Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1906 (Heft 13))

For the latter, in the days of Pericles, intent upon making the human
figure the vehicle of expression of the perfect union of the physical and
mental, had since that time declined. From impersonal types it had passed
to personal and individual representations; from a union of matter and
spirit to preoccupation with the physical; until, as morals became grosser,
even the idea of physical perfection was lost sight of in the rendering of
what was meritricious and licentious. Christianity, in its opposition to the
immoral conditions, could not help opposing the art which gave expression
to them. But it needed the service of art for the pictorial exposition of its
own truths and ideals, and found the kind of art it needed in that of the
Orient, which had reached Byzantium, the gateway of the East and West.
Its characteristics were primarily decorative: the opposite to realistic;
the conventionalizing of form and the subordination of form to color. In
such a treatment of form the Church had found a welcome antithesis to the
gross realism of decadent Greek art and a convenient medium for conveying
the symbolic teaching of Christianity. Thus the Oriental idea, which was
rather to extract from form its essential qualities and to use them for the
abstract purpose of producing a beautiful decoration, was diverted by the
influence of the Church into the direction of conscious symbolism. Types
of figure, of facial expression and gesture, arrangements even of composition,
became fixed by the Church, and reproduced, one from another. Alliance
with outside nature was rigidly excluded, and by perpetual inbreeding art
became devitalized. It was the reinfusing of this moribund thing with
vitality derived from nature-study that became the business of the Renais-
sance, and Giotto was the earliest of the independent students. Yet the
impression that his work arouses is due, not so much to what he derived
from nature or to any realistic skill, notwithstanding that at heart he was a
naturalist, as to the renewed force which he gave to the old Oriental ideal.
With him it again becomes a living thing: a noble form of decoration, with
large dignity in the balanced arrangement of the full and empty spaces,
grand silhouettes of form, simple flatness of mass and lightness and purity
of color. Finally he restored to the figures the significance of gesture; and
painted a moving story in which the actors, by gesture and facial expression,
played a real part. Yet, once again, it is not through these latter qualities
in which he was still a tyro, but through the abstract decorative ones,
reinforced by his study of nature and made thereby a living expression of
Giotto himself, that his work makes so strong an impression upon the
modern mind
In it we are face to face with what, so far, is the noblest use of the
Oriental principles of painting made by a European. But Giotto was an
indifferent draughtsman, knew nothing of modeling, had little instinct for
perspective, and, while he had the Oriental feeling for values in color, had
none for light and atmosphere. He was deficient in the qualities that constitute
the chief merit of modern painting. He used to the best of his power an
inheritance which subsequent painters did their best to disown, until it
passed entirely out of European consideration.

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