The corollaries of this American ethos were, on the one hand, an affinity for personal enterprise and industry and, on the other, a horror of dependency and contempt for anything that smacked of a mendicant mentality.
We seem to be a long way from the Exaltation of the Cross, the subject of the last scene in Gaddi's fresco cycle, in which the Emperor Heraclius, having alighted from his horse by order of an angel and walking barefoot like a mendicant friar, bears the relic into the holy city.
