with love songs.  On the threshold of that treacherous summer, as it were, this lonely church stands on guard.  Within, she is beautiful, in the old manner, splendid with antique pillars caught about now with iron; but it is perhaps the frescoes, that have faded on the walls till they are scarcely more than the shadows of a thousand forgotten sunsets, that you will care for most.  They are the work of Giunta Pisano, or if, indeed, they are not his they are of his school,—­a school already decadent, splendid with the beauty that has looked on death and can never be quite sane again.  No one, I think, can ever deny the beauty of Giunta’s work; it is full of a strange subtilty that is ready to deny life over and over again.  He is concerned not with life, but chiefly with religion, and with certain bitter yet altogether lovely colours which evoke for him, and for us too, if we will lend ourselves to their influence, all the misery and pessimism of the end of the Middle Age, its restlessness and ennui, that find consolation only in the memory of the grotesque frailty of the body which one day Jesus will raise up.  All the anarchy and discontent of our own time seems to me to be expressed in such work as this, in which ugliness, as we might say, has as much right as beauty.  It is, I think, the mistake of much popular criticism in our time to assert that these “primitive” painters were beginners, and could not achieve what they wished.  They were not beginners, rather they were the most subtle artists of a convention—­and all art is a convention—­that was about to die.  If one can see their work aright, it is beautiful; but it has lost touch with life, or is a mere satirical comment upon it, that Giotto, with his simplicity, his eager delight in natural things and in man, will supersede and banish.  In him, Europe seems to shake off the art and fatality of the East, under whose shadow Christianity had grown up, to be altogether transformed and humanised by Rome, when she at the head really of humanism and art should once more give to the world the thoughts and life of another people full of joy and temperance—­things so hard for the Christian to understand.  And it is really with such a painter as Giunta Pisano that Christian art pure and simple comes to end.  Some divinity altogether different has touched those who came after:  Giotto, who is enamoured of life which the Christian must deny; Angelico, whose world is full of a music that is about to become pagan; Botticelli, who has mingled the tears of Mary with the salt of the sea, and has seen a new star in heaven, and proclaimed the birth not of the Nazarene, but the Cyprian.

But it is not such thoughts as these you will find in Livorno, one of the busiest towns in Italy, full of modern business life; material in the manner of the Latin people that by reason of some inherent purity of heart never becomes sordid in our fashion.