Giotto so plainly as some lines he wrote on poverty, most likely after painting his famous Allegories when he had an opportunity to observe how little the manners and customs of mediæval monks corresponded with the spirit of their founder. Every line of the poem is full of common sense and knowledge of human frailty. Many, Giotto remarks somewhat sarcastically, praise poverty; but he does not himself recommend it as virtue is seldom co-existent with extremes; and voluntary poverty, upon which he touches in a few caustic lines, is the cause of many ills, and rarely brings peace to those who have chosen her as a mate and who too often study how to avoid her company; thus it happens that under the false mantle of the gentlest of lambs appears the fiercest wolf, and by such hypocrisy is the world corrupted.[75] [Illustration: THE MARRIAGE OF ST. FRANCIS WITH POVERTY (D. ANDERSON--_photo_)] Giotto, an artist before he was a moralist, undertook to carry out the wishes of his patrons, and thought only how he could best fill the triangular spaces of the ceiling with the figures of saints and angels. It was by no means an easy task, but Giotto succeeded so well that these four frescoes are reckoned among his masterpieces and the wonders of the thirteenth century. They certainly show a marked advance upon the earlier works in the Transept, but they lack the power and assurance of those in the Upper Church, where the youthful painter all but reached the zenith of his fame. _The Marriage of St. Francis and Poverty._[76]--In this fresco Giotto has represented three incidents, but just as they all refer to one subject, so do the figures form a perfect harmony, faultless as decoration and beautiful as a picture. A youth, imitating the charity of St. Francis to whom his guardian angel is pointing, is seen on the left giving his cloak to a beggar, while upon the other side, a miser clutching his money-bag and a youth with a falcon on his gloved hand refuse to listen to the good suggestions of an angel and of the friar who stands between them. The lines of decoration are further carried out by the two angels who fly up carrying a temple with an enclosed garden, perhaps symbolising Charity, and a franciscan habit, which may be the symbol of Obedience. But these are details and the eye does not rest upon them, but rather is carried straight into the midst of a court of attendant angels where Christ, standing upon a rock, gives the hand of St. Francis to the Lady Poverty, who slightly draws away as if in warning of the hardships and disillusions in store for him who links his life with hers. Cold and white, her garments torn by a network of accacia thorns, she is indeed the true widow of Christ, who, after His death as Dante says, "... slighted and obscure Thousand and hundred years and more, remain'd Without a single suitor, till he came."[77]