Giotto and his works in Padua

Towards the close of the thirteenth century, Enrico Scrovegno, a noble Paduan, purchased, in his native city, the remains of the Roman Amphitheatre or Arena from the family of the Delesmanini, to whom those remains had been granted by the Emperor Henry III. of Germany in 1090. For the power of making this purchase, Scrovegno was in all probability indebted to his father, Reginald, who, for his avarice, is placed by Dante in the seventh circle of the Inferno, and regarded apparently as the chief of the usurers there, since he is the only one who addresses Dante.[1] The son, having possessed himself of the Roman ruin, or of the site which it had occupied, built himself a fortified palace upon the ground, and a chapel dedicated to the Annunciate Virgin.

[Footnote 1:

"Noting the visages of some who lay Beneath the pelting of that dolorous fire, One of them all I knew not; but perceived That pendent from his neck each bore a pouch, With colours and with emblems various marked, On which it seemed as if their eye did feed. And when amongst them looking round I came, A yellow purse I saw, with azure wrought, That wore a lion's countenance and port. Then, still my sight pursuing its career, Another I beheld, than blood more red, A goose display of whiter wing than curd. And one who bore a fat and azure swine Pictured on his white scrip, addressed me thus: What dost thou in this deep? Go now and know, Since yet thou livest, that my neighbour here, Vitaliano, on my left shall sit. A Paduan with these Florentines am I. Ofttimes they thunder in mine ears, exclaiming, Oh! haste that noble knight, he who the pouch With the three goats will bring. This said, he writhed The mouth, and lolled the tongue out, like an ox That licks his nostrils."

Canto xvii.

This passage of Cary's Dante is not quite so clear as that translator's work usually is. "One of them all I knew not" is an awkward periphrasis for "I knew none of them." Dante's indignant expression of the effect of avarice in withering away distinctions of character, and the prophecy of Scrovegno, that his neighbor Vitaliano, then living, should soon be with him, to sit on his left hand, is rendered a little obscure by the transposition of the word "here." Cary has also been afraid of the excessive homeliness of Dante's imagery; "whiter wing than curd" being in the original "whiter than butter." The attachment of the purse to the neck, as a badge of shame, in the Inferno, is found before Dante's time; as, for instance, in the windows of Bourges cathedral (see Plate iii. of MM. Martin and Cahier's beautiful work). And the building of the Arena Chapel by the son, as a kind of atonement for the avarice of the father, is very characteristic of the period, in which the use of money for the building of churches was considered just as meritorious as its unjust accumulation was criminal. I have seen, in a MS. Church-service of the thirteenth century, an illumination representing Church-Consecration, illustrating the words, "Fundata est domus Domini supra verticem montium," surrounded for the purpose of contrast, by a grotesque, consisting of a picture of a miser's death-bed, a demon drawing his soul out of his mouth, while his attendants are searching in his chests for his treasures.]