16 GIOTTO AND HIS WORKS IN PADUA

may not unwarrantably be considered as one of the first efforts of Popery in resistance of 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 Grosseteste, the martyrdoms of the Albigenses in the Dominican crusades,¹ 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 approach of a 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.

4. The chapel having been founded, as stated above, in 1303, Giotto appears to have been summoned to decorate its interior walls about the year 1306,-summoned, as being at that time the acknowledged master of painting in Italy. By what steps he had risen to this unquestioned eminence it is difficult to trace; for the records of his life, strictly examined, and freed from the verbiage and conjecture of artistical history, nearly reduce themselves to a list of the cities of Italy where he painted, and to a few anecdotes, of little meaning in themselves, and doubly pointless in the fact of most of them being inheritances of the whole race of painters, and related successively of all in whose biographies the public have deigned to take an interest. There is even question as to the date of his birth;² Vasari stating

¹ [Robert Grosseteste (died 1253), Bishop of Lincoln; preached against Papal abuses; suspended by the Pope, 1251. For the martyrdoms of the Albigenses, see Vol. XXIII. p. 142 n.]

² [The date of Giotto’s birth is still one of the unsettled questions of arthistory. The date of his work at the Arena Chapel (1305-1306) is fixed by early evidence, and bears upon the other question. Benvenuto Rambaldi da Imola (1331-1380) in his commentary upon Dante appends this note to the passage in which the poet refers to the eclipse of Cimabue’s fame by Giotto: “... Now it once happened that while Giotto, still fairly young, was painting at Padua a chapel in the place where was once the theatre or arena, Dante came to the place And Giotto received him with honour and took him to his house.... This Giotto lived afterwards for a long time, for he died in 1336.” A Paduan record states that Dante was at Padua in 1306 (see Novelle Litterarie, Florence, 1748, col. 361). A contemporary Florentine writer states that Giotto was seventy when he died: Antonio Pucci (died 1398) in his Centiloquio. If Giotto was born in 1276, he would have died at sixty; but if in 1266, he would have been forty when Benvenuto describes him as “adhuc satis juvenis.”]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]