400 THE STONES OF VENICE

§ 86. TENTH CAPITAL. First side. Luxury (the opposite of Chastity, as above explained). A woman with a jewelled chain across her forehead, smiling as she looks into a mirror, exposing her breast by drawing down her dress with one hand. Inscribed “LUXURIA SUM IMENSA.”

These subordinate forms of vice are not met with so frequently in art as those of the opposite virtues, but in Spenser we find them all. His Luxury rides upon a goat:

“In a greene gowne he clothed was full faire,

Which underneath did hide his filthinesse,

And in his hand a burning hart he bare.”¹

But, in fact, the proper and comprehensive expression of this vice is the Cupid of the ancients; and there is not any minor circumstance more indicative of the intense difference between the medićval and the Renaissance spirit, than the mode in which this god is represented.

I have above said, that all great European art is rooted in the thirteenth century; and it seems to me that there is a kind of central year about which we may consider the energy of the Middle Ages to be gathered; a kind of focus of time, which, by what is to my mind a most touching and impressive Divine appointment, has been marked for us by the greatest writer of the Middle Ages, in the first words he utters; namely, the year 1300, the “mezzo del cammin” of the life of Dante.² Now, therefore, to Giotto, the contemporary of Dante, and who drew Dante’s still existing portrait³ in this very year, 1300, we may always look for the central medićval idea in any subject: and observe how he represents Cupid; as one of three, a terrible trinity, his companions being Satan and Death; and he himself “a lean scarecrow, with bow, quiver, and fillet, and feet ending in claws,”*

* Lord Lindsay, vol. ii. Letter iv. [p. 225, ed. 1847].

¹ [Book i. canto iv. 25.]

² [Inferno, canto i., line 1.-

“Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura.”]

³ [See Vol. IV. p. 188.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]