In the drawing of the figure Giotto was surpassed by many meaner artists of the fifteenth century.  Nor had he that quality of genius which selects a high type of beauty, and is scrupulous to shun the commonplace.  The faces of even his most sacred personages are often almost vulgar.  In his choice of models for saints and apostles we already trace the Florentine instinct for contemporary portraiture.  Yet, though his knowledge of anatomy was defective, and his taste was realistic, Giotto solved the great problem of figurative art far better than more learned and fastidious painters.  He never failed to make it manifest that what he meant to represent was living.  Even to the non-existent he gave the semblance of reality.  We cannot help believing in his angels leaning waist-deep from the blue sky, wringing their hands in agony above the Cross, pacing like deacons behind Christ when He washes the feet of His disciples, or sitting watchful and serene upon the empty sepulchre.  He was, moreover, essentially a fresco-painter, working with rapid decision on a large scale, aiming at broad effects, and willing to sacrifice subtlety to clearness of expression.  The health of his whole nature and his robust good sense are everywhere apparent in his solid, concrete, human work of art.  There is no trace of mysticism, no ecstatic piety, nothing morbid or hysterical, in his imagination.  Imbuing whatever he handled with the force and freshness of actual existence, Giotto approached the deep things of the Christian faith and the legend of S. Francis in the spirit of a man bent simply on realising the objects of his belief as facts.  His allegories of “Poverty,” “Chastity,” and “Obedience,” at Assisi, are as beautiful and powerfully felt as they are carefully constructed.  Yet they conceal no abstruse spiritual meaning, but are plainly painted “for the poor laity of love to read.”  The artist poet who coloured the virginal form of Poverty, with the briars beneath her feet and the roses blooming round her forehead, proved by his well-known canzone that he was free from monastic Quixotism, and took a practical view of the value of worldly wealth.[127] His homely humour saved him from the exaltation and the childishness that formed the weakness of the Franciscan revival.  By the same firm grasp upon reality he created more than mere abstractions in his chiaroscuro figures of the virtues and vices at Padua.  Fortitude and Justice, Faith and Envy, are gifted by him with a real corporeal existence.  They seem fit to play their parts with other concrete personalities upon the stage of this world’s history.  Giotto in truth possessed a share of that power which belonged to the Greek sculptors.  He embodies myths in physical forms, adequate to their intellectual meaning.  This was in part the secret of the influence he exercised over the sculptors of the second period;[128] and had the conditions of the age been favourable to such development, some of the allegorical types created by him might have passed into the Pantheon of popular worship as deities incarnate.