It is wholly beyond my power to convey to my readers any idea of the exceeding loveliness of this work, and no description could, I think, give more than a faint shadow of its beauty. Descriptions of pictures are stupid things at the best, and when the attempt is made to describe a work whose beauty consists less in any hard tangible perfection of form and colour, than in a delicate purity of feeling and an intense belief in the subject treated of, when we have to catalogue as beauties, the expressions of a choir of angels, and the raptures of the surrounding saints, words seem totally inadequate to the task.
Perhaps some faint idea of the picture may be gained by likening it to the _Paradise_ of Fra Angelico, which hangs in the Uffizi Gallery, and which is probably familiar to most of my readers, if only through the medium of the innumerable copies which have been made of the figures of the playing and singing angels which surround its frame. Fancy these Angelico figures enlarged slightly and made human, instead of angelic; fancy them arranged in rows, one above the other, the first row kneeling, and the second standing behind them, while further in the background, tier above tier, rise the heads of prophets and martyrs almost to the top of the golden background. Put two pictures of this sort on each side of a central one of _Christ and the Virgin_, lower Fra Angelico's key of colour just a little, till his pinks, blues, and yellows have shades of neutral colour toning them down, let the types of the saints and angels be rather heavier in the jaw, and broader in the face than his, and then you have the bones, so to speak, of Giotto's _Coronation_.
More than this I cannot tell you of the beauty of this picture, and it were useless to dwell upon the tender gravity of the singing angels, the devotion of the listening saints, the exquisite balance of the groups, and the pure brightness of the colouring. In a picture the whole of whose effect depends upon such subtle combination of faith and skill as does this _Coronation_, it is worse than useless to attempt to catalogue its merits as if for an auctioneer's programme. It is best to say, simply, that in a devotional age a great painter put forth his whole strength, to embody his faith in the loveliest design he could conceive, and that the result was worthy of him.