n of an early Marriage of
the Virgin in the Florence Academy; that essential point of the extreme
youth of Mary was never again attended to, although the rest of the
arrangement was repeated for two centuries. Similarly, no one noticed
or reproduced the delicate distinctions of action which Gaddi had put
into his two Annunciations of the Cappella Baroncelli; the shepherds
henceforth sprawled no matter how; and the scale of expression in the
vision of the Three Kings was not transferred to the more popular theme
of their visit to the stable at Bethlehem. In Giotto's Presentation at
the Temple in the Arena chapel at Padua, the little Mary is pushed up
the steps by her mother; in the Baroncelli frescoes the little girl,
ascending gravely, turns round for a minute to bless the children at
the foot of the steps. Here are two distinct dramatic conceptions, the
one more human, the other more majestic; both admirable. The fifteenth
century, nay, the fourteenth, took no account of either; the Virgin
merely went up the steps, connected by no emotion with the other
characters, a mere little doll, as she is still in the big pictures
of Titian and Tintoret, and quite subordinate to any group of richly
dressed men or barebacked women. It is difficult to imagine any miracle
quite so dull as the Raising of the King's Son in the Brancacci Chapel;
its dramatic or undramatic foolishness is surpassed only by certain
little panels of Angelico, with fiery rain and other plagues coming down
upon the silly blue and pink world of dolls.

A satisfactory study of the lack of all dramatic invention of the
painters of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is afforded by the
various representations of the Annunciation of the Virgin, one of the
favourite themes of the early Renaissance. It never seems to have
occurred to any one that the Virgin and the Archangel might be displayed
otherwise than each in one corner of the picture. Such a composition as
that of Rossetti's Ancilla Domini, where the Virgin cowers on her bed
as the angel floats in with flames round his feet; such a suggestion as
that of the unfinished lily on the embroidery frame, was reserved for
our sceptical and irreverent, but imaginative times.

The variety in these Annunciations depends, as I have remarked, not upon
a new dramatic conception, producing, as in the case of Rossetti's, a new
visible arrangement; but upon the particular kind of form preferred by
the artist, and the pa