ues themselves, notably the Gaddi
with Giotto, that we bring home to ourselves, for instance, that Giotto
did not, at least in his finest work at Florence, attempt to model his
frescoes in colour. Now the excessive ugliness of the Gaddi frescoes at
St. Croce is largely due to the effort to make form and boss depend, as
in nature, upon colour. Giotto, in the neighbouring Peruzzi and Bardi
chapels, is quite satisfied with outlining the face and draperies in
dark paint, and laying on the colour, in itself beautiful, as a child
will lay it on to a print or outline drawing, filling up the lines, but
not creating them. I give this as a solitary instance of one of the
first and most important steps towards pictorial realisation which the
great imaginative theme-inventors left to their successors. As a fact,
the items at which the fifteenth century had to work are too many to
enumerate; in many cases each man or group of men took up one particular
item, as perspective, modelling, anatomy, colour, movement, and their
several subdivisions, usually with the result of painful and grotesque
insistency and onesidedness, from the dreadful bag of bones anatomies
of Castagno and Pollaiolo, down to the humbler, but equally necessary,
architectural studies of Francesco di Giorgio. Add to this the necessity
of uniting the various attainments of such specialists, of taming down
these often grotesque monomaniacs, of making all these studies of drawing,
anatomy, colour, modelling, perspective, &c., into a picture. If that
picture was lacking in individual poetic conception; if those studies
were often intolerably silly and wrong-headed from the intellectual
point of view; if the old themes were not only worn threadbare, but
actually maltreated, what wonder? The themes were there, thank Heaven!
no one need bother about them; and no one did. Moreover, as I have
already pointed out, no one could have added anything, save in the
personal sentiment of the heads, the hands, the tilt of the figure,
or the quality of the form. Everything which depends upon dramatic
conception, which is not a question of form or sentiment, tended merely
to suffer a steady deterioration. Thus, nearly two hundred years after
Giotto, Ghirlandaio could find nothing better for his frescoes in
St. Trinita than the arrangement of Giotto's St. Francis, with the
difference that he omitted all the more delicate dramatic distinctions.
I have already alluded to the poetic conceptio