s work, there is extraordinary
charm in the conception of the respective positions of Mary and Joseph
at their wedding: he is quite old and grey; she young, unformed, almost
a child, and she has to stand on two steps to be on his level, raising
her head with a beautiful, childlike earnestness, quite unlike the
conventional bridal timidity of other painters. Leaving these unknown
mediocrities, I would refer to the dramatic value (besides the great
pictorial beauty) of an Entombment by Giottino, in the corridor of the
Uffizi: the Virgin does not faint, or has recovered (thus no longer
diverting the attention from the dead Saviour to herself, as elsewhere),
and surrounds the head of her son with her arms; the rest of the figures
restrain themselves before her, and wink with strange blinking efforts
to keep back their tears. Still more would I speak of two small frescoes
in the Baroncelli Chapel at Santa Croce, which are as admirable in
poetical conception as they are unfortunately poor in artistic execution.
One of them represents the Annunciation to the Shepherds: they are lying
in a grey, hilly country, wrapped in grey mists, their flock below asleep,
but the dog vigilant, sniffing the supernatural. One is hard asleep; the
other awakes suddenly, and has turned over and looks up screwing his
eyes at the angel, who comes in a pale yellow winter sunrise cloud, in
the cold, grey mist veined with yellow. The chilliness of the mist at
dawn, the wonder of the vision, are felt with infinite charm. In the
other fresco the three kings are in a rocky place, and to them appears,
not the angel, but the little child Christ, half-swaddled, swimming
in orange clouds on a deep blue sky. The eldest king is standing, and
points to the vision with surprise and awe; the middle-aged one shields
his eyes coolly to see; while the youngest, a delicate lad, has already
fallen on his knees, and is praying with both hands crossed on his breast.
For dramatic, poetic invention, these frescoes can be surpassed, poor as
is their execution, only by Giotto's St. John ascending slowly from the
open grave, floating upwards, with outstretched arms and illumined face,
to where a cloud of prophets, with Christ at their head, enwraps him in
the deep blue sky.

These pictorial themes elaborated by the painters of the school of
Giotto were not merely as good, in a way, as any pictorial themes could
be: simple, straightforward, often very grand, so that the immedi