charms of youthful art that can
enter this little sanctuary without a glow of delight. From the roof,
with its sky of ultramarine, powdered with stars and interspersed with
medallions containing the heads of our Saviour, the Virgin and the
Apostles, to the mock paneling of the nave, below the windows, the whole
is completely covered with frescoes, in excellent preservation, and all
more or less painted by Giotto's own hand, except six in the tribune,
which however have apparently been executed from his cartoons....

"These frescoes form a most important document in the history of
Giotto's mind, exhibiting all his peculiar merits, although in a state
as yet of immature development. They are full of fancy and invention;
the composition is almost always admirable, although sometimes too
studiously symmetrical; the figures are few and characteristic, each
speaking for itself, the impersonation of a distinct idea, and most
dramatically grouped and contrasted; the attitudes are appropriate,
easy, and natural; the action and gesticulation singularly vivid; the
expression is excellent, except when impassioned grief induces
caricature:--devoted to the study of Nature as he is, Giotto had not yet
learnt that it is suppressed feeling which affects one most. The head of
our Saviour is beautiful throughout--that of the Virgin not so good--she
is modest, but not very graceful or celestial:--it was long before he
succeeded in his Virgins--they are much too matronly: among the
accessory figures, graceful female forms occasionally appear,
foreshadowing those of his later works at Florence and Naples, yet they
are always clumsy about the waist and bust, and most of them are
under-jawed, which certainly detracts from the sweetness of the female
countenance. His delineation of the naked is excellent, as compared with
the works of his predecessors, but far unequal to what he attained in
his later years,--the drapery, on the contrary, is noble, majestic, and
statuesque; the coloring is still pale and weak,--it was long ere he
improved in this point; the landscape displays little or no amendment
upon the Byzantine; the architecture, that of the fourteenth century, is
to the figures that people it in the proportion of dolls' houses to the
children that play with them,--an absurdity long unthinkingly acquiesced
in, from its occurrence in the classic bas-reliefs from which it had
been traditionally derived;--and, finally, the lineal perspective