Note.—"This chapel, built in, or about, the year 1303, appears to have been intended to replace one which had long existed upon the spot; and in which from the year 1278 an annual festival had been held on Ladyday, in which the Annunciation was represented in the manner of our English mysteries (and under the same title: 'Una sacra rappresentazione di quel mistero'), with dialogue and music, both vocal and instrumental. Scrovegni's purchase of the ground would not be allowed to interfere with the national custom; but he is reported by some writers to have rebuilt the chapel with greater costliness, in order, as far as possible, to efface the memory of his father's unhappy life. But Federici, in his history of the Cavalieri Godenti, supposes that Scrovegni was a member of that body, and was assisted by them in decorating the new edifice. The order of Cavalieri Godenti was instituted in the beginning of the thirteenth century, to defend the 'existence,' as Selvatica states it, but, more accurately, the 'dignity' of the Virgin against the various heretics by whom it was beginning to be assailed. His knights were at first called 'Cavaliers of St. Mary;' but soon increased in power and riches to such a degree that from their general habits of life they received the nickname of the 'Merry Brothers.'
"Federici gives powerful reasons for his opinion that the Arena Chapel was employed in the ceremonies of their order; and Lord Lindsay observes 'that the fulness with which the history of the Virgin is recounted on its walls, adds to the plausibility of his supposition.'
"Enrico Scrovegni was, however, towards the close of his life driven into exile, and died at Venice in 1320. But he was buried in the chapel he had built, and has one small monument in the sacristy as the founder of the building, in which he is represented under a Gothic niche, standing with his hands clasped and his eyes raised, while behind the altar is his tomb, on which, as usual at this period, is a recumbent statue of him. The chapel itself may not unwarrantably be considered as one of the first efforts of Popery in resistance to the Reformation; for the Reformation, though not victorious till the sixteenth, began in reality in the thirteenth century; and the remonstrances of such bishops as our own Grossteste, the martyrdom of the Albigenses in the Dominican crusades, and the murmurs of those 'heretics,' against whose aspersions of the majesty of the Virgin this chivalrous order of the Cavalieri Godenti was instituted, were as truly the signs of the new era in religion, as the opponent work of Giotto on the walls of the Arena was a sign of the approach of a new era in art."—From The Arena Chapel at Padua, by John Ruskin.
JUSTICIA.
FRESCO BY GIOTTO.
IN THE CAPPELLA DELL' ARENA, PADUA.
CHAPTER IX.
GIOTTO'S STYLE.
"There is in truth a holy purity, an innocent naïveté, a child-like grace and simplicity, a freshness, a fearlessness, a yearning after all things truthful, lovely, and of good report, in the productions of this early time which invest them with a charm peculiar in its kind, and which few even of the most perfect works of the maturer era can boast of; and hence the risk and danger (which I warn you of at the outset) of becoming too passionately attached to them, of losing the power of discrimination, of admiring and imitating their defects as well as their beauties, of running into affectation in seeking after simplicity, and into exaggeration in our efforts to be in earnest; in a word of forgetting that in art, as in human nature, it is the balance, harmony and co-equal development, of sense, intellect, and spirit, which constitutes perfection."—Lord Lindsay's Christian Art.