[Page heading: FOLLOWERS OF GIOTTO]

For a hundred years after Giotto there appeared in Florence no painter
equally endowed with dominion over the significant. His immediate
followers so little understood the essence of his power that some
thought it resided in his massive types, others in the swiftness of his
line, and still others in his light colour, and it never occurred to any
of them that the massive form without its material significance, its
tactile values, is a shapeless sack, that the line which is not
functional is mere calligraphy, and that light colour by itself can at
the best spot a surface prettily. The better of them felt their
inferiority, but knew no remedy, and all worked busily, copying and
distorting Giotto, until they and the public were heartily tired. A
change at all costs became necessary, and it was very simple when it
came. "Why grope about for the significant, when the obvious is at hand?
Let me paint the obvious; the obvious always pleases," said some clever
innovator. So he painted the obvious,--pretty clothes, pretty faces, and
trivial action, with the results foreseen: he pleased then, and he
pleases still. Crowds still flock to the Spanish chapel in S. Maria
Novella to celebrate the triumph of the obvious, and non-significant.
Pretty faces, pretty colour, pretty clothes, and trivial action! Is
there a single figure in the fresco representing the "Triumph of St.
Thomas" which incarnates the idea it symbolises, which, without its
labelling instrument, would convey any meaning whatever? One pretty
woman holds a globe and sword, and I am required to feel the majesty of
empire; another has painted over her pretty clothes a bow and arrow,
which are supposed to rouse me to a sense of the terrors of war; a third
has an organ on what was intended to be her knee, and the sight of this
instrument must suffice to put me into the ecstasies of heavenly music;