Compare his “Virgin and Child” in the Accademia with that of Cimabue in the same gallery, and you will see how low his humanism could bring him.  The coarse heaviness of the forms of that woman and her baby is unthinkable in Cimabue; for Cimabue had learnt from the Byzantines that forms should be significant and not lifelike.  Doubtless in the minds of both there was something besides a preoccupation with formal combinations; but Giotto has allowed that “something” to dominate his design, Cimabue has forced his design to dominate it.  There is something protestant about Giotto’s picture.  He is so dreadfully obsessed by the idea that the humanity of the mother and child is the important thing about them that he has insisted on it to the detriment of his art.  Cimabue was incapable of such commonness.  Therefore make the comparison—­it is salutary and instructive; and then go to Santa Croce or the Arena Chapel and admit that if the greatest name in European painting is not Cezanne it is Giotto.

From the peak that is Giotto the road falls slowly but steadily.  Giotto heads a movement towards imitation and scientific picture-making.  A genius such as his was bound to be the cause of a movement; it need not have been the cause of such a movement.  But the spirit of an age is stronger than the echoes of tradition, sound they never so sweetly.  And the spirit of that age, as every extension lecturer knows, moved towards Truth and Nature, away from supernatural ecstasies.  There is a moment at which the spirit begins to crave for Truth and Nature, for naturalism and verisimilitude; in the history of art it is known as the early decadence.  Nevertheless, on naturalism and materialism a constant war is waged by one or two great souls athirst for pure aesthetic rapture; and this war, strangely enough, is invariably described by the extension lecturer as a fight for Truth and Nature.  Never doubt it, in a hundred years or less they will be telling their pupils that in an age of extreme artificiality arose two men, Cezanne and Gaugin, who, by simplicity and sincerity, led back the world to the haunts of Truth and Nature.  Strangest of all, some part of what they say will be right.

The new movement broke up the great Byzantine tradition,[15] and left the body of art a victim to the onslaught of that strange, new disease, the Classical Renaissance.  The tract that lies between Giotto and Lionardo is the beginning of the end; but it is not the end.  Painting came to maturity late, and died hard; and the art of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—­especially the Tuscan schools—­is not a mere historical link:  it is an important movement, or rather two.  The great Sienese names, Ugolino, Ambrogio Lorenzetti,[16] and Simone Martini, belong to the old world as much as to the new; but the movement that produced Masaccio, Masolino, Castagno, Donatello, Piero della Francesca, and Fra Angelico is a reaction from the Giottesque tradition of the fourteenth century, and an extremely vital movement.  Often, it seems, the stir and excitement provoked by the ultimately disastrous scientific discoveries were a cause of good art.  It was the disinterested adoration of perspective, I believe, that enabled Uccello and the Paduan Mantegna to apprehend form passionately.  The artist must have something to get into a passion about.