"I I"

There was an unassuming little chapel in Padua. Its exterior was nowhere near as grand as the Basilica of Santa Maria della Salute or St. Mark's, yet it was famous for Giotto's frescoes inside.

Ancient frescoes were easily affected by moisture, flash photography, and other factors, so the chapel limited visitors to twenty-five people a day, and reservations had to be made one day in advance.

They had decided on a whim the previous night to visit Padua, and by then it was too late to make a reservation. However, Gianluca had a doctorate in historic preservation and knew quite a few people, so they went to visit that afternoon.

Dante wrote in the Purgatory of the Divine Comedy: "O vain glory of human powers! Cimabue thought he held the field in painting, and now Giotto has the fame, eclipsing the former's renown."

Dante and Giotto had lived in the same era. Giotto was called the Dante of painting. Although his paintings still bore characteristics resembling the barbaric art of the Middle Ages, they concealed a secular spirit relatively independent from religious culture—the so-called humanism.

The greatest difference between this The Last Judgment, directly opposite the main entrance, and Michelangelo's The Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel was that although its creator had known Dante, the scenes of hell did not borrow from Dante's descriptions.

In Giotto's painting, demons devoured evil people and then excreted them, only to swallow them again. What they ate and what they expelled were the same, yet they did not find it disgusting.

According to the New Testament, sinners were cast into the lake of fire for the second death—the death of the soul. The good were granted the water of life by Jesus, so their souls might live forever. After the judgment, heaven and