Page:Charles Moore--Development and Character of Gothic Architecture.djvu/281

Rh and a natural expression in the eager group of welcoming spirits as they press forward, wing softly crowding wing, to aid the awakening soul. No self-consciousness is there, no ostentatious gesture, no vain display of curving plume, or studied fold of garment. All the angelic attendants are absorbed in joyful ministry to the rising spirit, and each figure holds its place in a group of marvellous beauty.

In composition of lines and masses the design is equally beautiful. There is a fine system of continuous, radiating, and encompassing curves in the wings and drapery; as well as an artful sympathy of position in the bodies, and repetition of masses in the placing of the heads. It would be difficult to point, in the whole range of plastic art, to a figure of more subtle beauty than that of the angel on the left, who stoops forward to support the shoulder of the Virgin—a figure which is at the same time adroitly employed by the artist to balance, by an opposing form, the rest of the composition. As in all noblest art, it is here evident that the artist's mind was encumbered by no merely theoretic ideal of beauty. No canonical type of head, hand, foot, or general form, is exhibited. The types are natural, varied, and simple. Individual parts, when taken by themseTves7 display no fanciful or conventional character. The charm of the work depends upon fundamental qualities of design; upon a graceful relation of forms, extending from the arrangement of the broad masses down to that of the least details. So, too, it was in the older art of Greece. It is the same principle that gives to the Harpy Tomb and to the Leucothea of the Villa Albani a kind of beauty that is wanting in the art of Scopas and Praxiteles. And so it was again with the subsequent works of the early Italian designers. The polished, but conventional types of form which belong to later developments of Italian art, and which Vasari has done so much to popularise, do not appear in the arts of Italy before the time of Raphael. The types of Giotto, of Angelico, and of Massaccio, were caught directly from the familiar men and women around them; but with such materials these masters, like those of France in the twelfth century, knew how to produce designs of exalted beauty.

I do not mean to imply that imperfections of form are necessary to the best art, or that more perfect forms than