[71] To facilitate seeing the paintings of the ceiling, both here and in the Lower Church, it would be well to use a hand-glass, a simple and most effectual addition to the comfort of the traveller.
[72] Mr Ruskin says that the gable of the bishop's throne is "of the exact period when the mosaic workers of the thirteenth century at Rome adopted rudely the masonry of the north. Briefly this is a Greek temple pediment, in which, doubtful of their power to carve figures beautiful enough, they cut a trefoiled hold for ornament, and bordered the edge with a harlequinade of mosaic. They then call to their aid the Greek sea waves, and let the surf of the Ægean climb along the slopes, and toss itself at the top into a fleur-de-lys."
[73] There are only the most meagre scraps of information to rely upon as to the dates of Giotto's works at San Francesco, and it is needless here to enter into the endless discussion. One thing is obvious; the Assisan frescoes must have been executed before those at Padua which have always been assigned to 1306. In these pages we have sometimes followed the view held by Messrs. Crowe and Cavalcaselle, sometimes that of Herr Thode, who appears to have studied the question with open eyes, but our final authority is M. Bernhard Berenson, who in a visit paid lately to Assisi was kind enough to point out many things which we should otherwise have passed by, and in the sequence of the frescoes by Giotto at San Francesco we have entirely followed his opinion.
[74] For Simone Martini's Madonna and Saints between the two chapels of this transept, see p. [212]. The portraits (?) of some of the first companions of St. Francis, painted beneath Cimabue's fresco, belong to the Florentine school. It would be vain to try and name them.
[75] See Vasari, ed. Milanesi, vol. i. p. 426. (Sansoni Firenze.)
[76] It is often supposed that Giotto took the theme of this fresco from the well-known lines of Dante referring to the mystical marriage of St. Francis to Poverty. But Dante wrote the xi. canto of the Paradiso long after Giotto had left Assisi; both painter and poet really only followed the legend recounted by St. Bonaventure of how St. Francis met three women who saluted him on the plain of S. Quirico near Siena. These were Poverty, Charity and Obedience.
[77] Paradiso, xi., Cary's translation.
[78] This fact alone would disprove the idea that Giottino, who was born in 1324, could have been the author of these frescoes. Everything that cannot be attributed to other painters is put down as his work, so that we have many pictures and frescoes of totally different styles assigned to Giottino.
[79] Some say this fresco represents the three youths begging St. Nicholas to pardon the consul who had condemned them to death, in which case it would come after the scene of the execution on the opposite wall.
[80] The tabernacle on the altar is the work of Giulio Danti, after a design by Galeazzo Alessi, both Perugians, in 1570.