GIOTTO AND HIS WORKS IN PADUA 45

complete “History of the most Holy Family,” written in Northern Italian of about the middle of the fourteenth century; and appearing to be one of the forms of the legend which Giotto has occasionally followed in preference to the statements of the Protevangelion. I have therefore, in illustration of the paintings, given, when it seemed useful, some portions of this manuscript; and these, with one or two verses of the commonly received accounts, will be found generally enough to interpret sufficiently the meaning of the painter.

The following complete list of the subjects will at once enable the reader to refer any of them to its place in the series, and on the walls of the building; and I have only now to remind him in conclusion, that within those walls the greatest painter and greatest poet of mediæval Italy held happy companionship during the time when the frescoes were executed. “It is not difficult,” says the writer already so often quoted, Lord Lindsay,¹ “gazing on these silent but eloquent walls, to repeople them with the group once, as we know, five hundred years ago, assembled within them: Giotto intent upon his work, his wife Ciuta admiring his progress; and Dante, with abstracted eye, alternately conversing with his friend, and watching the gambols of the children playing on the grass before the door.”

¹ [Christian Art, vol. ii. p. 199.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]