But, without detracting in any way from what was due to Giotto’s superlative genius, it may be admitted that something was given by the propitious moment of his advent. For the optics of the imagination are variable: in an age like the present, men and events grow larger as they recede into the mist of the past; it is rarely that we think of a man as truly great till he has for long received the consecration of death. But there must be periods when men have a surer confidence in their own judgments--periods of such creative activity that men can dare to measure the reputations of their contemporaries, which are of their own creation, against the reputations of antiquity--and in such periods the magnifying, mythopoetical effect, which for us comes only with time, takes place at once, and swells their contemporaries to heroic proportions. It was thus that Dante saw those of his own time--could even see himself--in the proportions they must always bear. The fact that S. Francis was canonised two years after death, and within twenty years was commemorated by the grandest monument in Italy, is a striking proof of that superb self-confidence.
We will return to the frescoes: the evidence for their being in the main by Giotto himself rests not only on the general consensus of tradition, but upon the technical characteristics and, most of all, upon the imaginative conception of the subjects. None the less, in so big a work it is probable that assistants were employed to carry out Giotto’s designs, and this will account for many slight discrepancies of style. Certain frescoes, however--notably the last three of the series--show such marked differences that we must suppose that one of these assistants rose to the level of an original creative artist.
In the fresco of S. Francis kneeling before the Pope, we have already noticed Giotto’s close connection with the artists of the Roman school. Their influence is not confined to the figures and drapery; the architecture--in which it may be noted, by the way, that Giotto has already arrived instinctively at the main ideas of linear perspective--with its minute geometrical inlays, its brackets and mouldings, derived from classic forms, is entirely in the manner of the Cosmati. But the composition illustrates, none the less, the differences which separate him from the master of the Esau fresco. Giotto is at this stage of his career not only less accomplished, but he has nothing of that painter’s elegant classical grace. He has, instead, the greatest and rarest gift of dramatic expressiveness. For though the poses, especially of the bishop seated on the Pope’s left, lack grace, and the faces show but little research for positive beauty or regularity of feature, the actual scene, the dramatic situation, is given in an entirely new and surprising way. Of what overwhelming importance for the history of the world this situation was, perhaps Giotto himself could scarcely realise. For this probably represents, not the approbation of the order of minor brethren by Honorius III., which was a foregone conclusion, but the permission to preach given by Innocent III., a far more critical moment in the history of the movement. For Innocent III., in whom the Papacy reached the zenith of its power, had already begun the iniquitous Albigensian crusade, and was likely to be suspicious of any unofficial religious teaching. It cannot have been with unmixed pleasure that he saw before him this poverty-stricken group of Francis and his eleven followers, whose appearance declared in the plainest terms their belief in that primitive communistic Christianity which, in the case of Petrus Waldus, had been branded by excommunication. In fact, the man who now asked for the Papal blessing on his mission was in most respects a Waldensian. Francis (the name Francesco is itself significant) was probably by birth, certainly by predilection[27] and temperament, half a Frenchman; his mother came from Provence, and his father had business connections at Lyons; so that it is not impossible that Francis was influenced by what he knew, through them, of the Waldensian movement. In any case, his teaching was nearly identical with that of Petrus Waldus; both taught religious individualism and, by precept at all events, communism. It was, therefore, not unnatural that Innocent should not respond at once to S. Francis’ application. According to one legend, the Pope’s first advice to him was to consort with swine, as befitted one of his miserable appearance. But, whatever his spontaneous impulses may have been, he had the good sense to accept the one man through whom the Church could again become popular and democratic.