in colour and design; the compositions, especially the first three, fitted with admirable art into the cramped spaces of the vaulting, the subjects, no doubt in the main dictated to the artist by his Franciscan employers, treated in no cold or mechanical spirit but with a full measure of vital humanity and original feeling. Had the career and influence of St Francis had no other of their vast and far-reaching effects in the world than that of inspiring these noble works of art, they would still have been entitled to no small gratitude from mankind. Other works at Assisi which most modern critics, but not all, attribute to Giotto himself are three miracles of St Francis and portions of a group of frescoes illustrating the history of Mary Magdalene, both in the Lower Church; and again, in one of the transepts of the same Lower Church, a series of ten frescoes of the Life of the Virgin and Christ, concluding with the Crucifixion. It is to be remarked as to this transept series that several of the frescoes present not only the same subjects, but with a certain degree of variation the same compositions, as are found in the master’s great series executed in the Arena chapel at Padua in the fullness of his powers about 1306; and that the versions in the Assisi transept show a relatively greater degree of technical accomplishment than the Paduan versions, with a more attractive charm and more abundance of accessory ornament, but a proportionately less degree of that simple grandeur in composition and direct strength of human motive which are the special notes of Giotto’s style. Therefore a minority of critics refuse to accept the modern attribution of this transept series to Giotto himself, and see in it later work by an accomplished pupil softening and refining upon his master’s original creations at Padua. Others, insisting that these unquestionably beautiful works must be by the hand of Giotto and none but Giotto, maintain that in comparison with the Paduan examples they illustrate a gradual progress, which can be traced in other of his extant works, from the relatively ornate and soft to the austerely grand and simple. This argument is enforced by comparison with early work of the master’s at Rome as to the date of which we have positive evidence. In 1298 Giotto completed for Cardinal Stefaneschi for the price of 2200 gold ducats a mosaic of Christ saving St Peter from the waves (the celebrated “Navicella”); this is still to be seen, but in a completely restored and transformed state, in the vestibule of St Peter’s. For the same patron he executed, probably just before the “Navicella,” an elaborate ciborium or altar-piece for the high altar of St Peter’s, for which he received 800 ducats. It represents on the principal face a colossal Christ enthroned with adoring angels beside him and a kneeling donor at his feet, and the martyrdoms of St Peter and St Paul on separate panels to right and left; on the reverse is St Peter attended by St George and other saints, receiving from the donor a model of his gift, with stately full-length figures of two apostles to right and two to left, besides various accessory scenes and figures in the predellas and the margins. The separated parts of this altar-piece are still to be seen, in a quite genuine though somewhat tarnished condition, in the sacristy of St Peter’s. A third work by the master at Rome is a repainted fragment at the Lateran of a fresco of Pope Boniface VIII. proclaiming the jubilee of 1300. The “Navicella” and the Lateran fragment are too much ruined to argue from; but the ciborium panels, it is contended, combine with the aspects of majesty and strength a quality of ornate charm and suavity such as is remarked in the transept frescoes of Assisi. The sequence proposed for these several works is accordingly, first the St Peter’s ciborium, next the allegories in the vaulting of the Lower Church, next the three frescoes of St Francis’ miracles in the north transept, next the St Francis series in the Upper Church; and last, perhaps after an interval and with the help of pupils, the scenes from the life of Mary Magdalene in her chapel in the Lower Church. This involves a complete reversal of the prevailing view, which regards the unequal and sometimes clumsy compositions of this St Francis series as the earliest independent work of the master. It must be admitted that there is something paradoxical in the idea of a progress from the manner of the Lower Church transept series of the life of Christ to the much ruder manner of the Upper Church series of St Francis.
A kindred obscurity and little less conflict of opinion await the inquirer at almost all stages of Giotto’s career. In 1841 there were partially recovered from the whitewash that had overlain them a series of frescoes executed in the chapel of the Magdalene, in the Bargello or Palace of the Podestà at Florence, to celebrate (as was supposed) a pacification between the Black and White parties in the state effected by the Cardinal d’Acquasparta as delegate of the pope in 1302. In them are depicted a series of Bible scenes, besides great compositions of Hell and Paradise, and in the Paradise are introduced portraits of Dante, Brunetto Latini and Corso Donato. These recovered fragments, freely “restored” as soon as they were disclosed, were acclaimed as the work of Giotto and long held in especial regard for the sake of the portrait of Dante. Latterly it has been shown that if Giotto ever executed them at all, which is doubtful, it must have been at a later date than the supposed pacification, and that they must have suffered grievous injury in the fire which destroyed a great part of the building in 1332, and been afterwards repainted by some well-trained follower of the school. To about 1302 or 1303 would belong, if there is truth in it, the familiar story of Giotto’s O. Pope Benedict XI., the successor of Boniface VIII., sent, as the tale runs, a messenger to bring him proofs of the painter’s powers. Giotto would give no other sample of his talent than an O drawn with a free sweep of the brush from the elbow; but the pope was satisfied and engaged him at a great salary to go and adorn with frescoes the papal residence at Avignon. Benedict, however, dying at this time (1305), nothing came of this commission; and the remains of Italian 14th-century frescoes still to be seen at Avignon are now recognized as the work, not, as was long supposed, of Giotto, but of the Sienese Simone Martini and his school.
At this point in Giotto’s life we come to the greatest by far of his undestroyed and undisputed enterprises, and one which can with some certainty be dated. This is the series of frescoes with which he decorated the entire internal walls of the chapel built at Padua in honour of the Virgin of the Annunciation by a rich citizen of the town, Enrico Scrovegni, perhaps in order to atone for the sins of his father, a notorious usurer whom Dante places in the seventh circle of hell. The building is on the site of an ancient amphitheatre, and is therefore generally called the chapel of the Arena. Since it is recorded that Dante was Giotto’s guest at Padua, and since we know that it was in 1306 that the poet came from Bologna to that city, we may conclude that to the same year, 1306, belongs the beginning of Giotto’s great undertaking in the Arena chapel. The scheme includes a Saviour in Glory over the altar, a Last Judgment, full of various and impressive incident, occupying the whole of the entrance wall, with a series of subjects from the Old and New Testament and the apocryphal Life of Christ painted in three tiers on either side wall, and lowest of all a fourth tier with emblematic Virtues and Vices in monochrome; the Virtues being on the side of the chapel next the incidents of redemption in the entrance fresco of the Last Judgment, the Vices on the side next the incidents of perdition. A not improbable tradition asserts that Giotto was helped by Dante in the choice and disposition of the subjects. The frescoes, though not free from injury and retouching, are upon the whole in good condition, and nowhere else can the highest powers of the Italian mind and hand at the beginning of the 14th century be so well studied as here. At the close of the middle ages we find Giotto laying the foundation upon which all the progress of the Renaissance was afterwards securely based. In his day the knowledge possessed by painters of the human frame and its structure rested only upon general observation and not upon detailed or scientific study; while to facts other than those of humanity their observation had never been closely directed. Of linear perspective they possessed but elementary and empirical ideas, and their endeavours to express aerial perspective and deal with the problems of light and shade were rare and partial. As far as painting could possibly be carried under these conditions, it was carried by Giotto. In its choice of
