The Chapel by Michael Downing Page A

the pages I’d saved were puzzling curiosities, including his notes for Chapter One, the chapter devoted to Giotto. There were a few photocopied pages of notes and anecdotes about Giotto from early Italian sources, but most of what constituted this chapter was basically a single page, a fragmentary chronology of Giotto’s career. Over the years, Mitchell had evidently made dozens and dozens of copies, each one covered with a new batch of annoyed annotations and exhortations to himself, as well as asterisks and underscores and arrows, skid marks on a stretch of road he never mastered, a curve that apparently threw him off course every time he approached the task of writing his book.
    I HAD TRIED TO PERSUADE W IDENER L IBRARY TO TAKE THE whole business off my hands, and in deference to Mitchell’s lifetime of service to the university, a graduate student was dispatched to my house and spent the better part of two hours in Mitchell’s study. He was a smoker, and he took several long breaks in the backyard before pronouncing the whole lot “a testament to the best tradition of citizen scholarship,” but not archival quality. He did give me the names of two rare-book dealers who might be interested in a couple of the oddball editions he’d noticed on Mitchell’s Dante bookcase.

    For a few weeks afterward, I managed to believe I would have the wit and the wherewithal to hire a raft or a little skiff in Florence, pack it with all this paper, light it on fire, and send it down the Arno under the Ponte Vecchio like a funeral bier, the sort of honorific sendoff Dante didn’t get. Now, I couldn’t even imagine getting myself on a train to Florence. Unless I could enlist T. to invent a more fitting conclusion to this sad story, it was obvious I was going to leave the suitcase under the bed.
    Before I repacked the whole mess, I put on my reading glasses, found the Sayers folder, and pulled out Mitchell’s preferred version of the lines Sara had read aloud, Dante’s assessment of Giotto’s fame.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Oh, empty glory of our human deeds!
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  How brief it’s green upon the topmost bough,
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  unless perhaps some grosser age succeeds.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  In painting, Cimabue thought as how
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  he held the field; but Giotto rules today
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  so that obscure the other’s fame is now.
    The margins were crammed with Mitchell’s exclamatory huzzahs to the genius of Sayers and Dante: topmost (golden) bough! the painter’s and the painted FIELD! rules (like a monarch? or a pope!). In a fit of inspiration, I got my nail scissors and clipped out the six lines to preserve them as a tribute to Mitchell, Dante, and this brief moment when we were all together in Padua. I laid them onto the second page of my journal, wishing I had some glue or a roll of tape. I finally settled for a slick of lip balm, which held the patch of poetry in the middle of the blank page. I stepped back to admire my work.
    I closed the cover, opened it, turned the page—and it had stuck. But Dante’s praise of Giotto had not. From my distance, Giotto rules today sounded a bit equivocal. I sat down and read the lines again.
    It was the Renaissance that succeeded Giotto, not “some grosser age,” which sort of confirmed the opening lament: “Oh, empty glory of our human deeds!” This was not exactly an endorsement of Giotto’s enduring greatness. True, Dante conceded, Giotto held the field for a while, but so had Cimabue—human deeds, empty glory. Dante, on the other hand, had strolled into Paradise at the end of his poem—a supernatural, unearthly accomplishment.
    Had Dante dissed Giotto?
    The whole passage was weirdly reminiscent of the patronizing tributes Mitchell had so often received from the more eminent deans and senior-faculty grandees,