In 1303 a certain Enrico Scrovegno had a private chapel built in the Arena at Padua and he sent for Giotto to come there and adorn the whole of its walls and ceiling with frescoes. These remain, though the chapel is now emptied of all else, and they suffice to bring scores of art-lovers to Padua. The picture here reproduced represents the meeting and reconciliation between the father and mother of the Virgin before her birth. The peculiarly shaped eyes and eyebrows that Giotto gives to all his characters are specially noteworthy here as in every one of the thirty-eight frescoes. There are three rows of pictures, one above the other and in them are portrayed the principal scenes in the lives of Christ and the Virgin. The painter here reached his high-water mark, showed the very best he could produce in sincere, restrained art. XIX FRANZ HALS _Dutch School_ 1580-04-1666 _Pupil of Karel Van Mander_ Franz Hals belonged to a family which for two hundred years had been highly respected in Haarlem in the Netherlands. The father of the painter left that town for political reasons in 1579, and it was at Antwerp that Franz was born sometime between that date and 1585. His parents took him back to Haarlem as an infant, and that is the town with which his name and fame are most closely associated. Little is known of his early life except that he began his studies with Karel Van Mander and Cornelis Cornelissen. What we know of his family life is not to his credit. In the parish register of 1611 is recorded the birth of a son to Franz Hals and five years later he is on the public records for abusing his wife, who died shortly afterward. He married again within a year and the second wife bore him many children and survived him ten years. Five of his seven sons became painters. Franz Hals drank too much and mixed too freely with the kind of disreputable people he loved to paint, but he never became so degraded that his hand lost its cunning, or his eye its keen vision for that which he wished to portray. In 1644, he was made a director of the Guild of St. Lucas, an institution for the protection of arts and crafts in Haarlem, but from that time onward he sank in popular esteem, deservedly. He fell into debt, then into pauperism, and when he died, about the age of eighty-six, he was buried at public expense in the choir of St. Bavon Church in Haarlem.