the painter strove to excite in others would kindle in himself, and yearn after something more than the cold immemorial language. By degrees the hard, flat lineaments of the countenance would begin to quicken themselves; its long ungraceful outline would be rounded into fulness and less rigid expression; the tall, straight, meagre form would swell out into something like movement, the stiff, fettered extremities separate into the attitude of life; the drapery would become less like the folds which swathe a mummy; the mummy would begin to stir with life. It was impossible but that the Saviour should relax his harsh, stern lineaments; that the child should not become more child-like; the Virgin-Mother waken into maternal tenderness." This effort after emancipation would first take place in those smaller

and rules of their art, were received and domiciliated in the Western Monasteries, and that in those Monasteries were chiefly preserved the traditions of the older Italian Art; that at no time was the commercial or political connexion of Constantinople and the West quite broken off, and under the Othos the two Courts were cemented by marriage; that all the examples of the period are to be sought in the rigid Mosaic, in miniatures, ivories, illuminations there must have been so much intermingling of the two streams, that such discrimination must at least be conjectural.-Compare Rio, on what he calls Romano-Christian, independent of Byzantine Art, pp. 32 et seqq. Rumohr, Italienische Forschungen, and Kugler. Lord Lindsay is a strong Byzantine; and see in Kugler, p. 77; but Kugler will hardly allow Byzantine Art credit for the original conception or execution of the better designs.

u Durandus, in his Rationale, i. c. 3, would confine the representation of the Saviour in Churches to three attitudes, either on his throne of glory, on the cross of shame, or in the lap of his Mother. He adds another, as teacher of the world, with the Book in his hand.-See Schnaase, iv. 387, for the various postures (ii. p. 136) of the Child in his Mother's arms. Schnaase, Geschichte der Bildende Kunst, says that about the middle of the fifth century the paintings of the Virgin Mary became more common (one has been discovered, which is asserted to be of an earlier period, but we have only the authority of enthusiastic admiration and polemic zeal for its age) in the Catacombs. The great Mosaic in S. Apollinare Nuovo is of the first quarter of the sixth century. Her image, as has been said, floated over the fleet of the Emperor Heraclius I.

works, the miniatures, the illuminations of manuscripts.* On these the artist could not but work, as has been said, more at his ease; on the whole, in them he would address less numerous perhaps, but more intelligent spectators; he would be less in dread of disturbing popular superstition: and so Taste, the parent and the child of art, would struggle into being. Thus imperceptibly, thus in various quarters, these better qualities cease to be the secret indulgences, the life-long labours of the emblazoner of manuscripts, the illuminator of missals. In the higher branches of the art, the names of artists gradually begin to transpire, to obtain respect and fame; the sure sign that art is beginning, that mere technical traditionary working at images for popular worship is drawing to its close. Already the names of Guido of Sienna, Giunto of Pisa, and of Cimabue, resound through Christendom. Poetry hails the birth and the youth of her sister art.

Such, according to the best authorities, appears to have been the state of painting from the iconoclastic controversy throughout the darker ages. Faintly and hesitatingly at the commencement of the twelfth century, more boldly and vigorously towards its close, and

The exquisite grace of the ivory carvings from Constantinople, which show so high and pure a conception for art, as contrasted with the harsh glaring paintings, is perfectly compatible with these views. The ivories were the works of more refined artists for a more refined class. The paintings were the idols of the vulgar—a hard, cruel, sensual vulgar; the ivories, as it were, talismans of the hardly less superstitious, but more opulent, and polished; of those who kept up, some the love of

letters, some more cultivated tastes. Even the illuminations were the quiet works of the gentler and better and more civilised Monks: their love and their study of the Holy Books was the testimony and the means of their superior refinement.

"Mir selbst aber ist es während vieljähriger Nachforschung durchaus nicht gelungen, irgend ein Beispiel des Wiederaufstrebens und Fortschreitens der Italienischen Kunstübung auszufinden, dessen Alter den Anbeginn des

born 1276,

during the thirteenth and half the fourteenth, Italian
painting rose by degrees, threw off with Giotto the last
trammels of Byzantinism which had still clung around
Cimabue; and at least strove after that exquisite har-
mony
of nature and of art, which had still great progress
to make before it reached its consummation. Turn from
the vast, no doubt majestic Redeemer of Cimabue, which
broods, with its attendant figures of the Virgin and St.
John, over the high altar at Pisa, to the free creations
of Giotto at Florence or Padua. Giotto was Giotto,
the great deliverer. Invention is no sooner died 1336.
free than it expatiates in unbounded variety. Nothing
more moves our wonder than the indefatigable activity,
the unexhausted fertility of Giotto: he is adorning Italy
from the Alps to the Bay of Naples; even crossing the
Alps to Avignon. His works either exist or have existed.
at Avignon, Milan, Verona, Padua, Ferrara, Urbino,
Ravenna, Rimini, Lucca, Florence, Assisi, Rome, Gaeta,
Naples. Bishops, religious orders, republics, princes
and potentates, kings, popes, demand his services, and
do him honour. He raises at once the most beautiful
tower in architecture-that of Florence-and paints the
Chapel of the Arena at Padua, and the Church at Assisi.
Giotto was no monk, but, in its better sense, a man of
the world. Profoundly religious in expression, in cha-
racter, in aim; yet religious not merely as embodying
all the imagery of the mediaval faith, but as prophetic,
at least, if not presentient of a wider Catholicism." Be-

sides the Scriptural subjects, in which he did not entirely depart from the Byzantine or earlier arrangement, and all the more famous Legends, he opened a new world of real and of allegorical beings. The poetry of St. Francis had impersonated everything; not merely, therefore, did the life of St. Francis offer new and picturesque subjects, but the impersonations, Chastity, Obedience, Poverty, as in the hymns of St. Francis they had taken being, assumed form from Giotto. Religious led to civil allegory. Giotto painted the commonwealth of Florence. Allegory in itself is far too unobjective for art: it needs perpetual interpretation, which art cannot give; but it was a sign of the new world opening, or rather boldly thrown open, to painting by Giotto. The whole Scripture, the whole of Legend (not the old permitted forms and scenes alone), the life of the Virgin, of the Saints, of the founders of Orders, even the invisible worlds which Dante had revealed in poetry, now expanded in art. Dante, perhaps, must await Orcagna, not indeed actually to embody, but to illustrate his transmundane worlds. Italy herself hailed, with all her more powerful voices-her poets, novelists, historiansthe new epoch of art in Giotto. Dante declares that he has dethroned Cimabue. "The vulgar," writes Petrarch, "cannot understand the surpassing beauty of Giotto's Virgin, before which the masters stand in astonishment." "Giotto," says Boccaccio, "imitates nature to perfect

in the character of Giotto as drawn by Lord Lindsay (ii. p. 268). The three first paragraphs appear to me most striking and just. Lord Lindsay divides his life into four periods. I. His youth in Florence and Rome. II. About A.D. 1306 in Lombardy, the Arena

Chapel at Padua. III. Assisi. IV. Longer residence in Florence, North of Italy, Avignon, Naples, p. 165.--See also Mr. Ruskin's Memoir. For Giotto's remarkable Poem against voluntary poverty, see Rumohr, i. c. 9.

illusion;" Villani describes him as transcending all former artists in the truth of nature.b

During the latter half of the thirteenth, and throughout the fourteenth century, the whole of Italy, the churches, the monasteries, the cloisters, many of the civil buildings, were covered with paintings aspiring after, and approximating to the highest art. Sienna,

then in the height of her glory and prosperity, took the lead; Pisa beheld her Campo Santo peopled with the wonderful creations of Orcagna. Painting aspired to her Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso: Painting will strive to have her Dante.

Orders.

This outburst was simultaneous with, it might seem to originate in, the wide dissemination, the ubiquitous activity, and the strong religious passion felt, Mendicant propagated, kept alive in its utmost intensity by the Mendicant Orders. Strange it might appear that the Arts, the highest luxuries, if we may so speak, of religion, should be fostered, cultivated, cherished, distributed throughout Italy, and even beyond the Alps, by those who professed to reduce Christianity to more than its primitive simplicity, its nakedness of all adornment, its poverty; whose mission it was to consort with the most rude and vulgar; beggars who aspired to rank below the coarsest mendicancy; according to whose rule there could be no property, hardly a fixed residence. Strange! that these should become the most munificent patrons of art, the most consummate artists; that their cloistered palaces should be the most sumptuous in architecture, and the most richly decorated by sculpture

b

"Credette Cimabue nella pittura

Purg. xi. 94.

cujus pulcritudinem ignorantes nec inTener lo campo, ed or' ha Giotto il grido." telligunt, magistri autem artis stupent."-Quoted by Vasari. Decameron, Giorn. vi. Nov. 5. Villani, 11, 12.

"Mitto tabulam meam beatæ Virginis, operis Joeti pictoris egregii in