There is no ruby colour on anybody's nose:
there are no black shadows under anybody's chin; there are no
Rembrandtesque gradations of gloom, or glitterings of sword-hilt and
armour.
Is this ignorance, think you, in Giotto, and pure artlessness? He was
now a man in middle life, having passed all his days in painting, and
professedly, and almost contentiously, painting things as he saw them.
Do you suppose he never saw fire cast firelight?--and he the friend of
Dante! who of all poets is the most subtle in his sense of every kind
of effect of light--though he has been thought by the public to know
that of fire only. Again and again, his ghosts wonder that there is no
shadow cast by Dante's body; and is the poet's friend, _because_ a
painter, likely, therefore, not to have known that mortal substance
casts shadow, and terrestrial flame, light? Nay, the passage in the
'Purgatorio' where the shadows from the morning sunshine make the
flames redder, reaches the accuracy of Newtonian science; and does
Giotto, think you, all the while, see nothing of the sort?
The fact was, he saw light so intensely that he never for an instant
thought of painting it. He knew that to paint the sun was as impossible
as to stop it; and he was no trickster, trying to find out ways of
seeming to do what he did not. I can paint a rose,--yes; and I will. I
can't paint a red-hot coal; and I won't try to, nor seem to. This was
just as natural and certain a process of thinking with _him_, as
the honesty of it, and true science, were impossible to the false
painters of the sixteenth century.
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