You will also please
take it on my word today--in another morning walk you shall have proof of
it--that Giotto was a pure Etruscan-Greek of the thirteenth century:
converted indeed to worship St. Francis instead of Heracles; but as far
as vase-painting goes, precisely the Etruscan he was before. This is
nothing else than a large, beautiful, coloured Etruscan vase you have
got, inverted over your heads like a diving-bell.' [Footnote: I observe
that recent criticism is engaged in proving all Etruscan vases to be of
late manufacture, in imitation of archaic Greek. And I therefore must
briefly anticipate a statement which I shall have to enforce in following
letters. Etruscan art remains in its own Italian valleys, of the Arno and
upper Tiber, in one unbroken series of work, from the seventh century
before Christ, to this hour, when the country whitewasher still scratches
his plaster in Etruscan patterns. All Florentine work of the finest
kind--Luca della Robbia's, Ghiberti's, Donatello's, Filippo Lippi's,
Botticelli's, Fra Angelico's--is absolutely pure Etruscan, merely changing
its subjects, and representing the Virgin instead of Athena, and Christ
instead of Jupiter. Every line of the Florentine chisel in the fifteenth
century is based on national principles of art which existed in the seventh
century before Christ; and Angelico, in his convent of St. Dominic, at
the foot of the hill of Fesole, is as true an Etruscan as the builder who
laid the rude stones of the wall along its crest--of which modern
civilization has used the only arch that remained for cheap building stone.
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