A subject worthy of Giotto's pencil, and one likely to be offered to him if he was then in Florence, we have therefore found in this visit of the Duke and the Cardinal. But that Giotto was in Florence at that time is certain. He painted a portrait[158] of the Duke in the Palace of the Signory; and through that prince, as Vasari tells, he was invited by King Robert to go down to work in Naples. All this, in the absence of evidence of any value in favour of another date, makes it, at the very least, highly probable that the fresco was a work of 1326 or 1327. In 1326 Dante had been dead for five years. The grudge his fellow-townsmen had nourished against him for so long was now worn out. We know that very soon after his death Florence began to be proud of him; and even such of his old enemies as still survived would be willing that Giotto should set him in a place of honour among the great Florentines who help to fill the fresco of the Paradise. That he was already dead would be no hindrance to his finding room alongside of Charles of Calabria; for the age was wisely tolerant of such anachronisms.[159] Had Dante been still living the painter would have been less at liberty to create, out of the records he doubtless possessed of the features of the friend who had paid him beforehand with one immortal line, the face which, as we look into it, we feel to be a glorified transcript of what it was in the flesh. It is the face of one who has wellnigh forgotten his earthly life, instead of having the worst of it still before him; of one who, from that troubled Italy which like his own Sapia he knew but as a pilgrim, has passed to the 'true city,' of which he remains for evermore a citizen--the city faintly imaged by Giotto upon the chapel wall. FOOTNOTES: [142] It is best known, and can now be judged of only through the lithograph after a tracing made by Mr. Seymour Kirkup before it was restored and ruined: published by the Arundel Society. [143] Antonio Pucci, born in 1300, in his _Centiloquio_, describes the figure of Dante as being clothed in blood-red. Philip Villani also mentions it. He wrote towards the close of the fourteenth century; Vasari towards the middle of the sixteenth. [144] In the Munich collection of drawings, and ascribed to Masaccio, but with how much reason I do not know. [145] Painted by Domenico Michelino in 1465, after a sketch by Alessio Baldovinetto. [146] 'Wearing over the long hair of the Frenchmen of the period a coroneted cap.'--Crowe and Cavalcaselle, _History of Painting in Italy_ (1864), i. 264. [147] Vol. i. p. 269. [148] The Priorate was the highest office to which a citizen could aspire, but by no means the highest in Florence. [149] I suppose the meaning is 'immediately previous.' [150] John Villani, _Cronica_, viii. 40 and 49; and Perrens, _Hist. de Florence_, under date of 1301. Charles entered Florence on the 1st of November of that year, and left it in the following April.