outside the stable, and always in one corner of the picture.
Again, whatever slight difference there may be in the expression and
gesture of the apostles at the Last Supper, they are always seated on
one side only of a table facing the spectator, with Judas alone on a
stool on the opposite side. And although there are two themes of the
Entombment of Christ, one where the body is stretched on the ground, the
other where it is being carried to the sepulchre, the action is always
out of doors, and never, as might sometimes be expected, gives us the
actual burial in the vault. These examples are more than sufficient. Yet
I feel that any description in words is inadequate to convey the extreme
monotony of all these representations, because the monotony is not merely
one of sentiment by selection of the dramatic moment, but of the visible
composition of the paintings, of the outlines of the groups and the
balancing of them. A monotony so complete that any one of us almost
knows what to expect, in all save technical matters and the choice of
models, on being told that in such a place there is an old Italian
fresco, or panel, or canvas, representing some principal episode of
Gospel history.

The explanation of this fidelity to one theme of representation in an
art which was the very furthest removed from any hieratic prescriptions,
in an art which was perpetually growing--and growing more human and
secular--must be sought for, I think, in no peculiarities of spiritual
condition or national imagination, but in two facts concerning the merely
technical development of painting, and the results thereof. These two
facts are briefly: that at a given moment--namely, the end of the
thirteenth century and the beginning of the fourteenth--there existed
just enough power of imitating nature to admit of the simple indication
of a dramatic situation, without further realisation of detail; and
that at this moment, consequently, there originated such pictorial
indications of the chief dramatic situations as concerned the Christian
world. And secondly, that from then and until well into the sixteenth
century, the whole attention of artists was engrossed in changing the
powers of indication into powers of absolute representation, developing
completely the drawing, anatomy, perspective, colour, light and shade,
and handling, which Giotto and his contemporaries had possessed only in
a most rudimentary condition, and which had sufficed for the cre