ng designers as reaching its crisis at the Entombment,
not at the Crucifixion. The expectation that, after experiencing every
form of human suffering, Christ would yet come down from the cross, or
in some other visible and immediate manner achieve for Himself the
victory, might be conceived to have supported in a measure the minds
of those among His disciples who watched by His cross. But when the
agony was closed by actual death, and the full strain was put upon
their faith, by their laying in the sepulchre, wrapped in His
grave-clothes, Him in whom they trusted, "that it had been He which
should have redeemed Israel," their sorrow became suddenly hopeless; a
gulf of horror opened, almost at unawares, under their feet; and in
the poignancy of her astonied despair, it was no marvel that the agony
of the Madonna in the "Pieta" became subordinately associated in the
mind of the early Church with that of their Lord Himself;--a type of
consummate human suffering.

* * * * *

XXXVI.

THE RESURRECTION.

Quite one of the loveliest designs of the series. It was a favourite
subject with Giotto; meeting, in all its conditions, his love of what
was most mysterious, yet most comforting and full of hope, in the
doctrines of his religion. His joy in the fact of the Resurrection,
his sense of its function, as the key and primal truth of
Christianity, was far too deep to allow him to dwell on any of its
minor circumstances, as later designers did, representing the moment
of bursting the tomb, and the supposed terror of its guards. With
Giotto the leading thought is not of physical reanimation, nor of the
momentarily exerted power of breaking the bars of the grave; but the
consummation of Christ's work in the first manifesting to human eyes,
and the eyes of one who had loved Him and believed in Him, His power
to take again the life He had laid down. This first appearance to her
out of whom He had cast seven devils is indeed the very central fact
of the Resurrection. The keepers had not seen Christ; they had seen
only the angel descending, whose countenance was like lightning: for
fear of him they became as dead; yet this fear, though great enough to
cause them to swoon, was so far conquered at the return of morning,
that they were ready to take money-payment for giving a false report
of the circumstances. The Magdalen, therefore, is the first witness of
the Resurrection; to the love, for whose sake mu