Giotto's Circumspection

Abstract

The outlines of an authorial relationship between Giotto, Francesco da Bar-berino, the Tuscan polymath, poet, and image inventor, and Petrus de Abano, the Paduan scientist, can be traced by reexamining two personifications above the north door of the Arena Chapel, part of the Virtues and Vices cycle. The shared motif of branchlike antennae-eyes is based on the extramission theory of vision. The intellectual relationship between Giotto and Francesco casts light on the design of the Arena Chapel's pictorial program, as an exercise not only in iconographic innovation but also in visual rhetoric in an age before art theory.