tist. The
Church had more use for his fingers than for his creative ability. It
was his business to transcribe what had gone before. This he did, but
not without signs here and there of uneasiness and discontent with the
pattern. There was an inclination toward something truer to nature,
but, as yet, no great realization of it. The study of nature came in
very slowly, and painting was not positive in statement until the time
of Giotto and Lorenzetti.

[Illustration: FIG. 22.--GIOTTO, FLIGHT INTO EGYPT. ARENA CHAP.
PADUA.]

The best paintings during the Gothic period were executed upon the
walls of the churches in fresco. The prepared color was laid on wet
plaster, and allowed to soak in. The small altar and panel pictures
were painted in distemper, the gold ground and many Byzantine features
being retained by most of the painters, though discarded by some few.

CHANGES IN THE TYPE, ETC.: The advance of Italian art in the Gothic
age was an advance through the development of the imposed Byzantine
pattern. It was not a revolt or a starting out anew on a wholly
original path. When people began to stir intellectually the artists
found that the old Byzantine model did not look like nature. They
began, not by rejecting it, but by improving it, giving it slight
movements here and there, turning the head, throwing out a hand, or
shifting the folds of drapery. The Eastern type was still seen in the
long pathetic face, oblique eyes, green flesh tints, stiff robes, thin
fingers, and absence of feet; but the painters now began to modify and
enliven it. More realistic Italian faces were introduced,
architectural and landscape backgrounds encroached upon the Byzantine
gold grounds, even portraiture was taken up.

This looks very much like realism, but we must not lay too much stress
upon it. The painters were taking notes of natural appearances. It
showed in features like the hands, feet, and drapery; but the anatomy
of the body had not yet been studied, and there is no reason to
believe their study of the face was more than casual, nor their
portraits more than records from memory.

No one painter began this movement. The whole artistic region of Italy
was at that time ready for the advance. That all the painters moved at
about the same pace, and continued to move at that pace down to the
fifteenth century, that they all based themselves upon Byzantine
teaching, and that they all had a similar style of working is proved
by the