listless, devout look of the priestlets in
the train of a bishop. All these figures, the standing ones who
introduce and the kneeling ones who are being introduced, are the most
perfect types of various states of dull, commonplace, mediocre routinist
superstition; so many Camerlenghi on the one hand, so many Passionist or
Propagandists on the other: the first aristocratic, bland and bored; the
second, dull, listless, mumbling, chewing Latin Prayers which never
meant much to their minds, and now mean nothing; both perfectly
reverential and proper in behaviour, with no more possibility of
individual fervour of belief than of individual levity of disbelief: the
Church, as it exists in well-regulated decrepitude. And thus does the
last of the Giottesques, the painter of glorified Madonnas and dancing
angels, the saint, represent the saints admitted to behold the supreme
tragedy of the Redemption.

Thus much for the Giottesques. The Tuscans of the early Renaissance
developed up to the utmost, assisted by the goldsmiths and sculptors,
who taught them modelling and anatomy, that realistic element of
Giottesque painting. Its ideal decorative part had become impossible.
Painting could no longer be a decoration of architecture, and it had not
yet the means of being ornamental in itself; it was an art which did
not achieve, but merely studied. Among its exercises