14 GIOTTO AND HIS WORKS IN PADUA

fortified palace upon the ground, and a chapel dedicated to the Annunciate Virgin.

2. This chapel, built in or about the year 1303,* appears

Vitaliano, on my left shall sit.

A Paduan with these Florentines am I.

Ofttimes they thunder in mine ears, exclaiming,

Oh! haste that noble knight, he who the pouch

With the three goats will bring. This said, he writhed

The mouth, and lolled the tongue out, like an ox

That licks his nostrils.”

-Canto xvii.

This passage of Cary’s Dante is not quite so clear as that translator’s work usually is. “One of them all I knew not” is an awkward periphrasis for “I knew none of them.” Dante’s indignant expression of the effect of avarice in withering away distinctions of character, and the prophecy of Scrovegno, that his neighbour Vitaliano, then living, should soon be with him, to sit on his left hand, is rendered a little obscure by the transposition of the word “here.” Cary has also been afraid of the excessive homeliness of Dante’s imagery; “whiter wing than curd” being in the original “whiter than butter.” The attachment of the purse to the neck,¹ as a badge of shame, in the Inferno, is found before Dante’s time; as, for instance, in the windows of Bourges cathedral (see Plate iii. of MM. Martin and Cahier’s beautiful work²). And the building of the Arena Chapel by the son, as a kind of atonement for the avarice of the father,³ is very characteristic of the period, in which the use of money for the building of churches was considered just as meritorious as its unjust accumulation was criminal. I have seen, in a MS. Church-service of the thirteenth century, an illumination representing Church-Consecration, illustrating the words, “Fundata est domus Domini supra verticem montium,”⁴ surrounded, for the purpose of contrast, by a grotesque, consisting of a picture of a miser’s death-bed, a demon drawing his soul out of his mouth, while his attendants are searching in his chests for his treasures.

* For these historical details I am chiefly indebted to the very careful treatise of Selvatico, Sulla Cappellina degli Scrovegni nell’ Arena di Padova. Padua, 1836.⁵

¹ [Compare Vol. XVI. p. 17.]

² [Monographie de la cathédrale de Bourges, par les PP. Arthur Martin et Charles Cahier, de la Compagnie de Jésus, 1841-1844.]

³ [Enrico built the chapel, says an old chronicler, “pro eripienda partis anima a pœnis purgationis et ad illius expianda peccata” (Scardeone: De antiquitate urbis Patavii, Basilea, 1560, p. 322).]

⁴ [See Isaiah ii. 2: “in vertice montium.”]

⁵ [In a subsequent edition of his book Selvatico gave a later date. It appears now to be established that the building and decoration of the chapel were completed between the Festival of the Annunciation in 1303 and that in 1305. See Moschetti: La Capella degli Scrovegni e gli affreschi di Giotto in essa dipinti, Firenze, 1904, pp. 15-19.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]