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TEE ARUNDEL SO-CIETT.

A second six of the wood-plates after Giotto's frescoes in the Arena Chapel at Padua have been issued by the Arundel Society, accompanied by the promised pamphlet from Mr. Ruskin on these works and their author. The series forms beyond compare the most important art-pub- lication of the day. It brings us into contact with as nobly endowed a man as ever devoted himself to art—one, too, whose works England does not afford the opportunity of studying in the original ; and asserts the supremacy of mind over both the description of cleverness and the ac-

quired knowledge which go to make up what, is called good execution. Giotto knew perfectly and in the loftiest sense what awork of art ought to be. No one requisite faculty seems to have been wanting to him,— neither the mind to conceive nor the heart to turn towards the most sacred and august subjects, nor the eye, for beauty-, nor the sympathy for manifold life. All this, moreover, is embodied without-alloy. His works are peculiarly valuable and adapted for standards of a system on ac- count of there being nothing bad about them. He is never weak, or fri- volous, or coarse, or extravagant. Against highest attainment in essen-

tials, downright deficiency in some points of practice may be set by those who see fit to do so ; mistaken intention never. No painter challenges more loudly the decision of the paramount question, Shall the great mina or the accomplished hand constitute the real artist ?

The present issue comprises the following subjects. The first of the entire series, " Joachim's Offering rejected by the High Priest because he is childless" ; the figure ofJoachim an admirable study for action and ex-

pression. "Joachim retires to the Sheepfold" ; interesting, among other things, for the true and varied though unlearned action of the sheep— noted, perhaps, from the old days when Giotto was a shepherd-boy. "The

Presentation of the Virgin Mary." " The Espousal of the Virgin." Here Lord Lindsay, quoted by Mr. Ruskin, says that the figure behind St.

Joseph is one of-the disappointed suitors stepping forward to strike him. To us the action appears dubious, and the explanation still more so. If the figure is a suitor at all, his expression looks more sarcastic than ex.

asperated; but it seems questionable why Giotto should not have given him the rod, which would at once identify him as a suitor; and possibly he is only Joseph's bridesman, as we should call it now. " The Annun- ciation" is divided into two subjects, the Angel Gabriel and the Virgin.

We do not perceive that the Virgin's face is "disappointing," as Mr. Ruskin calls it ; but she is invested with a dignity rather matronly than maiden, which makes the Angel look somewhat juvenile and petite.

It is noticeable in the series, that the same type of countenance is not always preserved in each personage, while, on the other hand, a com- mon type characterizes several, and some of the old men's heads appear to be as much conventional as straight from nature. Of the faithful spirit and broad manner in which the subjects have been rendered by the copying designer and the engravers, we have only to repeat our former commendation.

Mr. Ruskin's pamphlet* does not attempt to supply a life of Giotto, and is modest in its professions generally. It is, however, like every- thing the writer does about art, vital with passages of description and illustration, as also, and above all, with "the heart of the matter "—ap- preciation of Giotto. The Arena Chapel was built in or about 1303, by order of Enrico Scrovegno. a noble Paduan, whose father figures among the usurers in Dante's ; and Giotto was summoned to decorate it about 1306, when his age was probably something like thirty years. Among the various anecdotes of the painter, Mr. Ruskin enters into the rationale of one with almost curious particularity—that of his having simply drawn a perfect circle, proverbial as the " 0 of Giotto," when called upon for a proof of his skill in a competition for painting in St. Peter's. Was this covert satire, asks Mr. Ruskin, "or does the founder of religious paint- ing mean to tell us that he holds his own power to consist merely in firmness of hand secured by long practice ? " There seems to be a third

explanation—that Giotto's fame_ as an inventor equal or superior to all others was current over Italy, and that the only thing in question was his manual power. On the master's character generally Mr. Ruskin ob- serves—

" I think it unnecessary to repeat here any other of the anecdotes com- monly related of Giotto, as, separately taken they are quite valueless. Yet much may be gathered from their general toile. It is remarkable that they are, almost without exception, records of good-humoured jests, involving or illustrating some point of practical good sense: and by comparing this gene- ral colour of the reputation of Giotto with the actual character of his designs, there cannot remain the smallest doubt that his mind was one of the most healthy, kind, and active, that over informed a human frame. His love of

beauty was entirely free from weakness; his love of truth untinged by severity; his industry constant, without impatience ; his workmanship accu-

rate, without formalism ; his temper sefene, and vet playful; his imagine- nation exhaustless, without extravagance ; and his faith firm, without su- perstition. I do not know, in the annals of art, such another example of happy, practical, unerring, and benevolent power."

Mr. Ruskin points out, as characteristic of Giotto, that he never finished highly ; that he was a very noble colourist, "exceedingly faulty, of course," in drawing, and independent of all the inferior sources of pictorial interest, relying solely upon "pure colour, noble form, noble thought." His innovations, beginning as he did "with a perfect respect for his Byzantine models," are summed up as, first, greater lightness of colour, second, greater breadth of masses, and third, close imitation of nature.

'In this one principle [close imitation of nature] lay Giotto's great strength, and the entire secret of the revolution he effected. It was not by greater learning, not by the discovery of new theories of art, not by greater taste, nor by ideal' principles of selection, that he became the head of the progressive schools of Italy. It was simply by being interested in what was going on around him, by substituting the gestures of living men for conventional attitudes, and portraits of living men for conventional faces, and incidents of every-day life for conventional circumstances, that he became great, and the master of the peat. Giotto was to his con- temporaries precisely what Millais is to his contemporaries,—a daring na- turalist, in defiance of tradition, idealism, and formalism. The Giottesque movement in the fourteenth and Pre-Raphaelite movement in the nineteenth centuries are precisely similar in bearing and meaning : both being the pro- tests of vitality against mortality, of spirit against letter, and of truth against tradition : and both, which is the more singular, literally links in one un- broken chain of feeling ; for exactly as Niccola Pisano and Giotto were helped by the classical sculptures discovered in their time, the Pre-Raphaelites have been helped by the works of Niccola and Giotto at Pisa and Florence ; and thus the fiery cross of truth has been delivered from spirit to spirit, over the dust of intervening generations."

The pamphlet closes with brief notices of such of the frescoes as have been already published by the Arundel Society, and extracts from the apocryphal Gospels from which the incidents are taken. As this is termed 'Part I.," the remaining subjects will doubtless be treated in a similar manner.

• Giotto and his Works in Padua: Going an explanatory notice of the series of Wood-cuts executed for the Arundel Society after the Frescoes in the Arena Chapel. By John Ruskin. Part I. Printed for the Society.