A whole class of writers upon Christian art is like the prior in Browning's poem, who says to Fra Lippo Lippi:—
"Your business is to paint the souls of men.
"Give us no more of body than shows soul;"
but these writers, while appreciating the effect of certain qualities in Giotto and his followers, wholly misunderstood their intention. He did not leave his figures half modeled for the praise of God or for the sake of expressing soul. We might just as well say that it was for the sake of spiritual aspiration that his foreshortened feet stood on the points of their toes, or that his snub profiles were intended to suggest meekness....
It is an important fact in painting, especially in decorative painting, that in measure as an artist refines his work he may with advantage suppress one detail after another of its modeling. But this knowing what to leave out is one of the most subtle, one of the last kinds of knowledge that come to the painter. This system of elimination argues upon his part the possession of a high degree of technical accomplishment. When he can draw and paint every detail of his subject, then, and not till then, he can suppress judiciously. Great painters have thus instinctively commenced by making minutely detailed studies. Now, Giotto never made one such in his life; he did not know how. He was a beginner possessing magnificent natural gifts, still a beginner, a breaker of new paths. He drew and painted the human body exactly as well as he knew how to, leaving out elaborate modeling simply because he was unable to accomplish it. One lifetime would not have sufficed this pioneer of art for the achievement of all that he did and for the compassing of a skilful technique as well....
If we pass on to those qualities of a painter which were particular to Giotto, not merely as a muralist but as an individual man, we find that like other masters of his time he cannot yet subtly differentiate expression, but that, unlike others, his expression is more intense, more forceful, more varied. His heads have long narrow eyes, short snub noses, firm mouths, square jaws, and powerful chins; he divides them, not individually, but typically, into adolescent, adult, and aged heads. His feet are unsteady; his hands not yet understood; his draperies are for their time wonderful—simply, even grandly arranged, and if they do not express the body, at least they suggest it and echo its movements.
His animals, too small and often faulty enough, are sometimes excellent; and, like every other medieval artist, if he wanted to put in a sheep or a horse or a camel, he put it in without any misgivings as to knowledge of the subject. Neither did this architect entertain any scruples regarding architecture when he chose to paint it, and, like his fellows, he set Greek temple of Assisi, Romanesque convent, and Gothic church, all upon the same jackstraw-like legs,—that is to say, columns which made toys of all buildings, big or little. First and last and best, we see him as a miracle of compositional and dramatic capacity, and with this last quality he took his world by storm.
Men before him had tried to tell stories, but had told them hesitatingly, even uncouthly; Giotto spoke clearly and to the point. This shepherd boy, whose mountain pastures could be seen from her Campanile, taught grammar to the halting art of Florence. He taught the muse of the fourteenth century to wear the buskin, so that his followers, however confused their composition might be, were at least clear in the telling of their story. Indeed he was such a dramaturgist that men for a full hundred years forgot, in the fascination of the story told, to ask that the puppets should be any more shapely, that they should look one whit more like men and women.
HARRY QUILTER — 'GIOTTO'
The main characteristics of Giotto's style are, first, a lighter, purer tone of color than had been in use before the time of Cimabue, and a greater variety and purity of tint than had been attained by that master; second, the introduction into his compositions of a certain amount of natural detail which had been before totally neglected, and the substitution of the portraits of actual men and women for the imaginary beings that had formerly filled up the backgrounds of the Byzantine pictures; third, the power of illustrating the real meaning of his subject, not merely suggesting it as had formerly been the case; and fourth, his unrivaled dramatic power.
This dramatic power shows itself in almost every work that Giotto has left us, and even survives in the achievements of his pupils. His pictures are not scenes alone, they are situations. Besides their appropriateness of gesture and oneness of feeling, they possess the great characteristic of dramatic art in making the scene live before you, subduing its various incidents into one strain of meaning, yet keeping each incident complete and individual, as well as making it help the main purpose. A minor point in which the same quality shows is in the amount of emotion which this painter is capable of expressing by a single gesture—an amount so great that it occasionally runs some danger of lapsing into caricature, as is especially plain in such pictures as 'The Entombment' in the Arena Chapel. But in all his scenes Giotto has succeeded, not only in choosing the most appropriate figures for illustrating his meaning, but in seizing the very moment which is most significant.