Page:The painters of Florence from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century (1915).djvu/53

1335] righteousness to the just, the other, an executioner in the act of slaying the criminal, and the pediment of her throne is adorned with a frieze of happy children dancing and of huntsmen returning from the chase, symbolic of the peace and prosperity which flourish under her rule. Injustice is a hideous fiend seated in a robber's stronghold, with a sword in one hand and a grappling-hook in the other, to catch the innocent traveller as he journeys on his way, while figures of thieves and murderers are carved on the rocks at her feet. Fortitude appears in the guise of an armed woman, wearing a lion's skin knotted round her neck, and bearing a massive shield embossed with a lion and deeply indented with broken heads of javelins. Inconstancy is a maiden wearing a veil, blown to and fro by the wind, and vainly trying to support herself against a rolling globe on a slippery marble floor. Prudence is a grave matron with the double face of Janus, sitting at a desk and holding a mirror in her hand. Folly, wearing a cap of feathers and a bird's tail fastened to his skirts, looks up with a grin on his face at the club with which he is about to strike the air at random. Last of all, Hope, fairest and best of all the Virtues, stands on the threshold of Paradise, and springs forward to reach a crown held out by unseen hands, while Despair, the blackest of crimes, is dragged by devils down to hell-fires. Thus, in the same age, these two great Florentines, Giotto and Dante, gave utterance to their thoughts, the one in poetry, the other in painting, and clothed their conceptions in the favourite language of mediæval times.

The fame which Giotto already enjoyed beyond the