GIOTTO AT ASSISI.--THE UPPER CHURCH.
Of all the minor disadvantages of travel which have accompanied the
substitution of the locomotive for the coach, perhaps none is so real
an evil as the very partial impression an ordinary traveller derives
from a short visit to some interesting land. When Rome and Florence,
for instance, are brought within the compass of a day's journey, the
tourist is little likely to care to break his journey for
comparatively obscure cities, much less villages, scurries past "reedy
Thrasymene" without recognition, and scarce notices the towers and
churches of Perugia, rising green and grey on the mountain side. Still
less likely is our tourist to arrest his comet-like progression at a
rough country station, some fourteen miles from the old Etruscan city,
a station where very obviously, neither guard nor porter expects him
to alight, and which he has some difficulty in identifying by the help
of a nearly illegible inscription, as Assisi. And yet there was a time
when this forgotten town played no inconsiderable part in the world's
history, and was the central seat of an Order that reckoned princes
among its followers, and practically divided with the Dominicans the
spiritual sovereignty of Europe.[64] And even now, if any very
strong-minded traveller should be able to defy the ominous silence of
Bradshaw,[65] and the neglect of Cook, and more regardful of what has
been, than what is, spend a few days in the home of poverty, he will
not regret, we think, in after years his deviation from the accustomed
routine of travel; nay, if he gain no other advantage, he will at
least have had a brief space in which to take quiet breath, ere the
red-books and the _valet de place_ are again in requisition, ere St.
Peter's becomes No. 17 in the often consulted plan, and Rome takes "at
least a week to see properly." For at Assisi there is _no hurry_, and
so strong is the spirit of the place that the most energetic tourist
quickly succumbs to it; even those who rush over here from Perugia for
a day's excursion, treading softly ere they have been a couple of
hours in the city of St. Francis. And now we will suppose that "our
uncommercial traveller" has safely escaped the clutches of the three
or four inn touts whom his arrival has roused into unwonted energy,
and consigning his bag to the least ill-favoured, has set out manfully
along the dusty road leading from the station to the town; for be it
noted that Assisi is not strong in equipages, and the solitary rough
wooden box denominated omnibus, is hardly an attractive conveyance at
first sight, though ere long the traveller begins to look upon it as
an old friend, as it is to be found during the greater part of the
day, standing about in various unexpected parts of the town, being
apparently left wherever it has taken a passenger. One further
violence we must do to the mind of the well-instructed tourist,
namely, to beg that he will not accept guidance, nor torment himself
with details, archæological or otherwise, but simply open his eyes to
all the quiet influences of past devotion and present beauty which he
will find around him. And first, he will see by the side of the road
a vast church, in the most uninteresting style of Renaissance
architecture, not unlike a small edition of St. Peter's. This is St.
Mary of the Angels, little notable, save for its size, and a small
chapel it contains, where St. Francis first assembled his few
followers. In it there is only to be seen--a spoilt fresco, by
Perugino; walls dark with age, save where, here and there, the dim
lamplight falls upon the silver offerings of penitence and
thanksgiving; and some carved doors, more curious than beautiful.
These need not delay us much from the steep ascent to the town.
Another dusty mile of road, and Assisi lies before and above us,
rising a confused mass of tiled roofs and massive walls, from the grey
depths of the olive-groves which surround it. Not only on a mountain,
but of the mountain, does the town seem to be built, the ponderous
blocks of dim red and dusty yellow stone, scarcely seeming to have
more the characteristics of houses than of the cliffs above, save
where, here and there, a square tower of church or fortification lifts
itself into clear pre-eminence of definition from the tumbled
confusion of roofs, walls, and buttresses. Another turn in the long,
winding road, and the great attraction of the few sightseers who visit
Assisi, the Convent of St. Francis--with what Bradshaw calls its
"three superb churches," which are, in fact, two--stands revealed.
Picture to yourself a long mass of building, standing upon a double
range of tall arches, and pierced with a multitude of small windows.
This is the convent building itself; beyond it, on a level with its
roof, rises the Church of St. Francis, with its square campanile. Of
the same dull-yellowish colour as the other buildings of the town,
there is little beauty in the church from this point of view, save
that of massive strength, and a certain simplicity of design which,
when carried out upon so large a scale, almost amounts to grandeur.
So, leaving the convent on our left, we enter beneath a massive
square tower the first street of the city. It is difficult to say
whence comes the sense of extreme desolation which oppresses us, not
from the absence of life certainly, for at this point there are
commonly a few of the villagers and townspeople chatting round an old
fountain, and on every side resounds the squeaking of the pigs, that
every well-to-do inhabitant of Assisi keeps tethered on the
ground-floor of his house. Nor is it that there are no signs of
commercial enterprise, for we notice the hammered brass and copper
jars and cauldrons glimmering dimly in the recesses of one of the dark
shops, and some strings of onions and other vegetables in another. Is
it something, we wonder, in the construction of the town itself, in
its rough-hewn blocks of dusty stone, its huge buttresses, its
blocked-up arches, its weather-beaten tiles, the defacement of its
ruined fountains, and the general appearance of enormous toil with
which the city must have been constructed? Or is it still more the
case, that even at the first glance we connect the appearance of the
town with the state of the superstition to which it owes its
existence; whose power changed the small Etrurian village into a
shrine of the deepest sanctity and proudest priesthood, and having
done its work for good and evil, faded gradually away, and now finds
voice only on the trembling lips of the half-dozen monks who are all
that remain at Assisi of the famous Brotherhood? For whatever reason,
the place is desolate--desolate as no place can be which has not once
been great; and as we ascend the street, the impression deepens. Few
of the houses have glass to their windows; the old arched entrances
are blocked up with rough stone, and low, square doorways supply their
place; the ground-floor of the house is commonly used as a store-room,
a stable, or a piggery. The upper windows show us nothing within that
we are accustomed to connect with ideas of domestic comfort. Even the
massive ironwork seems to partake of the general desolation, and is
coated with the grey dust of centuries. Here and there we pass a
fountain, generally situated in a small grass-grown open space, with a
couple of earthen pitchers left to fill themselves leisurely; and over
all there is still the sense of death in life, needing a vigorous
effort on our part to endure. We begin to think there was some sense
in that philistine American we met at Florence, who smiled so
scornfully at our determination to visit Assisi, and to have thoughts
of the next train to a more lively spot. However, food and wine at the
modest little hotel quickly dissipate our loneliness; our musings on
St. Francis and his monks assume a more pleasant complexion, and by
the time we find our way down the long street to the convent, we are
in a fit mood to appreciate any beauty or pleasure which we may chance
to find there. And indeed he would be hard to please who could be
discontented with the enjoyment here provided, for whether it be
Nature or Art for which his "thirsty soul doth pine," here he may
satiate himself at leisure.
[Illustration: ASSISI.
_From a drawing by the Author._]
Everything on our way seems to tell the same story of departed
grandeur; the city is almost as deserted as one of those we read of in
the _Arabian Nights_. A beautiful arcade, each capital of whose
pillars is carved to represent a different species of vegetation,
incloses nothing; the house of the poet Metastasio is falling into
ruins, and scarcely can one decipher his coat of arms sculptured above
the door. No dogs bark, nor children scream, nor loungers stare as the
unwonted stranger passes through the market-place; the very _café_ has
been fain to part with its chairs and little tables, and now is only a
gaunt, bare room, in a corner of which sits, in half obscurity, a
melancholy woman sewing slowly. The market-place is certainly the most
gloomy part of the town, were it only from its contrast to the
market-places we are accustomed to see; and so let us hurry down the
long, grass-grown street, till at last a sudden breadth of light
opens before us, and straight in front, across a patch of green
meadow, rises the Church of St. Francis, while a little to the left a
steep incline leads down to the entrance of the Lower Church, called
incorrectly, in some works, the crypt, as the real crypt is beneath
this lower edifice. The Lower Church stands upon a shelf of rock, the
side of which slopes abruptly upward, against which one end of the
church is built. The position of the two churches may perhaps be
understood by thinking of them as situated upon two successive steps
of a staircase, the floor of the Upper Church being merely a
continuation of the upper step, and being thus immediately above the
roof of the Lower Church.
Let us pause before entering the church, and cast our eyes over the
scene before us. We stand on a little terrace half-way up the town,
looking down upon tiled roofs, grey walls, and greyer olive groves,
interspersed with some brighter greens of acacia and poplar. Beneath
us, winding away in long perspective, is the road to the station, with
the tall dome of St. Mary of the Angels forming a prominent blot upon
the landscape, and breaking the level monotony of the plain. On the
right a broad river-bed, nearly dry at the present season, stretches a
snake-like course towards Perugia, the towers of which are just
visible in the distance. In front of us, the valley of the Tiber
stretches away for miles and miles, broken only by long lines of
poplars and tiny villages, which, from the height at which we stand,
only show as gleaming spots in the sunshine. In the extreme distance,
purple mountains enclose the valley on every side, and immediately
behind us rises the mountain on which Assisi is built, crowned with a
ruined citadel, and black against the sky, the sharp pinnacles of
cypress-trees. Whichever way one turns, there is beauty--in the quaint
architecture of the old town, in the wild growth of the ancient
olive-trees, and their delicate tints of greyish-green and silver; in
the brighter colours of the plain, with its broad stretches of
sunshine and little shadows of cloud; in the ranges of mountains, the
darkness of the cypresses, and the brightness of the sky. And so
murmuring within ourselves that the old monk was no bad judge of
scenery, after all, we turn in beneath the broad portico of the
church.
It is not known when this church first began to receive pictorial
adornment; but it is probably true that Giunta Pisano painted there in
1236, though there can be little doubt that anterior to this period
there were paintings the authorship of which is unknown, and whose
date is uncertain. The whole question of the authorship of the
frescoes at Assisi is discussed by Crowe and Cavalcaselle;[66] but it
is difficult to extract their real conclusion from the mass of
verbiage in which it is enveloped, and the limitations with which it
is encumbered. Nor can I attach much importance to the conclusion
which these authors have drawn from frescoes in such a terrible state
of decay, as those in the northern and southern transepts of the Upper
Church. But I do not propose to enter here upon the question of the
authorship of any of these frescoes, except such as are attributed to
Giotto; and even this had better be deferred till I have given my
readers some idea of the general appearance of the church. Its shape
is the usual Latin cross formed by a nave and transepts, without
chapels or side aisles. From the entrance, which is at the _east_ end
of the church, to the choir, the building is divided into four
portions by grouped shafts, five in number, only half of which project
from the walls from the capitals; from each group spring to right and
left pointed arches, in the centre of each of which is a long narrow
window reaching from the ceiling to within about twenty-four feet of
the ground, and from the capitals there also spring arches which cross
the building diagonally, and intersect at the summit of the ceiling,
thus forming triangular openings with curved bases, each of which is
filled with a fresco, most of them greatly obliterated. The shafts and
capitals have all been painted in various colours, as have also the
spaces within the side arches on each side of the narrow windows above
mentioned, and so have the faces and sides of each arch. The four main
portions, into which the ceiling is thus divided, are alternately
painted blue with golden stars, or filled with medallions and figure
subjects. The painting of the arches is in imitation of marble mosaic.
The intersecting arches of the roof are round (as in the Lower
Church), not pointed like the side arches, and on the sides of the
latter, which are double in width of the centre arches, there are
busts of various saints and martyrs of the church connected by rich
ornament and involved geometrical design. On either side of the
windows, in the second row from the roof, are the frescoes ascribed to
Cimabue, all of which are considerably defaced; above these are the
ones assigned by Vasari and Lord Lindsay to Giunta Pisano. The roof
was, while I was there, in process of utter destruction (by
restoration), and its ruin is by this time probably completed.
Underneath the windows there is a third row of paintings, thirty-six
in number, commonly supposed to be the work of Giotto, and beneath
this again painted bands of mosaic, and so to the floor, which is
alternately inlaid with squares and octagons of marble originally red
and white, but which has worn into the warm dusty yellow which seems
to overspread the whole of Assisi.
The choir is built and decorated in a similar manner, and its centre
occupied by a very elaborately worked iron screen (once bronzed and
gilt) erected upon a marble daïs, inlaid with glass mosaic, the
patterns of each step being different, but all intricate and
beautiful. The daïs is about ten feet high and thirty-eight feet long,
and the screen about nine feet high. Surmounting the screen there is
a narrow marble canopy, supported upon twelve marble pillars, with
capitals of acanthus leaves richly gilt, the convex side of the leaves
in the upper portion of each capital being very deeply cut and painted
vermilion. The screen surrounds a plain marble altar.
The arrangement of the choir is similar to that of the body of the
church, each of the transepts being similar in size and arrangement to
one of the four divisions already spoken of; the only difference is in
the size of the windows, which are exactly double of those in the
nave, though of identical shape, each having one pointed archivault;
but at the choir end of the church the window is treble in size. The
two sides of the choir which have no windows, are ornamented with
small galleries of tre-foiled Gothic arches supporting canopies.
Underneath these galleries are a row of paintings corresponding with
the lowest row of frescoes in the nave. There is a recess of about two
feet running the whole length of the church between the groups of
shafts just above the lowest row of frescoes, which serves to measure
the depth of the side arches, and also as a domain to the two lower
rows of frescoes. The colour on the shafts, and on the lowest portion
of the side walls, has almost entirely disappeared, and the whole of
the paintings in the church are much injured by damp. So much is this
the case, that it makes me doubt whether it is worth while going very
deeply into the question of their authorship, though this is a
favourite battleground with the biographers of early Italian painters.
Vasari boldly ascribes the whole upper portion of the church to
Cimabue, and the lower to Giotto: Lindsay asserts that Giunta Pisano
had painted the upper, Cimabue the middle, and Giotto the lower range
of compartments: Kugler, though somewhat indefinite, holds that he
worked out his apprenticeship in the Upper Church of Assisi, and
afterwards came again and laboured in the Lower one.
To sum up then the discussion of this matter, which is hardly an
interesting one to the general reader, my explanation of the probable
authorship of the lower row of frescoes would be the following. That
they have been painted by a pupil of Giotto's at the same time that
the master himself was at work on the frescoes in the Lower Church,
and that the only frescoes by Giotto in the Upper Church, are the two
almost monochrome compositions that are placed one on each side of the
principal entrance. It should be noted that these two are far more
conspicuous, owing to their isolated position, than any other frescoes
in the church, which may well have been the reason for their execution
by the master himself. And it is somewhat curious to observe that they
are both painted in little more than two shades of colour, and are the
only frescoes in the church so painted, as if Giotto were purposely
restraining his hand, so as not to spoil by contrast the cruder work
of his pupil. This pupil I believe to have been Taddeo Gaddi; but I
have not seen sufficient undoubted works by his hand, to render this
more than a mere conjecture, and there is no evidence on the subject
whatever, save such as may be inferred from the fact that Gaddi was
almost certainly present with Giotto at the time he painted in the
Lower Church.
Leaving the question of the actual authorship undecided just now,
notice how far this hypothesis, besides having strong internal
evidence in its favour, goes to solve the difficulties of this matter;
by it we account easily and naturally for the Giottesque qualities
which we find in these works, and also for their comparative feeble
significance. And by the effort to combine the Byzantine manner of
Cimabue with the simplicity of Giotto, we account for all the very
inferior architecture with which these pictures are crowded:
architecture which is to a certain extent Giottesque in form, but
seems to be wholly conventional in colouring and arrangement.
Giotto would naturally say to his pupil something of this sort: "Look
here, Gaddi, this a great chance for you to distinguish yourself; mind
you make the most of it. Don't forget that what you have to do is to
complete Cimabue's work; you must not make his compositions look more
absurd and unnatural than you can help; above all, your work must be
in keeping with his in colour, or you'll spoil the church. Mind you
preserve the character of the architecture, and keep it uniform
throughout; and if you let your work be a little conventional, it will
be all the better."
So we may imagine Giotto talking to his pupil; and the compositions
are exactly such as might have been produced after such an
exhortation, by an earnest, but not very brilliant pupil, in
attempting to combine as much as possible of the character of Giotto's
work, with the form of Cimabue's compositions.
Indeed, these frescoes frequently fall between the two stools of
naturalism and conventionalism, and have the merits of neither. The
architecture is throughout utterly absurd, worse, because not so
refined as that of the Byzantine, and quite without the beauty of
Giotto; an effort towards the simplicity of the buildings in the
frescoes of the Arena Chapel being nevertheless observable, though it
results only in a toy-shop architecture of the lowest order, yellow
and blue towers being stuck one against another.
The figures, too, show the attempt to depict emotion, but without
success; and lastly, the colouring, as at present seen, is crude, to
the verge of discordancy; but upon this last it would be unsafe to lay
much stress, as it is impossible to say what deterioration may not
have resulted from the damp, which in some places has actually
obliterated the composition altogether. This execution by a pupil
would also account for Giotto having restricted himself to shades of
grey, green, and blue in the two frescoes at the end of the chapel to
which I have above referred. The subjects of these are _St. Francis
preaching to the Birds_, and _St. Francis' Dream_; and amongst all the
Giottos I have seen, there is no more harmonious piece of colouring
than in the last named of these works.[67]
There is one piece of corroborative evidence in favour of these works
being by Taddeo Gaddi that I may quote for what it is worth, which is,
that in the series of panels in the Gallery at Berlin which formerly
were part of the frescoes in the Santa Croce of Florence, and which
are certainly, according to Crowe and Cavalcaselle, the work of Gaddi;
"the subjects are, in fact, more or less repetitions of those in the
Upper Church of Assisi." Now it seems more probable that Gaddi should
have repeated his own compositions than that he should have repeated
those of some unknown master, especially one of such comparatively
feeble powers.
Here I must leave the consideration of the authorship of these
frescoes; as I said in the beginning, it is a much vexed question, and
one that there is at present no positive evidence for deciding; the
one thing that is certain is that in a very short time, if it has not
happened already, the frescoes will, to all intents and purposes, have
entirely vanished.
Crowe and Cavalcaselle hold that there were a series of painters who
worked at the Upper Church, and that the whole history of the revival
of early Italian art is comprised and explained in these paintings,
and seem to hold that Giotto painted only one or two of these
frescoes; while, lastly, in one of Dr. Dohme's German series of
biographies, which is the latest work issued on this subject, we have
the author maintaining the thesis that Giotto painted all these
frescoes (in the lower row), and that when he had finished this series
he began again upon those of the Lower Church.
Of the various opinions, those of Vasari and Lindsay can, I think, be
shown to be wrong from a comparison of the dates of Giotto's works. In
the first place there is no evidence whatever to hint at two visits to
Assisi, except Vasari's statement that Giotto was invited to Assisi by
Fra Mure. Now Fra Mure, who was general of the Franciscan order, only
held that post between 1296 and 1302, and therefore if he invited
Giotto to complete the frescoes of the Upper Church, it must have been
between those years; but from a register preserved in the Vatican, the
famous _Navicella_ mosaic was executed by Giotto in 1298, and that he
was still at Rome in 1300, is proved by a portion of a fresco
representing Pope Boniface announcing the opening of the Jubilee,
which took place 1300, and upon the completion of which work Giotto
betook himself to Florence, and painted the famous frescoes in the
Bargello, in one of which the portrait of Dante occurs. Dante was
exiled in 1302, and this, and many minor considerations, point to the
date 1301-2 for the execution of these frescoes. It is therefore easy
to see that Giotto could not have had the possibility of accepting Fra
Mure's invitation between the dates of 1296 and 1302. The question
remains whether the lower row of frescoes were executed by Giotto at
any subsequent period?
Now there is a consensus of testimony that in Florence, in the year
1303, Giotto executed the designs for the façade of the Duomo,
afterwards carried out by Andrea Pisano; and that in the same year he
married. What happened during the next two years is matter of
conjecture: Vasari states that he proceeded to Avignon, which is
contradicted by Crowe and Cavalcaselle on the authority of Abertini;
and we can find nothing certain till we discover our painter at Padua
between 1305-6 painting in the Chapel of the Arena.
If the frescoes in the Upper Church be compared at all carefully with
those of the Arena Chapel, it is at once evident that if they be the
work of the same hand, it must have worked in a far earlier stage of
progress, and it is equally evident, that the transition from the
frescoes of the Upper Church to those of the Lower, is marked by an
abrupt interval of time.
It is impossible that Giotto could have so far fallen away in skill as
to execute the frescoes in the Upper Church subsequent to his painting
of the Arena Chapel at Padua; and it is nearly impossible from the
dates of his work that he could have found time to do them before. The
only hypothesis that seems to be left, if we wish to believe that
Giotto executed this series in the upper church, is that Giotto
accompanied Cimabue when he worked at Assisi, and painted the lower
row of frescoes under the direction of his master.
This theory does not seem to me likely for many reasons; first, it
would have been most probable that had Giotto and Cimabue visited
Assisi together, some evidence of such a visit would have been
discovered; secondly, it seems improbable that Cimabue would have
allowed his apprentice such license in composition and incident as is
here shown; and thirdly, the manner of the pictures is not as was
Giotto's early manner, semi-Byzantine, but rather errs in the opposite
direction, and seems a coarse imitation of Giotto's natural method of
depicting events. It will be noticed, in careful examination of these
works, that, as far as can be judged from the damaged state in which
they at present exist, the composition, and what artists call motive,
of the pictures are, as a rule, very superior to their execution,
which is blundering and unmasterly. I am led by this, and other
considerations of style and time, to come to the conclusion that these
works are not from the hand of Giotto himself, but were probably
executed by his pupils, while the master himself was painting in the
Lower Church. The likelihood of this hypothesis will be greater if we
remember that there are in the Castellani Chapel of Santa Croce,
frescoes which are undoubtedly by the hand of Agnolo Gaddi, which
betray many of the so-called Giottesque traits that we find in these
frescoes; and indeed the wonder would rather be demanded if this were
not the case, and if the inaugurator of a new style of painting did
not have his merits imitated by the students working under his
tuition.
Again, it seems to be a gratuitous assumption on the part of Messrs.
Crowe and Cavalcaselle to hold that this lower row of scenes from the
life of St. Francis must be the work of successive artists merely
because they exhibit differences of merit. We should rather expect
that the same workman, or workmen, would improve in the course of so
long a series, especially if they were painted more or less under the
direction of a master like Giotto. In any case, a comparison of dates
renders it excessively improbable that Giotto paid two visits to
Assisi, and if this be so, we are, I think, justified in concluding
that the utmost connection he had with the frescoes of the Upper
Church was through the medium of his pupils.
Whether or no Crowe and Cavalcaselle are right in believing that other
painters besides Giunta and Cimabue had a hand in the upper rows of
frescoes, and, if so, who those painters were, are questions which are
just now beyond our subject; and very soon they will be beyond any
one's interest or power to answer, for the last traces of colour yet
remaining in these works are rapidly fading away. It is, however,
impossible to imagine with Vasari that all these upper rows of
pictures were executed by one hand, for the very strongest differences
in style, composition, and even (traces of) colour exists between
them.
Thus in the fresco of the _Creation_, there is not the slightest
approach to naturalism of treatment; the Almighty stands within a
circle of vermilion and gold surrounded by a halo, which is apparently
intended to represent the sun; beneath him is the moon, with a man's
face in it, so that there should be no mistaking what it was intended
for; beneath the moon, floating in the air in a lozenge-shaped patch
of red, is Adam, while beneath him again are some sheep, and an animal
that may be either ox, dog, or fox, for it partakes of the character
of all three; and to the right of the picture is the sea, with several
gigantic fishes half in, half out of the water. The only other fresco
in this compartment which is yet decipherable, represents the building
of the ark, and is of like character. Compare, however, with these the
picture in the next compartment eastwards, representing the sacrifice
of Isaac. Large portions of the left-hand side of this work are
destroyed, but sufficient are left to show an attempt, rough, it is
true, but quite unmistakable, to represent a mountain landscape, with
a temple in the distance. Turn to the right hand of the picture: Isaac
is half sitting, half lying on the sacrificial altar, and Abraham
stands beside him with one hand upon the child's head, his left foot
firmly planted on the step of the altar, and his right arm swung up to
its fullest height above his head. Seldom have I seen a more vivid bit
of arrested motion depicted in any work of art; the painter has
actually caught the pause caused by the sudden appearance of the
angel, bidding the father to stay his hand. The action of all the
limbs is most remarkable in its intensity, even Abraham's long robes
fly out wildly behind his outstretched arm. It is impossible that
these two pictures can belong to the same hand, or even to the same
school--the first is entirely Byzantine in manner, and might have been
copied from a fifth century MS.; the latter lacks nothing but a
certain amount of fuller detail and a little more anatomical
knowledge, to stand as a faithful representation of the event it
depicts.
We now come to the question of whether this fresco be one of the works
of Giotto, and again must answer it in the negative. In none of the
undoubted works by this master is there so advanced a naturalism as
here, especially in the treatment of the drapery, which is far nearer
to that of the Renaissance period than that of the Byzantine. It will
be found on a careful examination of the works in the Arena Chapel at
Padua, that the _main_ lines of the drapery are either straight (or
very slightly curved), and in some measure stiff; it would have been
almost folly to expect that this should be otherwise, remembering that
anterior to Giotto the treatment of drapery had been exclusively
founded upon the formal parallel lines of the Byzantine mosaics.
In all probability the Renaissance painters have here supplied the
place of a vacant or faded fresco with one of their own compositions,
and this is rendered the more likely as there are in the Lower
Churches several wretchedly bad Renaissance pictures.
FOOTNOTES:
[64] A small portion of this chapter appeared in the _Spectator_ last
year under the title of "The Shrine of Poverty," and is here reprinted
by the kind permission of the editors of that paper.
[65] I may as well mention that the hotel given by Bradshaw, though
the largest, is very poor in its accommodation, and the visitor would
probably do better to go to the Albergo Subasio close to the
monastery.
[66] Pages 168-174 and 210-228, vol. i.
[67] In Appendix C, at the end of this book, will be found a list of
the works attributed to Giotto by Lord Lindsay, Crowe and
Cavalcaselle, Ruskin, and Dohme.