Laughing with Giotto at Sinners in Hell

Abstract

Giotto’s Last Judgment in the Arena chapel in Padua, and particularly the scene of hell, has tended to be ignored in the considerable scholarly literature on the chapel. Yet, unusual emphases in Giotto’s infernal imagery are revealing of contemporary attitudes to the clergy in early fourteenth-century Padua, as well as providing further evidence of the artist’s acclaimed wit. The author examines the Paduan hell-scene in detail and relates its particulars to other visual and textual descriptions of the netherworld and to contemporary ideas of hell and the devil. Although the devil inspired fear he was also regarded as comic. The extravagant slapstick of Giotto’s demons and the fact that his sinners seem not to exhibit signs of undue suffering might suggest that, in part, the Paduan inferno was meant to be humorous. Not only is there an unusually large number of clerics in Giotto’s hell but several are punished by genital torture, suggesting that they have been guilty of sexual sins. Their unusual prominence in Giotto’s scene may be explained by reference to the virulent anticlericalism that existed in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries as a result of corruption within the Paduan church. The fact that some of the sinful priests wear black habits, similar to those of the Augustinians, suggests also that Giotto, by consigning them to his fictive hell, was taking his revenge on the Augustinian hermits because of the complaints they had made about the size and opulence of the Arena chapel.