it is scarcely necessary to point out with what processional gravity, with what hieratic dignity, with what sacramental intentness he endows it; the eloquence of the greatest critics has here found a darling subject.  But let us look a moment at certain of his symbols in the Arena at Padua, at the “Inconstancy,” the “Injustice,” the “Avarice,” for instance.  “What are the significant traits,” he seems to have asked himself, “in the appearance and action of a person under the exclusive domination of one of these vices?  Let me paint the person with these traits, and I shall have a figure that perforce must call up the vice in question.”  So he paints “Inconstancy” as a woman with a blank face, her arms held out aimlessly, her torso falling backwards, her feet on the side of a wheel.  It makes one giddy to look at her.  “Injustice,” is a powerfully built man in the vigour of his years dressed in the costume of a judge, with his left hand clenching the hilt of his sword, and his clawed right hand grasping a double hooked lance.  His cruel eye is sternly on the watch, and his attitude is one of alert readiness to spring in all his giant force upon his prey.  He sits enthroned on a rock, overtowering the tall waving trees, and below him his underlings are stripping and murdering a wayfarer.  “Avarice” is a horned hag with ears like trumpets.  A snake issuing from her mouth curls back and bites her forehead.  Her left hand clutches her money-bag, as she moves forward stealthily, her right hand ready to shut down on whatever it can grasp.  No need to label them:  as long as these vices exist, for so long has Giotto extracted and presented their visible significance.

[Page heading:  GIOTTO]

Still another exemplification of his sense for the significant is furnished by his treatment of action and movement.  The grouping, the gestures never fail to be just such as will most rapidly convey the meaning.  So with the significant line, the significant light and shade, the significant look up or down, and the significant gesture, with means technically of the simplest, and, be it remembered, with no knowledge of anatomy, Giotto conveys a complete sense of motion such as we get in his Paduan frescoes of the “Resurrection of the Blessed,” of the “Ascension of our Lord,” of the God the Father in the “Baptism,” or the angel in “Zacharias’ Dream.”

This, then, is Giotto’s claim to everlasting appreciation as an artist:  that his thorough-going sense for the significant in the visible world enabled him so to represent things that we realise his representations more quickly and more completely than we should realise the things themselves, thus giving us that confirmation of our sense of capacity which is so great a source of pleasure.

III.

[Page heading:  FOLLOWERS OF GIOTTO]