RIGHT AND LEFT 25 



will find, if you watcli yourself closely, that in examining a 

 landscape, or the view from a liill-top, your eye naturally 

 ranges from left to right ; and that you begin your survey, 

 as you would begin reading a page of print, from the left- 

 hand corner. Apparently, the now almost instinctive act 

 of reading (for Dogberry was right after all, for the civilised 

 infant) has accustomed our eyes to this particular move- 

 ment, and has made it especially natural when we are try- 

 ing to * read ' or take in at a glance the meaning of any 

 complex and varied total. 



In the matter of pictures, I notice, the correlation has 

 even gone a step farther. Not only do we usually take in 

 the episodes of a painting from left to right, but the 

 painter definitely and deliberately intends us so to take them 

 in. For wherever two or throe distinct episodes in 

 succession are represented on a single plane in the same 

 picture — as happens often in early art — they are invariably 

 represented in the precise order of the words on a written 

 or printed page, beginning at the upper left-hand corner, 

 and ending at the lower right-hand angle. I first noticed 

 this curious extension of the common principle in the 

 mediaeval frescoes of the Campo Santo at Pisa ; and I have 

 since verified it by observations on many other pictures 

 elsewhere, both ancient and modern. The Campo Santo, 

 however, forms an exceptionally good museum of such 

 story-telling frescoes by various painters, as almost every 

 picture consists of several successive episodes. The 

 famous Benozzo Gozzoli, for example, of Noah's Vineyard 

 represents on a single plane all the stages in that earliest 

 drama of intoxication, from the first act of gathering the 

 grapes on the top left, to the scandalised lady, the vcrgognosa 

 di Pisa, who covers her face with her hands in shocked 

 horror at the patriarch's disgrace in the lower right-hand 

 corner. 



