Fortitude and Justice, Faith and Envy, are gifted by him with a real corporeal existence.

They seem fit to play their parts with other concrete personalities upon the stage of this world's history.
Giotto in truth possessed a share of that power which belonged to the Greek sculptors.

He embodies myths in physical forms, adequate to their intellectual meaning.

This was in part the secret of the influence he exercised over the sculptors of the second period;[128] and had the conditions of the age been favourable to such development, some of the allegorical types created by him might have passed into the Pantheon of popular worship as deities incarnate.
The birth of Italian painting is closely connected with the religious life of the Italians.

The building of the church of S.Francis at Assisi gave it the first great impulse; and to the piety aroused by S.Francis throughout Italy, but mostly in the valleys of the Apennines, it owed its animating spirit in the fourteenth century.