Page:The painters of Florence from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century (1915).djvu/45

1335] fainting Virgin, the wild despair of the angels who hover in the air, mark a great advance on Cimabue's crude realism, and St. Francis himself is introduced among the saints who stand at the foot of the cross.

The next important series which Giotto painted were the frescoes in the Arena Chapel at Padua. In 1303, Enrico Scrovegno, a noble citizen of Padua, son of the wealthy usurer Rinaldo, whom Dante places in his Inferno, spent part of his father's ill-gotten fortune in building a chapel dedicated to the Annunziata, on the site of a Roman amphitheatre. Two years later Giotto was invited to decorate the interior with frescoes. Benvenuto da Imola, writing in 1376, tells us that when Dante visited Padua, in 1306, he found his friend Giotto living there with his wife, Madonna Ciutà, of the parish of Santa Reparata of Florence, and his young family, and was honourably entertained by the painter in his own house. Giotto, adds the writer, was then still young—he must have been exactly thirty years of age—and was engaged in painting a chapel on the site of an ancient Arena. Here the poet often watched him at work, with his children, who were "as ill-favoured as himself," playing around, and wondered how it was that the creations of his brain were so much fairer than his own offspring. Giotto's small stature and insignificant appearance seem to have been constantly the subject of his friends' good-humoured jests, and Petrarch and Boccaccio both speak of him as an instance of rare genius being concealed under a plain and ungainly exterior. "Two excellent painters I have known," writes Petrarch, "who were neither of them handsome—Giotto of Florence, whose fame is supreme among