In the first place, Giotto never finished highly. He was not, indeed,
a loose or sketchy painter, but he was by no means a delicate one. His
lines, as the story of the circle would lead us to expect, are always
firm, but they are never fine. Even in his smallest tempera pictures
the touch is bold and somewhat heavy: in his fresco work the handling
is much broader than that of contemporary painters, corresponding
somewhat to the character of many of the figures, representing plain,
masculine kind of people, and never reaching any thing like the ideal
refinement of the conceptions even of Benozzo Gozzoli, far less of
Angelico or Francia. For this reason, the character of his painting is
better expressed by bold wood-engravings than in general it is likely
to be by any other means.

Again, he was a very noble colourist; and in his peculiar feeling for
breadth of hue resembled Titian more than any other of the Florentine
school. That is to say, had he been born two centuries later, when the
art of painting was fully known, I believe he would have treated his
subjects much more like Titian than like Raphael; in fact, the
frescoes of Titian in the chapel beside the church of St. Antonio at
Padua, are, in all technical qualities, and in many of their
conceptions, almost exactly what I believe Giotto would have done, had
he lived in Titian's time. As it was, he of course never attained
either richness or truth of colour; but in serene brilliancy he is not
easily rivalled; invariably massing his hues in large fields, limiting
them firmly, and then filling them with subtle gradation. He had the
Venetian fondness for bars and stripes, not unfrequently casting
barred colours obliquely across the draperies of an upright figure,
from side to side (as very notably in the dress of one of the
musicians who are playing to the dancing of Herodias' daughter, in one