ind you of all
that is greatest in Titian; so forcibly, indeed, that for my own part,
if I had been told that a careful early fresco by Titian had been
recovered in Santa Croce, I could have believed both report and my own
eyes, more quickly than I have been able to admit that this is indeed by
Giotto. It is so great that--had its principles been understood--there
was in reality nothing more to be taught of art in Italy; nothing to be
invented afterwards except Dutch effects of light.

That there is "no effect of light" here arrived at, I beg you at once to
observe as a most important lesson. The subject is St. Francis
challenging the Soldan's Magi,--fire-worshippers--to pass with him
through the fire, which is blazing red at his feet. It is so hot that
the two Magi on the other side of the throne shield their faces. But it
is represented simply as a red mass of writhing forms of flame; and
casts no firelight whatever. There is no ruling colour on anybody's
nose; there are no black shadows under anybody's chin; there are no
Rembrandtesque gradations of gloom, or glitterings of sword-hilt and
armour.

Is this ignorance, think you, in Giotto, and pure artlessness? He was
now a man in middle life, having passed all his days in painting, and
professedly, and almost contentiously, painting things as he saw them.
Do you suppose he never saw fire cast firelight?--and he the friend of
Dante! who of all poets is the most subtle in his sense of every kind of
effect of light--though he has been thought by the public to know that
of fire only. Again and again, his ghosts wonder that there is no shadow
cast by Dante's body; and is the poet's friend _because_ a painter,
likely, therefore, not to have known that mortal substance casts shadow,
and terrestrial flame, light? Nay, the passage in the _Purgatorio_ where
the shadows from the morning sunshine make the flames redder, reaches
the accuracy of Newtonian science, and does Giotto, think you, all the
while, see nothing of the sort?

The fact was, he saw light so intensely that he never for an instant
thought of painting it. He knew that to paint the sun was as impossible
as to stop it; and he was no trickster, trying to find out ways of
seeming to do what he did not. I can paint a rose,--yes; and I will. I
can't paint a red-hot coal; and I won't try to, nor seem to. This was
just as natural and certain a process of thinking with _him_, as the
honesty of it, and true science, were