xlvi INTRODUCTION

data he accepted Lord Lindsay, and was thus led into some statements which, in the light of later inquiries, are almost certainly erroneous.¹ Ruskin, it should be noted more particularly, places Giotto’s work at Assisi after that at Padua; the more generally received view is that the frescoes in the Arena Chapel were the later by some years, those in Santa Croce being, again, much later still. Moreover, he wrote his notes on the works in the Arena Chapel, not in presence of the frescoes themselves, but upon the woodcuts as issued by the Arundel Society, and these, again, sometimes caused him to make minor mistakes.² The essay on Giotto and the notes on the frescoes remain, nevertheless, the standard work on their subject, and at the time of first publication made almost an epoch in the study of Italian art in this country. The style of the essay would at once show any reader, who had perused the works of Ruskin in their chronological order and had chanced not before to have seen this piece, that it belonged to the author’s middle period; it is as vivid, eloquent, and suggestive as any other book by Ruskin, and at the same time is quiet, direct, and clear. English taste, in the years when the book first appeared, was only beginning to awake to a due appreciation of the Primitives, and Ruskin showed the way to a fuller knowledge of Giotto. The points upon which Ruskin insisted-the balanced sanity of Giotto’s intellect, the broad humanity of his temper, his power of entering into the heart of a subject, and his peculiar faculty of dramatic presentation-these remain the essential points in all authoritative criticisms of the painter, while nothing that is much significant has been found for addition to Ruskin’s notes on the legendary, dramatic, and artistic characteristics of the several frescoes.

The study which Ruskin and the Arundel Society devoted to the Arena Chapel has been followed in later times by corresponding zeal in Italy. The chapel itself, under municipal control, is well cared for, and an admirable series of photographs, on a very large scale, has been taken by the Fratelli Alinari of Florence.³ The same firm has recently published a fully illustrated monograph on the chapel, written by Signor Andrea Moschetti;⁴ while in France the iconography of the frescoes has been made the subject of a study by M. Broussolle.

Ruskin never revised his essay or the descriptive notes, and for some years the book was out of print. Shortly before his death

¹ See pp. 34, 35 nn.

² See pp. 91, 97 nn.

³ These may be seen and purchased in the chapel.

⁴ La Cappella degli Scrovegni e gli Affresci di Giotto in essa dipinti, Firènze, 1904. J. C. Broussolle: Études d’ Art, de Voyage et de Religion, les Fresques de l’ Aréna à Padoue, Paris, 1905.

[Version 0.04: March 2008]