Let us go inside, and we shall pass a very different verdict. Giotto is to many of us not only a person singularly gifted in a great age, but in some sort the embodiment of an idea. The idea is that of an artist, pure, simple, and direct in his work, who should excel equally in all the arts, and show—even though his work be an exception to all rules—the consummate success of such a course. The man was fortunate in his day and in his friends. Here, where we stand to admire, he painted, whilst probably Dante looked on. For merely human and artistic interest there is, therefore, no room which more rightly deserves to be the object of endless pilgrimages; and there is none in which one will find the artist more faithful to his calling, more full of recollection and self-restraint than in this.
I know, therefore, no one building, of such very small size and cost, which can claim the same degree of interest as this small Chapel of the Arena. It is, indeed, one of the glories of art that the works of its great masters cannot diminish in value, or even be competed with by subsequent masters: when once done, they are done for ever; and so the Pietà of Giotto, in this little chapel at Padua, is now—as it was when first painted in the commencement of the fourteenth century, and as it will continue to be so long as the neglect with which it is now treated allows it to exist—one of the great paintings of the world, one of those fountains from which school after school and age after age of artists may drink instruction and knowledge, and never fail to gain more, the more they study its many excellences, and its intensity of feeling and conception.
The architectural portion of the interior may be first of all described. The apse is simply a sanctuary, and the chancel is formed by marble screens on each side of the nave, leaving a broad entrance-way between them, and enclosing about one-third of its length. Against the west side of these screens are altars, each with a small carved marble reredos; whilst on the east of them are steps leading to the two ambons; that on the north being a book-rest, carved in marble, and fixed with its face to the east; that on the south of iron, and turning upon a pivot. Between these screens and the sanctuary arch are modern stalls on each side. The sanctuary has seats all round the apse (except in the eastern bay), each with a delicate white marble canopy. The sacristy is groined, and has a thirteenth-century press of wood of a design rather curious than beautiful, but very rich in its detail. In the nave, as I have already said, walls have neither cornices nor string-courses to break their even surfaces, and their face is continued on in semicircular waggon vault. There are six lancet windows on the south, none at all on the north, and a three-light window very high up in the gable at the west end above the doorway.
The architectural merit of the building is simply, I think, that it performs satisfactorily the office of giving ample unbroken surfaces of wall for paintings.
The arrangement of these is very regular. The vault is divided into two parts by wide coloured borders, the space between which is painted blue, powdered with gilt stars, and in each bay there are five small medallions with figures on a gold ground. The side walls are divided by borders into three divisions in height; the upper division containing subjects from the life of the Blessed Virgin; the central, those illustrative of the life of Our Blessed Lord; whilst those nearest to the ground are representations of the Virtues and Vices opposed to each other; the last division tinted only in one colour, the others richly painted in bright colours upon a field of blue.
The borders which divide the paintings are very well designed, their patterns being always very clearly defined with white leading lines, and a line of red on either side always accompanying each line of white. The paintings themselves are very wonderful; there is an earnestness of purpose and expression about them such as one rarely meets with; each subject is treated with a severe conscientiousness, not always conventionally where a departure from strict rule is for any reason necessary, but still, generally speaking, in accordance no doubt with the ancient traditional treatment. This, illuminated as it is by the thought and love and earnest intensity of feeling which Giotto lavished on all that he did, makes his work here the most perfect example of a series of religious paintings that I have ever seen. Of course in such a large series of subjects there must be great variety of excellence, and I am content to agree with the rest of the world in awarding the palm of excellence to the Pietà, in which the expression of intense feeling in the face of the mourners over the body of Our Lord is certainly beyond anything of the kind that I know.