no means easy to express exactly the error, and no more than the error, of his original.  In most cases modern copyists try to modify or hide the weaknesses of the old art,—­by which procedure they very often wholly lose its spirit, and only half redeem its defects; the results being, of course, at once false as representations, and intrinsically valueless.  And just as it requires great courage and skill in an interpreter to speak out honestly all the rough and rude words of the first speaker, and to translate deliberately and resolutely, in the face of attentive men, the expressions of his weakness or impatience; so it requires at once the utmost courage and skill in a copyist to trace faithfully the failures of an imperfect master, in the front of modern criticism, and against the inborn instincts of his own hand and eye.  And let him do the best he can, he will still find that the grace and life of his original are continually flying off like a vapour, while all the faults he has so diligently copied sit rigidly staring him in the face,—­a terrible caput mortuum.  It is very necessary that this should be well understood by the members of the Arundel Society, when they hear their engravings severely criticised.  It is easy to produce an agreeable engraving by graceful infidelities; but the entire endeavour of the draughtsmen employed by this society has been to obtain accurately the character of the original:  and he who never proposes to himself to rise above the work he is copying, must most assuredly often fall beneath it.  Such fall is the inherent and inevitable penalty on all absolute copyism; and wherever the copy is made with sincerity, the fall must be endured with patience.  It will never be an utter or a degrading fall; that is reserved for those who, like vulgar translators, wilfully quit the hand of their master, and have no strength of their own.

Lastly.  It is especially to be noticed that these works of Giotto, in common with all others of the period, are independent of all the inferior sources of pictorial interest.  They never show the slightest attempt at imitative realisation:  they are simple suggestions of ideas, claiming no regard except for the inherent value of the thoughts.  There is no filling of the landscape with variety of scenery, architecture, or incident, as in the works of Benozzo Gozzoli or Perugino; no wealth of jewellery and gold spent on the dresses of the figures, as in the delicate labours of Angelico or Gentile da Fabriano.  The background is never more than a few gloomy masses of rock, with a tree or two, and perhaps a fountain; the architecture is merely what is necessary to explain the scene; the dresses are painted sternly on the “heroic” principle of Sir Joshua Reynolds—­that drapery is to be “drapery, and nothing more,”—­there is no silk, nor velvet, nor distinguishable material of any kind:  the whole power of the picture is rested on the three simple essentials of painting—­pure Colour, noble Form, noble Thought.