This, Giotto tells you to believe as the beginning of all knowledge and
all power. [Footnote: So also the Master-builder of the Ducal Palace of
Venice. See Fors Clavigera for June of this year.] This he tells you to
believe, as a thing which he himself knows.
He will tell you nothing but what he _does_ know.
2. Therefore, though Giovanna Pisano and his fellow sculptors had
given, literally, the taking of the rib out of Adam's side, Giotto
merely gives the mythic expression of the truth he knows,--"they two
shall be one flesh."
3. And though all the theologians and poets of his time would have
expected, if not demanded, that his next assertion, after that of the
Creation of Man, should be of the Fall of Man, he asserts nothing of
the kind. He knows nothing of what man was. What he is, he knows best
of living men at that hour, and proceeds to say. The next sculpture is
of Eve spinning and Adam hewing the ground into clods. Not
_digging_: you cannot, usually, dig but in ground already dug. The
native earth you must hew.
They are not clothed in skins. What would have been the use of Eve
spinning if she could not weave? They wear, each, one simple piece of
drapery, Adam's knotted behind him, Eve's fastened around her neck with
a rude brooch.
Above them are an oak and an apple-tree. Into the apple-tree a little
bear is trying to climb.
The meaning of which entire myth is, as I read it, that men and women
must both eat their bread with toil.
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