Euphorion

ment of Giottesque painting. Its ideal decorative part had become impossible. Painting could no longer be a decoration of architecture, and it had not yet the means of being ornamental in itself; it was an art which did not achieve, but merely studied. Among its exercises in anatomy, modelling, perspective, and so forth, always laborious and frequently abortive, its only spontaneous, satisfactory, mature production was its portrait work, Portraits of burghers in black robes and hoods; of square-jawed youths with red caps stuck on to their fuzzy heads, of bald and wrinkled scholars and magnificoes; of thinly bearded artizans; people who stand round the preaching Baptist or crucified Saviour, look on at miracle or martyrdom, stolid, self-complacent, heedless, against their background of towered, walled, and cypressed city--of buttressed square and street; ugly but real, interesting, powerful among the grotesque agglomerations of bag-of-bones nudities, bunched and taped-up draperies and out-of-joint architecture