With Gothic architecture the descent began.  Gothic architecture is juggling in stone and glass.  It is the convoluted road that ends in a bridecake or a cucumber frame.  A Gothic cathedral is a tour de force; it is also a melodrama.  Enter, and you will be impressed by the incredible skill of the constructor; perhaps you will be impressed by a sense of dim mystery and might; you will not be moved by pure form.  You may groan “A-a-h” and collapse:  you will not be strung to austere ecstasy.  Walk round it, and take your pleasure in subtleties of the builder’s craft, quaint corners, gargoyles, and flying buttresses, but do not expect the thrill that answers the perception of sheer rightness of form.  In architecture the new spirit first came to birth; in architecture first it dies.

We find the spirit alive at the very end of the twelfth century in Romanesque sculpture and in stained glass:  we can see it at Chartres and at Bourges.  At Bourges there is an indication of the way things are going in the fact that in an unworthy building we find glass and some fragments of sculpture worthy of Chartres, and not unworthy of any age or place.  Cimabue and Duccio are the last great exponents in the West of the greater tradition—­the tradition that held the essential everything and the accidental nothing.  For with Duccio, at any rate, the sense of form was as much traditional as vital:  and the great Cimabue is fin de siecle.  They say that Cimabue died in 1302; Duccio about fifteen years later.  With Giotto (born 1276), a greater artist than either, we turn a corner as sharp as that which had been turned a hundred years earlier with the invention of Gothic architecture in France.  For Giotto could be intentionally second-rate.  He was capable of sacrificing form to drama and anecdote.  He never left the essential out, but he sometimes knocked its corners off.  He was always more interested in art than in St. Francis, but he did not always remember that St. Francis has nothing whatever to do with art.  In theory that is right enough; the Byzantines had believed that they were more interested in dogmatic theology than in form, and almost every great artist has had some notion of the sort.  Indeed, it seems that there is nothing so dangerous for an artist as consciously to care about nothing but art.  For an artist to believe that his art is concerned with religion or politics or morals or psychology or scientific truth is well; it keeps him alive and passionate and vigorous:  it keeps him up out of sentimental aestheticism:  it keeps to hand a suitable artistic problem.  But for an artist not to be able to forget all about these things as easily as a man who is playing a salmon forgets his lunch is the devil.  Giotto lacked facility in forgetting.  There are frescoes in which, failing to grasp the significance of a form, he allows it to state a fact or suggest a situation.  Giotto went higher than Cimabue but he often aimed lower.