THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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examples of naturalism are only such when compared with the Byzantines and also with Cimabue; they are none within the Gothic diversity of being and the hierarchy of
being beneath which the diverse, by being built in, is all the more triumphantly bowed. In this respect Giotto totally conforms to the Thomist world­picture, the equation
of valuations with levels of being, of the degree of reality with the hierarchical status. This strangely optimistic theory fills the whole conceptual ‘realism’ of the High
Middle Ages, it is also the sole premise of the ontological proof of the existence of God (God is therefore by far the most real being because he is the most universal
and most complete). Thus even Giotto's art succumbs to the ontological­hierarchical conviction: he paints robes, rocks and the like flat, almost two­dimensional, but the
reality increases towards the centre of the composition (which centre does not necessarily coincide with the middle of the picture). Giotto thus supplements the spatial
hierarchy of his objects most vividly with hierarchy of being: only this conveys to repose and gravity that particular dignity of value which stems from believed Being­
More. Even the superficiality to which the naturalistic, and also architecture is usually subordinated in Giotto, with regard to the unum necessarium: land of legend, can in
this way, by underlining an event of value, ultimately become central. The mountain outline which serves as an ornament in the ‘Flight into Egypt’, as a background to
the travelling figures also repeats their outlines and signs itself like them into eternity. But all this occurs solely in the land of legend for which sacred history has
succeeded, and instead of perspective in the Renaissance sense it exclusively contains hierarchy of successfulness and composition steering towards it. Thus in this
painting a utopia of Christianity is formed as existing, in fact as already by far the most real; corresponding to the enormous optimism of the proportionality of being and
value. This optimism has shattered, the specific utopia of Giotto's world has thoroughly turned into a mere mythology of a utopian kind. Its builtness also immediately
shattered with the end of the medieval feudal­theocracy, it even broke in internal­religious terms. Grünewald's world of Christ, the Baptist not cathedral one,presents
the Bible legend solely as explosive and the centre (resurrection in the Isenheim. altar) solely as that of the most glaring paradox. But even in his day Giotto's land of
legend lay on that narrow ridge of equilibrium which was stretched out more in heaven than on earth and which the modern age lost as much as abandoned. The
perspective of mere premonition, a precise but dawning one, which appears in the background of the Mona Lisa and even in the absorbing distant centre of the
Baroque, expresses more appropriately the