Nor, the pattern once assured, has Giotto failed of vivid dramatic presentation. It is surprising to find crowded into so small a space so many new poses all beautifully expressive of the individual shades of a common feeling: the woman to the left of the cross leaning her head on her hand as though sorrow had become a physical pain; the beautiful figure of the youth, with long waving hair, who throws back both arms with a despairing gesture; the woman lifting her robe to wipe her tears; and, most exquisite of all, and most surprising, in its novelty and truth to life, the figure of the girl to the left, drawn towards the terrible scene by a motion of sympathy and yet shrinking back with instinctive shyness and terror. In the child alone Giotto has, as was usually the case, failed of a rhythmical and expressive pose. And what an entirely new study of life is seen here in the variety of the types! In one--the man whose profile cuts the sky to the left--he seems to have been indebted to some Roman portrait-bust; another, on horseback to the left, is clearly a Mongolian type, with slant eyes and pigtail, a curious proof of the intercourse with the extreme East which the Franciscan missionaries had already established. In the drawing of the nude figure of S. Peter, in spite of the unfortunate proportion of the head, the same direct study of nature has enabled Giotto to realise the structure of the figure more adequately than any artist since Roman times. One can well understand the astonishment and delight of Giotto’s contemporaries at this unfolding of the new possibilities of art, which could now interpret all the variety and richness of human life and could so intensify its appeal to the emotions. One other peculiarity of this picture is interesting and characteristic of Giotto’s attitude. In painting the frame of his panel he did not merely add figures as decorative and symbolic accessories, he brought them into relation with the central action, for each of them gazes at S. Peter with a different expression of pity and grief. Giotto had to be dramatic even in his frames.[34]
That Giotto remained in Rome till after the great Jubilee of 1300 is shown by the fragment of his fresco of the Papal Benediction which still remains on a pillar of S. John Lateran. There is every probability that at this time he met Dante, who was collecting the materials for the terrible portrait of Boniface VIII. which he drew in the “Inferno.”