[61] See Lower Church of Assisi, Chapter X.
[62] See Chapter on the Lower Church of Assisi, p. 111.
[63] Almost the only artist who ever thoroughly vanquished the difficulty of representing the Last Supper, without stiffness of arrangement, was Tintoretto in his great picture in the Scuola San Rocco. The celebrated Leonardo fresco at Milan of this subject suffers in a measure from the same difficulty as Giotto's work, though in a less degree.
"There is in truth a holy purity, an innocent _naïveté_, a child-like grace and simplicity, a freshness, a fearlessness, a yearning after all things truthful, lovely, and of good report, in the productions of this early time which invest them with a charm peculiar in its kind, and which few even of the most perfect works of the maturer era can boast of; and hence the risk and danger (which I warn you of at the outset) of becoming too passionately attached to them, of losing the power of discrimination, of admiring and imitating their defects as well as their beauties, of running into affectation in seeking after simplicity, and into exaggeration in our efforts to be in earnest; in a word of forgetting that in art, as in human nature, it is the balance, harmony and co-equal development, of sense, intellect, and spirit, which constitutes perfection."--LORD LINDSAY'S _Christian Art_.
I feel my inability to convey to my readers any adequate idea of the general style of Giotto's painting, and this not so much because it is a complicated one or difficult to understand, as because of its very simplicity. A few points may be mentioned in which it differed from that of his predecessors in Italy, from the pictures of the Renaissance period, and lastly from those of our own time; but when all is said, the peculiar beauty of the colouring, the simplicity and purity of the feeling, the strength and directness of the painter's aim, and the unstudied grace of his compositions will remain to baffle any description that can be given.
First let me note that previous to the time of Giotto (since the decay at least of Greek art) colour in painting meant almost exclusively the arrangement of gorgeous hues on a golden background. The tints used being little, if at all, gradated, but laid on more in the manner of a mosaic than a modern picture. Derived, as were the traditions of painting, from manuscripts of Mount Athos and mosaics of Byzantium, they were almost wholly confined to the composition of pure colours in pleasing juxtaposition, and these colours were almost invariably full and deep. It may, perhaps, make my meaning clearer if I take an antithetical example from the art of the present day. Everybody knows the characteristics of French landscape painting, a beautiful tone of grey and black, and perhaps a few other tertiary tints, and no form or colour whatever, depending entirely on the gradation for its beauty. Well, before Giotto there was no such thing as tone, save in pure colours; and gradation of colour was practically unknown. The colours used were dark and rich, purples and crimsons and deep blues, and here and there orange and green and heavy blue-blacks. These, laid upon a gold ground, more or less ornamented with chased designs, formed the chief portion of the pictorial art of the centuries preceding Giotto. Looking into one of these pictures was like looking into a decaying fire, where amidst masses of dark shade there still burnt gloomily here and there, patches of glowing cinders and bright flame. Hung in the dim recess of a chapel or an oratory, lighted by the faint glimmer of the silver lamps, these works of Christian art may well have harmonised with the dark ages of superstition which gave them life, but they were essentially unsuitable for having any real effect upon men's minds, apart from their religious uses. They had no connection with the real life of the world, full of varying emotions and conflicting passions; they had no affinity with the times when the hardbound earth cracked at the close of winter, and the sun shone once more in a blue sky, and all men's "pulses throbbed together with the fulness of the spring."