140 THE LIFE AND LEGEND OF MICHAEL SCOT 



heretical book ^ that rests on his knee. It would be 

 too much to assert that the figure we have described 

 was meant as a portrait of Michael Scot, yet con- 

 sidering the place he holds in the Divine Comedy, it 

 is not impossible that such an idea may have crossed 

 the artist's mind and left these traces in his work. 

 Certainly no better pictorial illustration can be 

 found, at once of Dante's lines, and of the somewhat 

 equivocal reputation which began to haunt Scot from 

 the time of his return to court. There was indeed 

 a singular fitness in the Moslem dress considered as 

 the daily wear of one who, though a Christian and 

 a Churchman, had just done more than any living 

 scholar to introduce the Moorish science and philo- 

 sophy in the West. His choice of such a fashion 

 is evidence that Michael Scot possessed a ready 

 adaptability to his circumstances, and even a vein of 

 aesthetic and dramatic instinct which we might not 

 otherwise have suspected. But it is not to be for- 

 gotten that his versions of Averroes were already 

 condemned by the Church, and that the very manner 

 of Scot's appearance when he broughtthem from Spain 

 must have heightened the suspicions of heresy which 

 began to attach themselves to the translator of these 

 forbidden works. The only hof)e for such a man was 

 that he might be induced to tear his book and turn 

 to less dangerous pursuits. This is exactly the idea 

 which the painter of the Sj^anish Chapel has expressed, 

 and in a form which accords so remarkably with the 

 picturesque descrijDtion of Michael Scot by Dante.^ 



^ See infra, chap. ix. 



2 The fact that Averroes himself is painted on the opposite wall holding 

 in liis hand the Great Commentary seems highly to increase the probability 

 that the figure here described was meant for Michael Scot, the recognised 

 interpreter of that forbidden philosophy. Averroes occupies a similar 

 position in Orgagna's fresco in the Campo Santo of Pisa. 



