120 GIOTTO AND HIS WORKS IN PADUA

ENVY¹

(Frontispiece to Fors Clavigera, Letter 6)

After describing the Ducal Palace sculpture, in which “she is pointing malignantly with her finger; a serpent is wreathed about her head like a cap, another forms the girdle of her waist, and a dragon rests in her lap,” Ruskin proceeds:-

“Giotto has, however, represented her, with still greater subtlety, as having her fingers terminating in claws, and raising her right hand with an expression partly of impotent regret, partly of involuntary grasping; a serpent, issuing from her mouth, is about to bite her between the eyes; she has long membranous ears, horns on her head, and flames consuming her body. The Envy of Spenser is only inferior to that of Giotto, because the idea of folly and quickness of hearing is not suggested by the size of the ear; in other respects it is even finer, joining the idea of fury, in the wolf on which he rides, with that of corruption on his lips, and of discolouration or distortion in the whole mind:-

’Malicious Envy rode

Upon a ravenous wolfe, and still did chaw

Between his cankred teeth a venomous tode,

That all the poison ran about his jaw.

. . . . . . .

All in a kirtle of discoloured say

He clothed was, ypaynted full of eies,

And in his bosome secretly there lay

An hateful snake, the which his taile uptyes

In many folds, and mortall sting implyes.’”

-Stones of Venice, vol. ii. ch. viii. § 93 (Vol. X. pp. 405-406).

“Covetousness, lady of competition and of deadly care; cold above the altars of Ignoble Victory, builder of streets, in cities of Ignoble Peace. I have given you the picture of her-your goddess and only Hope-as Giotto saw her; dominant in prosperous Italy as in prosperous England, and having her hands clawed then as now so that she can only clutch, not work.”-Fors Clavigera, Letter 6.

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INFIDELITY²

“Most nobly symbolized as a woman helmeted, the helmet having a broad rim which keeps the light from her eyes. She is covered with a heavy drapery, stands infirmly as if about to fall, is bound by a cord round her

¹ [Lord Lindsay’s account is: “An old woman standing in flames, with the ear and the horns of Satan, a snake issuing from her mouth which turns round and bites her; she clutches a purse with her left hand, and stretches out her right like a claw.”-Christian Art (vol. ii. p. 196).]

² [It will be noticed that neither the Stones of Venice nor Christian Art notice the small figure in the upper right-hand corner.-ED. 1899. It is the figure of a Prophet proffering a scroll of the Sacred Writings to reclaim Infidelity.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]