[Footnote *200: I do not understand what this means. The "Byzantine period" was not the starting point of anything, but rather a decadence; and how can anything be the starting point of something "stationary"? Christian art comes to us in the first centuries as absolutely dependent on Roman pagan work. It did not contrive a new force of expression, but very happily used the old. For the history of art is continuous, and in Byzantine work we see merely a decadence, not something new. The Renaissance in painting is based on Roman art of pagan times in the work of the Cosmati and the Cavallini, from whom in all probability Giotto learned all he could learn. It is the same with sculpture. Niccolò Pisano is a pupil of the ancients, a native of Apulia. The northern influence came later.] [Footnote *201: Yes? In Duccio's work, for instance. But the hand of man cannot achieve anything finer than the work of these early men--than the Annunciation of Simone Martini, for instance. That they preferred a decorative convention to a realistic does not accuse them of incompetence. Dennistoun would have said that the Japanese could not draw. It was not that "the hand failed to realise the aims of the mind," but that the mind saw things from a standpoint different from ours. It is easy to talk of the "truths of nature." What are the truths of nature? It is a question of appearance, of a manner of seeing, of an attitude of mind, of soul, toward nature and toward itself. Simone Martini was as great an artist, in the true sense of the word, as Raphael, in his own convention. Raphael's convention is still ours, but we are already passing out of it. Is it not so?] [Footnote *202: Yes; an age of realism. It is as though one preferred a Roman work of the best period to a Greek work of the fifth century B.C. What came was the tyranny of the body, without the old excuse, for we no longer believed in the body; we no longer believed in anything but unreality. It is not that the earlier men were "right" and the later "wrong," but that both are equally right and wrong where right and wrong do not count since only beauty may decide. Dennistoun speaks as he does because he could not possibly have spoken otherwise. He is wrong not so much in what he asserts as in what he denies.] [Footnote *203: Here, again, I do not understand. How can an artist's ideas exceed his means of expression?--I do not say his power of expression. What means of expression did Dante lack that Milton enjoyed, or Sophocles? In what was Donatello poorer than Michelangelo or Niccolò Pisano than either? Giotto had the same means of expression as Apelles or Leonardo, for the work he undertook, and before a new means of expression was invented, he could not have conceived the use of it.] [Footnote *204: Their aim was perhaps rather the realistic imitation of life than the expression of it.] [Footnote *205: They never sufficed.]