282 ARIADNE FLORENT1NA. 



church of Assisi, as if that were merely an accidental occur- 

 rence of blind walls for Giotto to paint on ! 



But how came the upper church of Assisi there ? How 

 came it to be vaulted to be aisled ? How came Giotto to be 

 asked to paint upon it ? 



The art that built it, good or bad, must have been an Italian 

 one, before Giotto. He could not have painted on the air. 

 Let us see how his panels were made for him. 



64. This Captain the centre of our first group Arnolfo, 

 has always hitherto been called ' Arnolfo di Lapo ; ' Amolfo 

 the son of Lapo. 



Modern investigators come down on us delightedly, to tell 

 us Arnolfo was not the son of Lapo. 



In these days you will have half a dozen doctors, writing 

 each a long book, and the sense of all will be, Arnolfo wasn't 

 the son of Lapo. Much good may you get of that ! 



Well, you will find the fact to be, there was a great North- 

 man builder, a true son of Thor, who came down into Italy 

 in 1200, served the order of St. Francis there, built Assisi, 

 taught Arnolfo how to build, with Thor's hammer, and disap- 

 peared, leaving his name uncertain Jacopo Lapo nobody 

 knows what. Arnolfo always recognizes this man as his true 

 father, who put the soul-life into him ; he is known to his 

 Florentines always as Lapo's Arnolfo. 



That, or some likeness of that, is the vital fact. You never 

 can get at the literal limitation of living facts. They disguise 

 themselves by the very strength of their life : get told again 

 and again in different ways by all manner of people ; the 

 literalness of them is turned topsy-turvy, inside-out, over 

 and over again ; then the fools come and read them wrong 

 side upwards, or else, say there never was a fact at all. Noth- 

 ing delights a true blockhead so much as to prove a negative ; 

 to show that everybody has been wrong. Fancy the delicious 

 sensation, to an empty-headed creature, of fancying for a 

 moment that he has emptied everybody else's head as well as 

 his own ! nay, that, for once, his own hollow bottle of a head 

 has had the best of other bottles, and has been first empty ; 

 first to know nothing. 



