n
on a large scale, aiming at broad effects, and willing to sacrifice
subtlety to clearness of expression. The health of his whole nature and
his robust good sense are everywhere apparent in his solid, concrete,
human work of art. There is no trace of mysticism, no ecstatic piety,
nothing morbid or hysterical, in his imagination. Imbuing whatever he
handled with the force and freshness of actual existence, Giotto
approached the deep things of the Christian faith and the legend of S.
Francis in the spirit of a man bent simply on realising the objects of his
belief as facts. His allegories of "Poverty," "Chastity," and "Obedience,"
at Assisi, are as beautiful and powerfully felt as they are carefully
constructed. Yet they conceal no abstruse spiritual meaning, but are
plainly painted "for the poor laity of love to read." The artist poet who
coloured the virginal form of Poverty, with the briars beneath her feet
and the roses blooming round her forehead, proved by his well-known
_canzone_ that he was free from monastic Quixotism, and took a practical
view of the value of worldly wealth.[127] His homely humour saved him from
the exaltation and the childishness that formed the weakness of the
Franciscan revival. By the same firm grasp upon reality he created more
than mere abstractions in his _chiaroscuro_ figures of the virtues and
vices at Padua. Fortitude and Justice, Faith and Envy, are gifted by him
with a real corporeal existence. They seem fit to play their parts with
other concrete personalities upon the stage of this world's history.
Giotto in truth possessed a share of that power which belonged to the
Greek sculptors. He embodies myths in physical forms, adequate to their
intellectual meaning. This was in part the secret of the influence he
exercised over the sculptors of the second period;[128] and had the
conditions of the age been favourable to such development, some of the
allegorical types created by him might have passed into the Pantheon of
popular worship as deities incarnate.

The birth of Italian painting is closely connected with the religious life
of the Italians. The building of the church of S. Francis at Assisi gave
it the first great impulse; and to the piety aroused by S. Francis
throughout Italy, but mostly in the valleys of the Apennines, it owed its
animating spirit in the fourteenth century. The church of Assisi is
double. One structure of nave, and choir, and transept, is imposed upon
another;