o, and the light
and shade of Tintoret, like the still further additions to painting
represented by men like Velasquez and Rembrandt, could suggest new
treatment of the old histories and enable the well-known events to be
shown from totally new intellectual standpoints, and in totally new
artistic arrangements. If we look into the matter, we shall recognise
that the monotony of representation throughout the Renaissance can
be amply accounted for without referring to the fact, which, however,
doubtless went for something, that the men of the fifteenth century were
too much absorbed in the working out of details to feel any desire for
new pictorial versions of the stories of the Gospel, and the lives of
the Saints.

Moreover, the Giottesques--among whom I include the immediate precursors,
sculptors as well as painters, of Giotto--put into their Scripture
stories an amount of logic, of sentiment, of dramatic and psychological
observation and imagination more than sufficient to furnish out the works
of three generations of later comers. Setting aside Giotto himself, who
concentrates and diffuses the vast bulk of dramatic invention as well
as of artistic observation and skill, there is in even the small and
smallest among his followers, an extraordinary happiness of individual
invention of detail. I may quote a few instances at random. It would be
difficult to find a humbler piece of work than the so-called Tree of
the Cross, in the Florentine Academy: a thing like a huge fern, with
medallion histories in each frond, it can scarcely be considered a work
of art, and stands halfway between a picture and a genealogical tree.
Yet in some of its medallions there is a great vivacity of imaginative
rendering; for instance, the Massacre of the Innocents represented by
a single soldier, mailed and hooded, standing before Herod on a floor
strewn with children's bodies, and holding up an infant by the arm, like
a dead hare, preparing slowly to spit it on his sword; and the kiss of
Judas, the soldiers crowding behind, while the traitor kisses Christ,
seems to bind him hand and foot with his embraces, to give him up, with
that stealthy look backwards to the impatient rabble--a representation
of the scene, infinitely superior in its miserable execution to Angelico's
Ave Rabbi! with its elaborate landscape of towers and fruit trees.
Again, in a series of predella histories of the Virgin, in the same
place, also a very mediocre and anonymou