Free The Chapel by Michael Downing

firmly fixed on the side of the saved. Yet Dante’s poem had relegated the Scrovegnis to the deepest-down depths of hell.
    Giotto and Dante were contemporaries, and I knew they were both alive in 1300, but when I tried to recall who did what when—well, I couldn’t remember my children’s birthdays, never mind the speculative and often wildly revised estimates for the completion of a pre-Renaissance painting or a poem. Mitchell had shown me reproductions of Giotto’s Last Judgment many times, tracing his finger through the layered lines of saints and sinners to demonstrate the painter’s debt to Dante’s spiraling circles of hell. Mitchell believed that Giotto had been compelled to paint Enrico and his chapel intothe scene because Scrovegni and everyone else in Italy had read The Inferno and Scrovegni wanted a happier ending for himself and his family name. This all made sense and, as was so often true of my conversations with Mitchell, did not really address my question. Why did Dante pick on Scrovegni, of all people?
    One startling detail from the video, which Mitchell had never mentioned and maybe never knew, wasn’t swallowed up in this historical stew—a teardrop. I was looking for a tear. It was the reason I had migrated to the corner of the windowed wall near the Last Judgment and looked up to the second row of panels from the top. It was somewhere in Number 20 on Sara’s map, the Slaughter of the Innocents.
    In that frame, a central patch of deep blue sky was bordered by two white towers. From a windowed parapet on the left, the red-robed King Herod pointed a finger, directing the attention of the hooded and helmeted soldiers beneath him. On the right were the white buttresses and arched windows of a church, half-hidden by a crowd of grieving mothers. One woman was cradling her baby, only its head visible above the back of a bigger soldier with a metal rod poised to break the woman’s embrace, and next to her a blue-robed woman was losing her grip as a bearded soldier tugged at her baby’s ankle with his left hand, a sword in his right hand aimed at the child’s bent spine. At this man’s feet, and piled shin-high against his comrades, were the bodies and severed heads of dozens of pierced and broken children, bent limbs, a bruised buttocks, and feet splayed at impossible angles. The babies were bulging out of the bottom of the frame, blurring the border between then and now, as if their broken bodies might fall down into your arms.
    â€œYou need these. Trust me.” Shelby had sidled up to me and slid her hand around my waist. She passed me her binoculars and slipped away.
    Every hair on every child’s prone or thrown-back head had been imagined and painted with a separate, singular, delicate stroke of abristle or two of Giotto’s brush. I felt a rush of tears, and the magnifying lenses were wet before I could pull them from my eyes. I was sobbing, and I was impatient with myself because I knew our time was almost up, but the vicious vulgarity of the murders and the tender hand of the painter who had labored over every hair on every baby’s head were combining and recombining in some sort of chemical reaction I couldn’t control.
    A uniformed man called “ Tempo di andare! ” from somewhere just behind me, and after the hushed groans of disappointment from the other guests died down, he called out again, “Time!” and I rubbed my sleeve across my eyes and looked through the lenses to the farthest-away woman at the front of the clot of mourning mothers. She was wearing green, and her empty hands were crossed in front of her hollow face, and there, from the sad slit of her eye, at the outside corner and tracing its way down her pink cheek until it gathered into a tiny dark drop as it fell from her jaw, I saw it. I saw where Giotto had painted, for the first time in the history of the world, a human tear. Behind her, a second tear