oblem. But for an artist not to be able to
forget all about these things as easily as a man who is playing a salmon
forgets his lunch is the devil. Giotto lacked facility in forgetting.
There are frescoes in which, failing to grasp the significance of a
form, he allows it to state a fact or suggest a situation. Giotto went
higher than Cimabue but he often aimed lower. Compare his "Virgin and
Child" in the Accademia with that of Cimabue in the same gallery, and
you will see how low his humanism could bring him. The coarse heaviness
of the forms of that woman and her baby is unthinkable in Cimabue; for
Cimabue had learnt from the Byzantines that forms should be significant
and not lifelike. Doubtless in the minds of both there was something
besides a preoccupation with formal combinations; but Giotto has allowed
that "something" to dominate his design, Cimabue has forced his design
to dominate it. There is something protestant about Giotto's picture. He
is so dreadfully obsessed by the idea that the humanity of the mother
and child is the important thing about them that he has insisted on it
to the detriment of his art. Cimabue was incapable of such commonness.
Therefore make the comparison--it is salutary and instructive; and then
go to Santa Croce or the Arena Chapel and admit that if the greatest
name in European painting is not Cezanne it is Giotto.

From the peak that is Giotto the road falls slowly but steadily. Giotto
heads a movement towards imitation and scientific picture-making. A
genius such as his was bound to be the cause of a movement; it need not
have been the cause of such a movement. But the spirit of an age is
stronger than the echoes of tradition, sound they never so sweetly. And
the spirit of that age, as every extension lecturer knows, moved towards
Truth and Nature, away from supernatural ecstasies. There is a moment at
which the spirit begins to crave for Truth and Nature, for naturalism
and verisimilitude; in the history of art it is known as the early
decadence. Nevertheless, on naturalism and materialism a constant war is
waged by one or two great souls athirst for pure aesthetic rapture; and
this war, strangely enough, is invariably described by the extension
lecturer as a fight for Truth and Nature. Never doubt it, in a hundred
years or less they will be telling their pupils that in an age of
extreme artificiality arose two men, Cezanne and Gaugin, who, by
simplicity and sincerity, led back the