s, and not in relation to their position. The masonry
is no longer covered, but carved, rendered uneven with the cavities and
protrusions of perspective. In Mantegna's frescoes the wall becomes a
slanting theatre scene, cunningly perspectived like Palladio's Teatro
Olimpico; with Correggio, wall, masonry, everything, is dissolved, the
side or cupola of a church becomes a rent in the clouds, streaming with
light.

Not so with the Giottesque frescoes: the wall, the vault, the triumphant
masonry is always present and felt, beneath the straight, flat bands of
uniform colour; the symmetrical compartments, the pentacles, triangles,
and segments, and borders of histories, whose figures never project,
whose colours are separate as those in a mosaic. The Giottesque
frescoes, with their tiers and compartments of dark blue, their vague
figures dressed in simple ultramarines, greens, dull reds, and purples;
their geometrical borders and pearlings and dog-tooths; cover the walls,
the ribbed and arched ceilings, the pointed raftering almost like some
beautiful brown, blue, and tarnished gold leather-hangings; the figures,
outlined in dark paint, have almost the appearance of being stencilled,
or even stamped on the wall. Such is Giottesque painting: an art which
is not merely essentially decorative, but which is, moreover, what
painting and sculpture remained throughout the Gothic period,
subservient to the decorative effect of another art; an art in which all
is subordinated to architectural effect, in which form, colour, figures,
houses, the most dramatic scenes of the most awful of all dramas,
everything is turned into a kind of colossal and sublime wall-paper; and
such an art as this would lead us to expect but little realism, little
deliberate and slavish imitation of the existing. Yet wherever there is
life in this Gothic art (which has a horrible tendency, piously
unobserved by critics, to stagnate into blundering repetition of the
same thing), wherever there is progress, there is, in the details of
that grandiose, idealistic decoration, realism of the crudest kind.
Those Giottesque workers, who were not content with a kind of Gothic
Byzantinism; those who really handed over something vital to their
successors of the fifteenth century, while repeating the old
idealistical decorations; were studying with extraordinary crudeness of
realism. Everything that was not conventional ornament or type was
portrait; and portrait in which