t beautiful, but well dressed
and moving well; the exquisiteness of a song sung delicately by an
insufficient or defective voice: a fascination almost spiritual, since
it seems to promise a sensitiveness to beauty, a careful avoidance of
ugliness, a desire for something more delicate, a reverse of all things
gross and accidental, a possibility of perfection.

This imagination of pleasant detail and accessory, which delights us
by the intimacy into which we are brought with the artist's innermost
conception, develops into what, among the masters of the fifteenth
century, I should call the imagination of the fairy tale. A small number
of scriptural and legendary stories lend themselves quite particularly
to the development of such beautiful accessory, which soon becomes the
paramount interest, and vests the whole with a totally new character: a
romantic, childish charm, the charm of the improbable taken for granted,
of the freedom to invent whatever one would like to see but cannot, the
charm of the fairy story. From this unconscious altering of the value of
certain Scripture tales, arises a romantic treatment which is naturally
applied to all other stories, legends of saints, biographical accounts,
Decameronian tales (Mr. Leyland once possessed some Botticellian
illustrations of the tale of Nastagio degli Onesti, the hero of Dryden's
"Theodore and Honoria," a sort of pendant to the Griseldis attributed to
Pinturicchio), and mythological episodes: a new kind of invention, based
upon a desire to please, and as different from the invention of the
Giottesques as the Arabian Nights are different from Homer.

I have said that it begins with the unconscious altering of the values
of certain scriptural stories, owing to the preponderance of detail over
accessory. The chief example of this is the Adoration of the Magi. In
the paintings of the Giottesques, and in the paintings of the serious,
or duller, masters of the fifteenth century--Ghirlandaio, Rosselli,
Filippino, those for whom the fairy tale could exist no more than for
Michelangelo or Andrea del Sarto--the chief interest in this episode is
the Holy Family, the miraculous Babe whom these great folk came so far to
see. The fourteenth century made very short work of the kings, allowing
them a minimum of splendour; and those of the fifteenth century, who
cared only for artistic improvement, copied slavishly, giving the kings
their retinue only as they might have introduced an