en the artist and spectator
that the one shall misrepresent nature sixty times over, and the other
believe the misrepresentation sixty times over, but it is an agreement
that certain means and limitations being prescribed, only that _kind of
truth_ is to be expected which is consistent with those means. For
instance, if Sir Joshua Reynolds had been talking to a friend about the
character of a face, and there had been nothing in the room but a deal
table and an inkbottle--and no pens--Sir Joshua would have dipped his
finger in the ink, and painted a portrait on the table with his finger,
and a noble portrait too; certainly not delicate in outline, nor
representing any of the qualities of the face dependent on rich outline,
but getting as much of the face as in that manner was attainable. That
is noble conventionalism, and Egyptian work on granite, or illuminator's
work in glass, is all conventional in the same sense, but not
conventionally false. The two noblest and truest carved lions I have
ever seen, are the two granite ones in the Egyptian room of the British
Museum, and yet in them, the lions' manes and beards are represented by
rings of solid rock, as smooth as a mirror!

[Footnote 31: Having no memoranda of my own, taken from Giotto's
landscape, I had this tree copied from an engraving; but I imagine the
rude termination of the stems to be a misrepresentation. Fig. 21 is
accurately copied from a MS., certainly executed between 1250 and 1270,
and is more truly characteristic of the early manner.]

85. There are indeed one or two other conditions of noble
conventionalism, notice more fully in the Addenda (Sec.Sec. 68-71); but you
will find that they always consist in _stopping short_ of nature, not in
falsifying nature; and thus in Giotto's foliage, he _stops short_ of the
quantity of leaves on the real tree, but he gives you the form of the
leaves represented with perfect truth. His foreground also is nearly
always occupied by flowers and herbage, carefully and individually
painted from nature; while, although thus simple in plan, the
arrangements of line in these landscapes of course show the influence of
the master-mind, and sometimes, where the story requires it, we find the
usual formulae overleaped, and Giotto at Avignon painting the breakers of
the sea on a steep shore with great care, while Orcagna, in his Triumph
of Death, has painted a thicket of brambles mixed with teazles, in a
manner worthy of the best