counted on its walls, adds to the plausibility of his
supposition.

[Footnote 2: For these historical details I am chiefly indebted to the
very careful treatise of Selvatico, _Sulla Cappellina degli Scrovegni
nell'Arena di Padova_. Padua, 1836.]

Enrico Scrovegno was, however, towards the close of his life, driven
into exile, and died at Venice in 1320. But he was buried in the
chapel he had built; and has one small monument in the sacristy, as
the founder of the building, in which he is represented under a Gothic
niche, standing, with his hands clasped and his eyes raised; while
behind the altar is his tomb, on which, as usual at the period, is a
recumbent statue of him. The chapel itself may not unwarrantably be
considered as one of the first efforts of Popery in resistance of the
Reformation: for the Reformation, though not victorious till the
sixteenth, began in reality in the thirteenth century; and the
remonstrances of such bishops as our own Grossteste, the martyrdoms of
the Albigenses in the Dominican crusades, and the murmurs of those
"heretics" against whose aspersions of the majesty of the Virgin this
chivalrous order of the Cavalieri Godenti was instituted, were as
truly the signs of the approach of a new era in religion, as the
opponent work of Giotto on the walls of the Arena was a sign of the
approach of a new era in art.

The chapel having been founded, as stated above, in 1303, Giotto
appears to have been summoned to decorate its interior walls about
the year 1306,--summoned, as being at that time the acknowledged
master of painting in Italy. By what steps he had risen to this
unquestioned eminence it is difficult to trace; for the records of his
life, strictly examined, and freed from the verbiage and conjecture of
artistical history, nearly reduce themselves to a list of the cities
of Italy where he painted, and to a few anecdotes, of little meaning
in themselves, and doubly pointless in the fact of most of them being
inheritances of the whole race of painters, and related successively
of all in whose biographies the public have deigned to take an
interest. There is even question as to the date of his birth; Vasari
stating him to have been born in 1276, while Baldinucci, on the
internal evidence derived from Vasari's own narrative, throws the date
back ten years.[3] I believe, however, that Vasari is most probably
accurate in his first main statement; and that his errors, always
numerous, are in t