Chastity, Obedience; not rendered as in Giotto's great allegories at
Assisi, of which these are, as it were, his own later simplifications,
but merely as the three mystical Angels that met Francis and his
friars on the road to Siena, crying "Welcome, Lady Poverty." The
picture of St. Francis on the altar, ascribed by Vasari to Cimabue, is
probably by some unknown painter at the close of the thirteenth
century.
The frescoes in the following, the Chapel of the Peruzzi, are very
much better preserved, especially in the scene of Herod's feast. Like
all Giotto's genuine work, they are eloquent in their pictorial
simplicity of diction; there are no useless crowds of spectators, as
in the later work of Ghirlandaio and his contemporaries. On the left
is the life of St. John the Baptist--the Angel appearing to Zacharias,
the birth and naming of the Precursor, the dance of the daughter of
Herodias at Herod's feast. This last has suffered less from
restoration than any other work of Giotto's in Florence; both the
rhythmically moving figure of the girl herself and that of the
musician are very beautiful, and the expression on Herod's face is
worthy of the psychological insight of the author of the Vices and
Virtues in the Madonna's chapel at Padua. Ruskin talks of "the striped
curtain behind the table being wrought with a variety and fantasy of
playing colour which Paul Veronese could not better at his best." On
the right wall is the life of the Evangelist, John the Divine, or
rather its closing scenes; the mystical vision at Patmos, the seer
_dormendo con la faccia arguta_, like the solitary elder who brought
up the rear of the triumphal pageant in Dante's Earthly Paradise; the
raising of Drusiana from the dead; the assumption of St. John. The
curious legend represented in this last fresco--that St. John was
taken up body and soul, _con le due stole_, into Heaven after death,
and that his disciples found his tomb full of manna--was, of course,
based upon the saying that went abroad among the brethren, "that that
disciple should not die"; it is mentioned as a pious belief by St.
Thomas, but is very forcibly repudiated by Giotto's great friend,
Dante; in the _Paradiso_ St. John admonishes him to tell the world
that only Christ and the Blessed Virgin rose from the dead. "In the
earth my body is earth, and shall be there with the others, until our
number be equalled with the eternal design."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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