s and sticks as body, head, and legs,
provided he and his friends can associate with them the ideas in their
minds: the youth sets himself to copy what he sees, to reproduce forms,
and effects, without any aim beyond the mere pleasure of copying; the
mature artist strives to obtain forms and effects of which he approves,
he seeks for beauty. In the life of Italian painting generations of men
who flourished at the beginning of the sixteenth century are the mature
artists; the men of the fifteenth century are the inexperienced youths;
the Giottesques are the children--children Titanic and seraph-like, but
children nevertheless, and, like all children, learning more perhaps in
their few years than can the youth of the man learn in a lifetime.

Like the child, the Giottesque painter wished to show a situation or
express a story, and for this purpose the absolute realization of
objects was unnecessary. Giottesque art is not incorrect art, it is
generalized art; it is an art of mere outline. The Giottesques could
draw with great accuracy the hand, the form of the fingers, the bend of
the limb, they could give to perfection its whole gesture and movement,
they could produce a correct and spirited outline, but within this
correct outline marked off in dark paint there is but a vague, uniform
mass of pale colour; the body of the hand is missing, and there remains
only its ghost, visible indeed, but unsubstantial, without weight or
warmth, eluding the grasp. The difference between this spectre hand of
the Giottesques, and the sinewy, muscular hand which can shake and crush
of Masaccio and Signorelli, or the soft hand with throbbing pulse and
warm pressure of Perugino and Bellini,--this difference is typical of
the difference between the art of the fourteenth century and the art of
the fifteenth century; the first suggests, the second realizes; the one
gives impalpable outlines, the other gives tangible bodies; the
Giottesque cares for the figure only, inasmuch as it displays an action,
he reduces it to a semblance, a phantom, to the mere exponent of an
idea; the man of the Renaissance cares for the figure, inasmuch as it is
a living organism, he gives it substance and weight, he makes it stand
out as an animate reality. But despite its early triumphs, the
Giottesque style, by its inherent nature, forbade any progress; it
reached its limits at once, and the followers of Giotto look almost as
if they were his predecessors, for the s