Giotto paints in Padua

The story

A banker who wanted to be forgiven

In Padua, at the beginning of the 1300s, there lived a very rich man, Enrico Scrovegni. His father, Reginaldo, was a banker who lent money at very high interest, an activity the Church considered a grave sin, usury. Dante, in the Divine Comedy, puts Reginaldo in Hell, among the usurers. Enrico wanted to restore the family's good name, and decided to have a chapel built.

He bought a plot of land inside the remains of an ancient Roman amphitheatre, the Arena, and built a small church dedicated to Santa Maria della Carità, which was inaugurated on 25 March 1303, the day of the Annunciation, and definitively consecrated on the same day in 1305. To decorate it he called the most famous painter of the time: Giotto.

The painter of sheep

Giotto di Bondone was born around 1267, according to tradition at Vespignano, in Tuscany, near Florence. A legend, told by the painter and biographer Giorgio Vasari, says that as a boy he was a little shepherd and drew his sheep on a stone; the painter Cimabue, passing by, saw the drawing, was impressed and took him into his workshop. We do not know whether it is true, but certainly Giotto learned the trade and soon surpassed his teachers.

Medieval painting before him was usually very solemn: stiff figures, gold backgrounds, faces similar to one another, little movement, like icons. Giotto changed everything. He painted figures with volume, as if they had a real body, heavy and three-dimensional, wrapped in clothes that fall in natural folds. His scenes have deep space, with buildings and landscapes in which the figures move believably.

The chapel

Between 1303 and 1305 Giotto and his assistants covered all the walls with frescoes, that is, with paintings done on plaster that is still damp, so that the colour sinks into the wall. They worked in “days”: each day only as much plaster was laid as could be painted before it dried. The edges of the days can still be made out if you look at the frescoes close up.

The cycle tells, in three bands from top to bottom, the stories of Joachim and Anne, Mary's parents, then the life of Mary and finally the life and passion of Jesus. On the entrance wall is the Last Judgement, in which Enrico Scrovegni can be seen offering the Virgin a small model of the chapel. Below, in monochrome, are the allegories of the Virtues and the Vices. The ceiling is a deep blue like a night sky, dotted with golden stars.

The scenes are famous for their emotions. In the “Flight into Egypt” the donkeys and people are realistic. In the “Nativity” there are shepherds and sheep. In the “Lamentation over the Dead Christ” the angels fly in the sky weeping and twisting, while at the foot of the cross the family show all their despair. For the first time in Western art the sacred figures seem like real people who suffer and who are moved.

A chapel to protect

After Padua, Giotto worked at Assisi, Florence, Rome and Naples. In 1334 he became master builder of Florence Cathedral and designed the bell tower, which was later called “Giotto's Campanile”. He died in 1337. Dante remembered him in the Purgatorio, writing that Giotto had overshadowed the fame of Cimabue.

The Scrovegni Chapel is today one of the most precious places in Italian painting. To protect the frescoes from damp and from the breath of visitors, people enter in small groups, first passing through a chamber where they wait for about fifteen minutes. In 2021 the chapel was added, together with other fresco cycles of Padua, to UNESCO's World Heritage List.