Like the child, the Giottesque painter wished to show a situation or express a story, and for this purpose the absolute realization of objects was unnecessary. Giottesque art is not incorrect art, it is generalized art; it is an art of mere outline. The Giottesques could draw with great accuracy the hand, the form of the fingers, the bend of the limb, they could give to perfection its whole gesture and movement, they could produce a correct and spirited outline, but within this correct outline marked off in dark paint there is but a vague, uniform mass of pale colour; the body of the hand is missing, and there remains only its ghost, visible indeed, but unsubstantial, without weight or warmth, eluding the grasp. The difference between this spectre hand of the Giottesques, and the sinewy, muscular hand which can shake and crush of Masaccio and Signorelli, or the soft hand with throbbing pulse and warm pressure of Perugino and Bellini,--this difference is typical of the difference between the art of the fourteenth century and the art of the fifteenth century; the first suggests, the second realizes; the one gives impalpable outlines, the other gives tangible bodies; the Giottesque cares for the figure only, inasmuch as it displays an action, he reduces it to a semblance, a phantom, to the mere exponent of an idea; the man of the Renaissance cares for the figure, inasmuch as it is a living organism, he gives it substance and weight, he makes it stand out as an animate reality. But despite its early triumphs, the Giottesque style, by its inherent nature, forbade any progress; it reached its limits at once, and the followers of Giotto look almost as if they were his predecessors, for the simple reason that, being unable to advance, they were forced to retrograde. The limited amount of artistic realization required to present to the mind of the spectator a situation or an allegory had been obtained by Giotto himself, and bequeathed by him to his followers, who, finding it more than sufficient for their purposes, and having no incentive to further acquisition in the love of form and reality for their own sake, worked on with their master's materials, composing and recomposing, but adding nothing of their own. Giotto had observed Nature with passionate interest, because, although its representation was only a means to an end, it was a means which required to be mastered, and as such became in itself a sort of secondary aim; but the followers of Giotto merely utilized his observations of Nature, and in so doing gradually conventionalized and debased these second-hand observations. Giotto's forms are wilfully incomplete, because they aim at mere suggestion, but they are not conventional: they are diagrams, not symbols, and thence it is that Giotto seems nearer to the Renaissance than do his latest followers, not excepting even Orcagna. Painting, which had made the most prodigious strides from Giunta to Cimabue, and from Cimabue to Giotto, had got