By a slope, then, I mean that which lies between a great primitive
morning, when men create art because they must, and that darkest hour
when men confound imitation with art. These slopes can be subdivided
into movements. The downward course of a slope is not smooth and even,
but broken and full of accidents. Indeed the procession of art does not
so much resemble a river as a road from the mountains to the plain. That
road is a sequence of ups and downs. An up and a down together form a
movement. Sometimes the apex of one movement seems to reach as high as
the apex of the movement that preceded it, but always its base carries
us farther down the slope. Also, in the history of art the summit of one
movement seems always to spring erect from the trough of its
predecessor. The upward stroke is vertical, the downward an inclined
plane. For instance, from Duccio to Giotto is a step up, sharp and
shallow. From Giotto to Lionardo is a long and, at times, almost
imperceptible fall. Duccio is a fine decadent of that Basilian movement
which half survived the Latin conquest and came to an exquisite end
under the earlier Palaeologi. The peak of that movement rises high above
Giotto, though Duccio near its base is below him. Giotto's art is
definitely inferior to the very finest Byzantine of the eleventh and
twelfth centuries, and Giotto is the crest of a new movement destined
and doomed inevitably to sink to depths undreamed of by Duccio.

All that was spiritual in Greek civilisation was sick before the sack of
Corinth, and all that was alive in Greek art had died many years
earlier. That it had died before the death of Alexander let his tomb at
Constantinople be my witness. Before they set the last stone of the
Parthenon it was ailing: the big marbles in the British Museum are the
last significant examples of Greek art; the frieze, of course, proves
nothing, being mere artisan work. But the man who made what one may as
well call "The Theseus" and "The Ilissus," the man whom one may as well