ation of
just such pictorial themes as they had invented, and no more.

Let me explain myself further. The artists of the fourteenth century,
with the exception of Giotto himself--to whose premature excellence none
of his contemporaries and disciples ever attained--give us, by means of
pictorial representation, just about the same as could be given to us
by the conventional symbolism of writing. In describing a Giottesque
fresco, or panel, we are not stopped by the difficulty of rendering
visible effects in words, because the visible effects that meet us are
in reality so many words; so that, to describe the picture, it almost
suffices to narrate the story, no arrangements of different planes and
of light and shade, no peculiarities of form, foreshortening, colour,
or texture requiring to be seen in order to be fully understood. The
artists of the fifteenth century--for the Giottesques do little more
than carry, without developing them, the themes of Giotto into various
parts of Italy--work at adding to the art exactly those qualities which
belong exclusively to it, and which baffle the mere written word: they
acquire the means, slowly and laboriously, of showing these events no
longer merely to the mind, but also to the eye; they place these people
in real space, in real relations of distance and light, they give them
a real body which can stand and move, made of real flesh and blood and
bones, and covered with real clothes; they turn these abstractions once
more into realities like the realities of nature whence they had been
abstracted. But the work of the fifteenth century does not go beyond
filling up the programme indicated by the Giottesques; and it is only
after the men of the sixteenth century have been enabled to completely
realise all that the men of the fourteenth century had indicated, that
art, with Michelangelo, Tintoret, and still more with the great painters
of Spain and Flanders, proceeds to encounter problems of foreshortening,
of light and shade, of atmospheric effect, that could never have been
imagined by the contemporaries of Giotto, nor even by the contemporaries
of Ghirlandaio and the Bellini. Hence, throughout the fifteenth century,
while there is a steady development of the artistic means required to
realise those narrative themes which the Giottesques had invented, there
is no introduction of any new artistic means unnecessary for this result,
but which, like the foreshortenings of Michelangel