Why you need to see the Arena Chapel Frescoes

In the early 1300s, wealthy Paduan banker Enrico Scrovegni asked the Florentine painter Giotto di Bondone (who lived around 1267–1337) to decorate the newly completed Scrovegni family chapel. Giotto chose for his subject a series of scenes from the New Testament, then set about his task using the fresco technique, which involves painting directly onto wet plaster.

In a decisive break with the art of the immediate past, which favoured subdued colours and stylised figures, Giotto injected an unprecedented degree of realism and emotion into his retelling of the Christian story. In doing this, he blazed a trail for the great Renaissance artists who followed.

Giotto covered every inch of wall space around the chapel’s nave with scenes from the lives of the Virgin Mary and of Jesus, all executed in glorious, glowing colours. Adjacent scenes were separated with bands painted to imitate inlaid marble and precious stones. On the west wall is a vast Last Judgement where, among the throngs of the saved, Giotto included his patron, Enrico, presenting a model of his chapel to the Virgin Mary.

The barrel-vaulted ceiling above is a brilliant blue studded with glittering golden stars, and Giotto repeated the blue in the background of several scene

The powerful effect of the chapel lies more than anything in Giotto’s narrative skill. He laid out the chosen scenes in chronological sequence, beginning at the top of the walls with the lives of Mary’s mother and father, Anna and Joachim, and the Virgin’s early life. The earthly life of Jesus is depicted along the central tier, finishing with the Passion cycle and Resurrection. Giotto also placed thematically related scenes above and below each other: the miracle of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead, for example, is above the resurrection of Christ, the first scene foreshadowing the second.

Selecting the key moment in each story—the reaction to a miracle, Judas’s betrayal of Jesus with a kiss—Giotto imagined how the characters must have acted and felt, and represented the emotion of the story through their facial expressions, physical gestures and postures. In the Lamentation, Jesus’s followers wring their hands, their faces tense with grief, as Mary holds the body of her dead son. Elements such as folds in clothing, horizon lines, looks and gestures  direct the viewer’s attention to the central event. Giotto’s innovative use of light and shade to model solid figures, and diagonal lines to create depth, added realism, as did the contemporary styles of dress and architecture, all helping to draw viewers into the drama unfolding on the walls around them

Consecrated in 1305, the chapel was an instant success with visitors, to the consternation of the Augustinian monks living nearby. The monks appealed to Pope Benedict XI to close the chapel on the grounds that it was too big, its decorations too opulent and its bells were too loud. But the Pope disagreed: he had already granted indulgences to all visitors, reducing their time in Purgatory by a year and 40 days.

Visitors in later centuries included Masaccio, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael, all of whom built on Giotto’s artistic innovations.