Next the eye will realize splendid people gravely occupied with solemn acts. There is the strangest blend of passion and decorum. See the eager old man who clutches his wife before a massive city gate while she caresses him tenderly, Figure [13]a, note the firm gentleness of the bearded priest who handles a screaming baby before the altar, mark the sense of strain and hurry where a mother and child mounted on an ass, Figure [14], are pushed and dragged along by an old man and attendants. Or again, what sinister power in the scene where three Jewish magistrates press money upon a haggard, bearded, nervous man. You do not need the bat-like demon prompting him to know that it is the arch-traitor Judas, Figure [15]. Then there is a strange, serene, processional composition, with the Virgin moving homeward among her friends to a solemn music, Figure [16]. It has a rhythm like the frieze of the Parthenon. Perhaps your eye will fix longest on the scene where about the pale body of the dead Christ women wail with outstretched hands, or tend the broken body, while bearded men, accustomed to the hardness of life, stand in mute sympathy with folded hands, Figure [17]. It is what the Gospel ought to look like. How Giotto shows every feeling, pushing its expression just to the verge, and there stopping, so that idyl and tragedy, devotion and wrath, treachery and fealty, fear and courage, each keeps its proper and distinguishing aspect, while all are invested in a common dignity and nobility. You will perhaps never have seen an art at once so varied and moving, and nevertheless so monumental, and you may well be curious as to the method.
Fig. 15. Giotto. Judas betraying Christ.—Arena, Padua.
You will see readily that these compositions are conceived sculpturally. Every one with the slightest change could be cut in marble. Indeed the seven Virtues, Figure [18], and seven Vices impersonated in monochrome on the dado of the chapel are direct imitations of sculpture. The figures throughout the life of Christ and the Virgin are of even size, and usually all on one plane. The landscapes and architectural features are arranged simply as frames or backgrounds for the figure groups. The figures are, whenever the subject permits, clad in drapery of a classic cast. Expression is conveyed not much by the faces, which have a uniform Gothic intentness, but by the action of the entire figure and especially of the hands. The forms are rather squat and massive, yet have a homely gracefulness. There is nothing like perspective, and small regard for distance, yet the figures have convincing bulk and move gravely in adequate space. All this is due to the most consummate draughtsmanship. Giotto simplifies his seeing; what he cares for is the thrust of the shoulder, or the poise of hip, the swing of the back from the pelvis, the projection of the chest, the balance of the head on the neck and its attachment to the shoulders. All these essential facts of mass he represents by the simplest lines of direction, by broad masses of light and shade, often merely by the tugging lines in drapery that tell of the form beneath. The cave men would have understood Giotto, and so would the post-impressionists of today. Conciseness, economy, force, mass—these are the technical qualities of the work, as human insight and tenderness are its grace. As the great analytical critic Bernard Berenson has well remarked, this painting makes the strongest possible appeal to our tactile sense, stirring powerfully all our memories of touch, and presenting the painted indications as so many swiftly grasped clues to reality. We have to do with a magnificently conceived shorthand. No artist before or since has made a greater expenditure of mind or achieved a more notable inventiveness than Giotto in the Arena Chapel.
Fig. 16. Giotto. The Virgin returning from her wedding.—Arena, Padua.
Fig. 17. Giotto. Lamentation over Christ.—Arena, Padua.
It was dedicated March 25, 1305, Giotto being nearly forty years old, and it was probably not completely painted on the day of dedication, since many draperies were borrowed from St. Mark’s, Venice, to cover, presumably, the still unpictured parts of the walls. Giotto lived some four years in Padua, brought his family there, received the exiled poet Dante and with him joked not too decorously about his own ugliness and that of his children. It seems likely enough, though not certain, that he followed the banished Pope to Avignon about 1309, and spent some years in Southern France. What is certain is that he was again in Florence by 1312, and that, having found his own solution of the problem of mass in the Arena Chapel, he thereafter rested comfortably on his discovery, never was quite as strenuous again, and spent his later years at a new problem—that of decorative symmetry.
