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cult to prove that Giotto, besides illustrating the inte rior of the chapel of the Arena with scenes from sacred history, was the person employed by Enrico Scrovegno to erect the chapel itself; but the perfect manner in which the interior is adapted to the plan of its pictorial adorn ment, suggests and might justify that assumption. Emi nently in the spirit of Christian thought, dramatic in the force with which the idea is evolved, yet so simple as to convey their meaning to the least gifted of mankind, these paintings reveal in Giotto, young as he then was, 1 an intimate acquaintance with the character, the types, the passions of men. Conceived and distributed according to the highest maxims of art, they disclose in him the pos session of uncommon taste united to most remarkable technical powers. Erected in the form of a single vaulted aisle with a choir merely separated from the body of the chapel by an arch, the building is lighted by six windows piercing the side to the right of the portal. Giotto arranged the subjects in obedience to the maxims which for centuries had ruled their distribution, but with a sense of their mutual value and position quite unusual. On the wall, above the entrance, was the Last Judgment. On the arch leading into the sanctuary, the Saviour sat in glory guarded by angels. Beneath him the annunciation was depicted, and in a triple course along the walls, were thirty eight scenes of the life of the Virgin and of the Saviour. These subjects were inclosed in a painted ornament of a beautiful kind, interrupted at intervals by little frames of varied forms, containing subjects from-the old and new testament. All rested on a painted marble cornice supported on brackets and pilasters, in the intervals of which were fourteen figures in dead colour representing the virtues and the vices. As in the chapel of the Podesta, so at the Scrovegni, the waggon roof was spanned by two at Padua, and though many pain tings exist in Avignon, in the ca thedral and papal palace, they are not by Giotto, but by Simone Martini of Sienna, as may be more fully proved hereafter. 1 “Adhuc satis juvenis,” says Benvenuto da Imola, ub. sup.
