The date of Giotto's visit to Rome is still further fixed by an assertion of Baldinucci's that there is a record in the Vatican in a register, to the effect that the mosaic of the Navicella (which is still in the portico of St. Peter's though enormously damaged), was executed at Rome in 1298. If this be true, and though quoted by Crowe it is not contradicted, it fixes the date of Giotto's visit as at all events not later than that year. Of the works of Giotto at Rome I shall speak in a subsequent chapter, in which I shall endeavour to fix upon the analogy of style, the order in which Giotto painted at Florence, Padua, and Assisi. It should have been noticed that Crowe and Cavalcaselle make the incident of the O occur in the time of Benedict XI, by supposing that that Pope sent from Avignon "at the request of Petrarch, to seek out the best artists of Italy for the purpose of restoring and adorning the churches and palaces of Rome which were falling into decay." This, however, leaves Giotto's first visit to Rome in 1298 unaccounted for, and contradicts Vasari and Lindsay, apparently without sufficient cause, for it seems highly improbable that if the painter had been already engaged in painting and designing mosaics for St. Peter's, that in after years the Pope should have thought it necessary to have a proof of his skill.
However, the date of this visit to Rome is of little importance, as the whole of the works of Giotto in that city have been long destroyed, with the exception of the mosaic of the Navicella, and some small panel pictures in the Sacristy of St. Peter's.[43]
About the year 1300 it seems probable that Giotto returned to Florence, and in the following year painted in the Chapel of the Podesta—commonly called the Bargello. It was here that Giotto introduced (I believe for the first time in the history of mediæval Italian art) accurate portraits of living people into his picture of Paradise. It is here that the famous portrait of Dante in his early manhood was discovered after having been covered with whitewash for two hundred years.
It was with the greatest difficulty that an American named Kirkup, and Signor Bezzi obtained permission from the Italian government to remove the whitewash from this fresco of Paradise at their own expense.[44] All the frescoes in this chapel are very greatly injured by time and neglect, whitewash and restoration, and especially the Dante portrait, which has suffered most of all from the last-mentioned cause. As I shall have little occasion to refer to the works in this chapel in subsequent chapters, I may here say that in my opinion Crowe and Cavalcaselle have erred in attributing all of them to Giotto.[45] There are many which show little, if any, trace of the master's hand, and others which are apparently imitations by pupils; as, however, the frescoes are all exceedingly defaced, it is not worth while to dwell minutely on this point.[46]
In less than two years from the date of this picture of the Paradise, Dante was exiled to Verona, and for three or four years Giotto did not see him again. In the year 1306, when Giotto went to Padua to paint the Arena Chapel, Dante also settled in that town.[47]
Within a year from the painting of the Bargello, Giotto married a lady, of whom, no matter what may have been her virtues or attractions, posterity knows little or nothing, save that she bore the painter several children, and that her name was Ciuta di Lapo. It was shortly after this period of his life that he produced what must on the whole be considered the greatest work of his life—the decoration of the Scrovegni Chapel at Padua. This was a small barn-like edifice of perfectly plain exterior, which had just been built by Enrico Scrovegni on the site of an old Roman amphitheatre, and dedicated to the Madonna.
According to some accounts, Giotto himself was its architect; but this has only been surmised from the fact of his decoration being so admirably suited to the building. The fact probably being that had the building been of a different or more elaborate shape, he would have treated it in a different manner. As it was, the extreme simplicity of the arrangement of the frescoes, is most happily in harmony with the simplicity of the architecture. Here he seems to have lived for several years, and here as we have said came Dante in 1306, having passed the intervening years of his exile at Bologna. According to Baldinucci, our painter had no less than six children, all of whom were of a surpassing ugliness; and it is recorded that Dante remarked upon this circumstance to him, pretending to be surprised that one who could paint such beautiful figures should have such ugly sons; to which Giotto replied by a jest more suited to his own times, than to ours. Indeed, all that the biography of Giotto amounts to after this, is an account of his various jokes and eccentricities, most of which, I must confess, seem to me of very poor quality, somewhat akin to the pleasantries told at the tea-table of a humorous schoolmaster, or to those which are murmured between the pauses of the work, at the weekly meetings of a Dorcas society. However, all the historians agree in asserting that he was a man of infinite jest, and the humour of these anecdotes may well have evaporated in the course of six hundred years. The following, which I give as it occurs in Vasari, derives a certain interest from the quaint simplicity with which the biographer tells it, and the naïve way in which justice is depicted as of course being on the side of the best speaker, is not without a certain amount of significance, even in our enlightened nineteenth century.
"Giotto, as we have said before, was of an exceedingly jocund humour, and abounded in witty and humorous remarks, which are still well remembered in Florence. Examples of these may be found not only in the writings of Messer Giovanni Boccaccio, but also in the three hundred stories of Franco Sacchetti, who cites many amusing instances of his talent in this way. And here I will not refuse the labour of transcribing some of these stories, giving them in Franco's own words, that my readers may be made acquainted with the peculiar phraseology and modes of speech used in those times, together with the story itself. He says there in one of these, to set it forth with its proper title:—
"'To Giotto, the great painter, is given a buckler to paint by a man of small account. He, making a jest of the matter, paints in such sort that the owner is put out of countenance.'