Page:Val d'Arno (Ruskin, 1890).djvu/183

Rh afterwards match for two hundred years. Nay, you can scarcely match it then—for grace of line, only in the richest flamboyant of France.

177. Now this fact would set you, if you looked at art from its aesthetic side only, at once to find out what German artists had taught Giovanni Pisano. There were Germans teaching him,—some teaching him many things; and the intense conceit of the modern German artist imagines them to have taught him all things.

But he learnt his luxuriance, and Giotto his severity, in another school. The quality in both is Greek, and altogether moral. The grace and the redundance of Giovanni are the first strong manifestation of those characters in the Italian mind which culminate in the Madonnas of Luini and the arabesques of Raphael. The severity of Giotto belongs to him, on the contrary, not only as one of the strongest practical men who ever lived on this solid earth, but as the purest and firmest reformer of the discipline of the Christian Church of whose writings any remains exist.

178. Of whose writings, I say; and you look up, as doubtful that he has left any. Hieroglyphics, then, let me say instead; or, more