But now, unless one happens to be a painter, these famous works make us miserably desperate.

They are poor, dim ghosts of what, when Giotto or Cimabue first created them, threw a splendor along the stately aisles; so far gone towards nothingness, in our day, that scarcely a hint of design or expression can glimmer through the dusk.

Those early artists did well to paint their frescos.
Glowing on the church-walls, they might be looked upon as symbols of the living spirit that made Catholicism a true religion, and that glorified it as long as it retained a genuine life; they filled the transepts with a radiant throng of saints and angels, and threw around the high altar a faint reflection--as much as mortals could see, or bear--of a Diviner Presence.

But now that the colors are so wretchedly bedimmed,--now that blotches of plastered wall dot the frescos all over, like a mean reality thrusting itself through life's brightest illusions,--the next best artist to Cimabue or Giotto or Ghirlandaio or Pinturicchio will be he that shall reverently cover their ruined masterpieces with whitewash! Kenyon, however, being an earnest student and critic of Art, lingered long before these pathetic relics; and Donatello, in his present phase of penitence, thought no time spent amiss while he could be kneeling before an altar.

Whenever they found a cathedral, therefore, or a Gothic church, the two travellers were of one mind to enter it.