Giotto and his works in Padua. Ruskin JohnЧитать онлайн книгу.

passage of Cary's Dante is not quite so clear as that translator's work usually is. "One of them all I knew not" is an awkward periphrasis for "I knew none of them." Dante's indignant expression of the effect of avarice in withering away distinctions of character, and the prophecy of Scrovegno, that his neighbor Vitaliano, then living, should soon be with him, to sit on his left hand, is rendered a little obscure by the transposition of the word "here." Cary has also been afraid of the excessive homeliness of Dante's imagery; "whiter wing than curd" being in the original "whiter than butter." The attachment of the purse to the neck, as a badge of shame, in the Inferno, is found before Dante's time; as, for instance, in the windows of Bourges cathedral (see Plate iii. of MM. Martin and Cahier's beautiful work). And the building of the Arena Chapel by the son, as a kind of atonement for the avarice of the father, is very characteristic of the period, in which the use of money for the building of churches was considered just as meritorious as its unjust accumulation was criminal. I have seen, in a MS. Church-service of the thirteenth century, an illumination representing Church-Consecration, illustrating the words, "Fundata est domus Domini supra verticem montium," surrounded for the purpose of contrast, by a grotesque, consisting of a picture of a miser's death-bed, a demon drawing his soul out of his mouth, while his attendants are searching in his chests for his treasures.

2

For these historical details I am chiefly indebted to the very careful treatise of Selvatico, Sulla Cappellina degli Scrovegni nell'Arena di Padova. Padua, 1836.

3

Lord Lindsay, Christian Art, vol. ii. p. 166.

4

At Pietra Mala. The flames rise two or three feet above the stony ground out of which they spring, white and fierce enough to be visible in the intense rays even of the morning sun.

5

At least Lord Lindsay seems to consider the evidence collected by Förster on this subject conclusive. Christian Art, vol. ii. p. 168.

6

It might not, I think, be a work unworthy of the Arundel Society, to collect and engrave in outline the complete series of these Byzantine originals of the subjects of the Arena Chapel, in order to facilitate this comparison. The Greek MSS. in the British Museum would, I think, be amply sufficient; the Harleian MS. numbered 1810 alone furnishing a considerable number of subjects, and especially a Death of the Virgin, with the St. John thrown into the peculiar and violent gesture of grief afterwards adopted by Giotto in the Entombment of the Arena Chapel.

7

Notes to Rogers' Italy.

8

These words are gravely added to some singular particulars respecting the life of Adam, related in a MS. of the sixteenth century preserved in the Herald's College.