Arena Chapel Research Articles

Gestures in Passion Cycles in Central European Mural Painting

In medieval Passion cycles represented in Czech, Slovak (former Hungary), and Polish murals dating from the fourteenth to the fifteenth centuries one may observe a number of-gestures which appear in respective scenes starting from the Entry into Jerusalem and ending with the Entombment (laying in the sepulchre). The most significant gesture in the entry scene is the outstretched hand of Christ riding a donkey. It is the language of gesture used since antiquity, transmitted through Byzantine and Italian art (including Giotto’s Entry into Jerusalem in his Arena Chapel frescoes), and transferred into art north of the Alps.

Gesty w cyklach pasyjnych w malarstwie naściennym w Europie środkowej

W średniowiecznych cyklach pasyjnych, z terenu dzisiejszych Czech, Słowacji (dawny obszar Węgier) i Polski, na malowidłach naściennych zaobserwować można szereg gestów, pojawiających się w poszczególnych scenach, począwszy od wjazdu do Jerozolimy a kończąc na scenie złożenia do grobu. Artykuł analizuje poszczególny gesty, w kontekście religijnym i historycznym.

Imago humilis: Humor, Irony, and the Rhetorical Wit of the Sacred in the Arena Chapel, Padua

In 1986, Andrew Ladis identified the extensive visual humor in the Arena Chapel’s pictorial cycle as a testament to the master painter Giotto di Bondone’s legendary wit. Yet scholarship on fourteenth-century devotional and ecclesiastical art still tends to cast “low,” “secular” humor as the antithesis to “high” veneration and theology. This essay challenges this notion by reassessing humor’s purpose in the Arena Chapel. Rather than serving as an indicator of Giotto’s personality alone—a product of nascent Renaissance humanism colored by comic literature—humor played a role in the cycle’s scheme of paradoxical contrasts (oppositio), its presence likely motivated in part by ties to rhetorical traditions favored particularly by Franciscans. Humor and wit were intimately tied to the dynamic of oppositio in the sermo humilis (sermon in a plain or humble style), a genre preached daily and considered most appropriate for conveying the irony of the Christian God’s Incarnation, the focus of Giotto’s pictorial program.

Peace and Penance in Late Medieval Italy by Katherine Ludwig Jansen

Reviewed by: Peace and Penance in Late Medieval Italy by Katherine Ludwig Jansen Carrie E. Beneš Peace and Penance in Late Medieval Italy. By Katherine Ludwig Jansen. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2018. Pp. xxii, 253. $39.95/£30.00 hardcover; $27.99 ebook. ISBN 978-0-691-17774-8 hardcover; 978-1-4008-8905-1 ebook.) The ideal of peace may seem universal: while the United Nations deploys peace-keeping troops, the rest of us employ yoga, meditation, and other techniques to acquire inner peace. Yet as a concept peace is elusive, recognized most easily in its disturbance, breach, or absence. This was as true in medieval Italy as it is today: while preachers and magistrates extolled the benefits of peace, scholars generally characterize the era as one of vendetta, factionalism, and regional warfare. But conflict and conflict resolution are two sides of the same coin, and one of the chief contributions of Jansen's new book is its insistence that all of the well-studied hand-wringing about violence betrays a fundamental belief in peace as a key social virtue. Jansen's book therefore focuses on peace agreements: what we might call the aftermath of violence in medieval Italy. Jansen brings an impressive range of evidence to her study, using sermons, political treatises, chronicles, and works of art to enrich and contextualize her analysis of over five hundred peace agreements from Florentine notarial registers between 1257 and 1343. While scholars debate the extent to which events and practices in Florence can be considered representative of medieval Italy more broadly, Jansen persuasively employs the riches of the Florentine archives to illuminate peacemaking as a broad social phenomenon. Chapter 1 explores how the confessional requirements introduced at the Fourth Lateran Council and the preaching of the new mendicant orders encouraged a culture of penitence—for example in the "Great Devotion" of 1233 or the Battuti of 1310. Chapter 2 then analyzes how political theorists and communal councils (including figures such as Remigio de' Girolami and Albertanus of Brescia) linked the practice of personal penitence to the maintenance or restoration of civic order: in other words, arguing that citizens' acquisition of inner peace through penitence was an essential prerequisite to the outer peace of the community. Chapters 3 and 4 represent the core of Jansen's archival work, laying out the social conventions and legal requirements that surrounded these peace agreements and providing a typology of the crimes which they were drawn up to resolve—from burglary to rape, armed assault, and vendetta. Such agreements were employed by both men and women along a broad social spectrum. Chapter 5 then turns to pictorial representations of peace agreements, focusing first on depictions of the "angel of peace" uniting two parties in a conflict, and [End Page 711] second on representations of the traditional "kiss of peace": when informed by contemporary peacemaking rituals, for example, Judas' kiss of betrayal in Giotto's scene in the Arena Chapel inverts not just an expression of personal affection but a legal act of reconciliation and an affirmation of community. Jansen's book stands out first for its breadth and interdisciplinarity: subjects that had previously been treated chiefly in isolation (penitential culture, communal ideologies, ritual and artistic practices) are revealed as facets of the same social problem. In this it closely resembles Dennis Romano's important recent book on the marketplaces of medieval Italy. Secondly, Jansen's focus on practice, performance, and social meaning highlights the social roles played by notaries as well as women—who participate here not only as victims and allegorical inspiration but also as perpetrators and mediators. The book's final great virtue is the case it presents against positivist views of state-formation, which see progress from the informal or private justice of "pre-modern" societies to the formal or public justice of "modern" societies: Jansen's analysis reveals clearly the close co-operation between private and public forms of justice in medieval Florence. Here her work dovetails with related studies by Glenn Kumhera (2017) and James Palmer (forthcoming). In fact, this demolishing of an artificial public/private divide reinforces Jansen's fundamental point that medieval Italians saw the personal as inextricably...

“Propria Figura”: The Advent of Facsimile Portraiture in Italian Art

Two portraits of Enrico Scrovegni, patron of the Arena Chapel, are ‘facsimile portraits’ made in the early decades of the fourteenth century; that is to say that they exploit mechanical means of reproduction with the intention of capturing and recreating exact physical likeness. Close visual analysis establishes the use of life casts, and shows how the sculptors responded to the new technology. The resulting portraits seem to contradict prevailing ideas about medieval concepts of likeness, and prompt revision of accepted histories of medieval and renaissance portraits. Arising from a confluence of intellectual and artistic impulses in Padua c.1300, the two portraits express the particular historical consciousness of that time and place. However, they also introduce a benchmark of physical accuracy in portraiture which endured beyond those specific historical circumstances, and they demonstrate the persistence of artistic style in even the most objectively accurate portraits. The advent of facsimile portraiture has implications for our understanding of likeness as a variable element in all subsequent portraiture.

Giotto’s Annunciation to the Virgin in Arena Chapel in Padua between East and West

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that Giotto’s knowledge of the Byzantine painting and illumination - but also of the textual sources - was deeper than conventionally thought and that in the Arena Chapel the painter realized an astonishing fusion between the Eastern and Western iconographical lines of development. About 1303-1305, on the chancel arch of the Arena Chapel in Padua, Giotto painted an extraordinary and original composition, showing the God the Father sending the Archangel Gabriel to announce to the Virgin Mary the miraculous conception of Christ the Saviour. God’s image is painted on a wooden panel inserted in the wall, while the other characters of the scene are made in buon fresco. It is evident that Giotto had looked at a non-Western textual and visual tradition, but it is the first time that in Europe such a specific theme was displayed with a corresponding doctrinal and formal complexity.

Giotto's applications of embodied perception: Lateral and vertical dimensions of space

Giotto's Arena Chapel frescoes, dating from the early fourteenth century, provide salient illustrations of two types of embodied perceptions. One is universal, a consequence of biology and the physical laws of nature, linked to the vertical dimension of space, and impacting on affect and moral judgement. The other is culturally determined, acquired from the direction of reading script and affecting perceptions of directions of movement, time and causality. Giotto's intuitive use of embodiments, the result of a newly evolving realism in painting, may have prompted late mediaeval chapel-visitors to empathize with the storied biblical characters, so that figures that were once only the object of religious veneration and awe were now made into living beings with a shared humanity, resulting in an awakening of a personal agency that fueled the Renaissance and Modernism.

Triplex Periculum: The Moral Topography of Giotto's Hell in the Arena Chapel, Padua

Giotto's depiction of hell in the Arena Chapel in Padua is carefully integrated into the system of the fresco program. This essay considers Giotto's arrangement of hell as a purposeful rendering of medieval triads related to the dangers of sin -including the well-known triad often referred to as the World, the Flesh, and the Devil. Like Dante's organisation, the arragement of the Arena Chapel hell seems to make distinctions among three types of sin. The tripartite division is most obvious in the top of the composition: as sinners plummet into hell, fiery rivers divide them into thirds. The rivers establish regions of hell that continue, consistently but less obviously, below, where sweeping arcs of kindred sinners cluster together. To the left are the avaricous; the region to the far right belongs to the lustful; located between the avaricious and the lustful are the proud, wrathful, or envious. We propose that the three regions relate to medieval understandings of the triadic perils that lead to sin, based on the first epistle of John (2.16), which admonishes Christians to avoid the 'concupiscence of the flesh, and the concupiscence of the eyes, and the pride of life'. From the early Church Fathers to the age of Thomas Aquina, theologians and homilists used this text to explain the triadic threat that leads to sin. In the minds of many of these commentators, a triple resistance, sometimes embodied in the Virgin Mary, was suggested in the triad of chastity, poverty, and humility. We conclude with a speculative reading of the donation scene of the chapel's Last Judgement. There a heavenly triad (Mary, John the Evangelist and Catherine of Alexandria) receive a model of the chapel from the repentant Enrico Scrovegni.

Images-within-Images in Italian Painting (1250–1350): Reality and Reflexivity by Péter Bokody (review)

Reviewed by: Images-within-Images in Italian Painting (1250–1350): Reality and Reflexivity by Péter Bokody Judith Collard Bokody, Péter, Images-within-Images in Italian Painting (1250–1350): Reality and Reflexivity, Farnham, Ashgate, 2015; hardback; pp. 264; 20 colour, 70 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. £65.00; ISBN 9781472427052. The ongoing importance placed on Italian painting between 1250 and 1350 is demonstrated in Péter Bokody’s new book, which has its origins in his doctoral dissertation. The Hungarian art historian, now teaching at Plymouth University, examines the major shift in painting that occurred at this time, which led to a new visual language that transformed the two-dimensional image into a representation of three-dimensional space. This period is given heightened significance because it marks the beginning of the familiar narrative that leads on towards the development of Italian Renaissance art and the growing dominance of perspectival imagery in European art. Italian art ceased to be dominated by Byzantine art at this time, and began to develop its own identity. The artists covered in this discussion – Giotto, Duccio, Simone Martini, and the Lorenzetti brothers – are familiar ones and the sites include Assisi, Rome, Florence, Siena, and Padua. Focusing on painting, Bokody suggests that the images produced at this time had become ‘imitations of reality in terms of their spatial, chronological and emotional aspects’, that they were a ‘mimesis of reality’. While John White and others have focused particularly on the treatment of rectangular objects creating three-dimensionality on a two-dimensional plane, Bokody does not discuss the development of perspective. While the idea of mimesis was to have ongoing ramifications, he is as interested in the more reflexive pictorial tendencies like trompe l’oeil, architectural illusionism, or the idea of meta-painting. He argues that these self-reflexive aspects perhaps also played a role in the development of this new realistic style. Barthes’s concept of the ‘reality effect’ is also evoked in this analysis, as the presence of superfluous or insignificant elements can contribute to a work’s realism, becoming key elements in a visual rhetoric. Bokody focuses his research particularly on Giotto and contemporaries such as the Lorenzettis and Taddeo Gaddi, while the frescoes at Assisi provide many of the examples. Like White in his earlier study, he also side-steps awkward questions such as the attribution questions in this building and the involvement of Giotto. Bokody organises his study into seven chapters, exploring questions around three-dimensional space, the role of meta-painting, and the idea of the [End Page 268] reality effect. In this chronological exploration, he begins with the emergence of images-within-images in the Legend of St Francis in the Upper Church of Assisi where they played an important iconographical role, and served as a key element in the work’s realism. The depiction of St Francis praying before the cross of San Damiano is an important example of this, demonstrating too how the representation of prayer was already being depicted in a Franciscan context and revealing how images were venerated. As the focus of the book is on the marginal or secondary images-within-images labelled ‘parargon’, in the second chapter, illusionistic frames, columns, and chambers are discussed, highlighting how mural paintings reproduced real architectural elements. The third chapter discusses Barthes’s idea, examining both the depiction of architecture and images-within-images and the influence of antique and contemporary models, although these did not necessarily conform to pre-existing models. The self-reflexive aspects of some paintings are also explored in Chapter 4. The layering of meanings was also made possible in these works, and its implications for Netherlandish painting is developed in the next chapter. Giotto’s Arena Chapel frescoes are discussed in Chapter 6, while the final chapter discusses the impact of these innovative approaches in the work of artists, such as Bernardo Daddi and Taddeo Gaddi, who followed Giotto. This is a clever book that reinvestigates familiar, if often overlooked, aspects of this significant moment in Italian art. It reflects the hold this period has had on the historical imagination when Italian art moved out of the shadow of Byzantine influences to develop its...

After Paradigm. Iconography and Giotto

A key question concerning the present situation of iconography is whether it is regarded as a method or a paradigm of art history. Based on Thomas Kuhn’s critical theory on the context-dependent nature of knowledge and the non-linear development of science, iconography is described here as being in a post-paradigmatic state. Although this implies that Iconography (or Iconology) can no longer claim to be the leading paradigm of art history, some of its components, especially iconographic analysis investigating the subject matter of works, remain relevant. The various potential synergies between iconography, visual hermeneutics and social art history are discussed in view of Paul Ricoeur’s dynamic interpretative model distinguishing between the sense and the meaning of a work. Furthermore, the significance of subject matter and iconography is examined on three meta-images from Italy, dated shortly before or after 1300 and attributed to Giotto di Bondone: the Dream of Innocent III in the Upper Church at Assisi, the allegory of Obedience in the Lower Church at Assisi and the allegories of Justice and Injustice in the Arena Chapel in Padua.

The Mirror, the Window, and the Telescope: How Renaissance Linear Perspective Changed Our Vision of the Universe (review)

Reviewed by: The Mirror, the Window, and the Telescope: How Renaissance Linear Perspective Changed Our Vision of the Universe Darin Hayton The Mirror, the Window, and the Telescope: How Renaissance Linear Perspective Changed Our Vision of the Universe. By Samuel Y. Edgerton. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2009. 224 pp. $65.00 (cloth); $19.95 (paper). Samuel Edgerton’s latest book refines and extends his argument about the importance of linear perspective for nothing less than the rise of modern science, the discovery of the New World, and the successful mission to the moon in 1969. He first emphasized the importance of linear perspective for the development of modern science more than thirty years ago in his The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective (Basic Books, 1975), echoing a thesis that had been articulated by other art historians, including Erwin Panofsky and William Ivins. Although Edgerton himself has refined his thesis in books and articles over the past three decades, his most recent book was motivated by a “concern that the subject of perspective in the arts has fallen victim to a new wave of art criticism that no longer considers it a positive idea” (p. xiv). Edgerton argues that Filippo Brunelleschi demonstrated linear perspective within the deeply religious context of early fifteenth-century Florence. Brunelleschi’s early paintings had a profound impact on his contemporaries, most notably Leon Battista Alberti, who codified Brunelleschi’s innovations. Through his use of the window metaphor, Alberti began to shift the meaning of perspective from its religious and spiritual context into a secular and moral one. Finally, Edgerton claims that linear perspective encouraged a secularized understanding of space that laid the foundations for the Scientific Revolution. This new understanding of space was most evident in Galileo Galilei’s use of the telescope to observe the moon and depict its topography. Looking again at Giotto de Bondone’s Assisi and his Arena Chapel frescoes, Edgerton argues that these need to be understood not as precursors to later perspective paintings or attempts to represent real life but as devotional tools. These frescoes were efforts to memorialize and extend the impact of the Christian miracle plays. Giotto’s frescoes were objects for reflection and meditation. Rather than find an artistic connection between Giotto and fifteenth-century Florentine artists, Edgerton argues for an intellectual source in medieval thinkers, especially Roger Bacon and Peter of Limoges, who understood both geometry and the medieval science of optics as important tools in the Christian hopes of recovering the Holy Land and converting infidels. Bacon’s work, especially De multiplicatione specierum, was widely discussed in early fifteenth-century Florence. The most influential religious leader, [End Page 383] the Dominican priest Antonino Pierozzi, was deeply influenced by Bacon’s arguments about the applicability of perspective for encouraging proper worship. His sermons on the nature of sin and salvation are replete with optical metaphors and analogies. According to Edgerton, Brunelleschi’s efforts to develop linear perspective only make sense within this religious context and the moralized theories of vision that were pervasive in Florence at the time. Brunelleschi drilled a hole through the center of his first perspective painting and instructed his audience to look through it at the painting’s reflection in a mirror to provide a visual confirmation of Paul the Apostle’s claim about spiritual vision in 1 Corinthians 13:12: “For now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face.” Edgerton analyzes works by Masaccio, Donatello, and Fra Angelico to show how Brunelleschi’s rules of perspective quickly spread through the Florentine artists. In 1435 Alberti codified Brunelleschi’s rules in his own De pictura. Alberti simplified the mathematics by replacing Brunelleschi’s mirror with a gridded window. The artist looked through the window and copied the contents of each square of the grid onto his canvas. Edgerton argues that this shift away from the mirror began the process of secularizing perspective. No longer did the artist or the viewer of the final painting look at a mirror image of the world but viewed the real world disciplined by the rules of geometry and perspective. Alberti’s window had not...

Building a Catholic Church the 21st Century: Tradition Observed, Part II

Building a Catholic Church in the 21st Century: Tradition Observed, Part II Frank Mitjans 10. The image of Christ in the West: 10.1. Tradition Observed Before suggesting some answers to his challenge, let us look more closely at some facets of the question of images, first with regard to the image of Christ. 1. Romanesque (Norman) churches were almost without exception painted. The main figure was the image of Christ in majesty, painted on the semi-spherical ceiling of the apse, towards which the eyes of priest and the people converged, as in the case of the church of St. Clement at Tahull in the Catalan Pyrenees, from the beginning of the12th century (Figure 10.1). In this case, Christ holds on open book with the words: EGO SUM LUX MUNDI, spelling out the message that He is the Oriens at which the Christian faithful gaze. He is surrounded by the symbols of the four Evangelists; below are paintings of the Blessed Virgin Mary, St John the Evangelist, and other Apostles. 2. The Romanesque Crucifix, moreover, was usually painted on a wooden cross of large dimensions so as to be prominent within the apse (Figure 10.2.1). At times the symbols of the four Evangelists would be placed at the four extremes of the cross; in other cases Mary and John would be presented standing at the foot of the cross on their own or with the holy women. Angels would complete the composition and perhaps other figures such as the Risen Christ1 and saints above the scene of the Crucifixion, and even the hand of God the Father at the very top. 3. The first type of panel painting to evolve in Italy was in fact the crucifix, often on a very large scale (for instance, the Pisa crucifixes 1 The combination of Christ on the Cross and the Risen Christ above would continue, see for instance Giotto’s crucifix (circa 1310) that hung in the sanctuary of the Arena Chapel (in this case, Mary and John appear also on the end of the horizontal crossbeam). Antiphon 15.3 (2011): 216-248 217 Building a Catholic Church in the 21st Century: Tradition Observed, Part II Figure 10.1: The image of Christ in the West Image of Christ in Majesty painted on the apse of the church of San Clemente de Tahull, Spain (consecrated on 10 December 1123). The image of Christ is at the East end of the church. Christ, Alpha and Omega, holds the open book of Sacred Scripture on which the words EGO SUM LUX MUNDI are written spelling out that He is the Oriens at which the Christian faithful gaze. The painting of Christ is surrounded by the symbols of the four Evangelists; the Blessed Virgin Mary and St John, and other Apostles, are painted below.. Free photograph downloaded from Wikimedia Commons. 218 Frank Mitjans Figure 10.2.1: Romanesque Crucifix The Crucifixion with the Virgin Mary and St John kept at the Medieval and Renaissance Gallery of the V&A, museum number 850-1900. Photo© Victoria and Albert Museum, London Oil painting on canvas laid on wooden panel, Italian, 12th century, In this case Christ on the Cross is painted with open eyes and His body is almost straight. This is in contrast with the closed eyes and strongly curving body of Italian crucifixes after 1250. In the top terminal is Christ in Majesty with two angels, at the lower terminal is the Denial of St Peter. In the side terminals are, on the left, Christ descending into hell after the Resurrection, and, on the right, the Holy Women at the Sepulchre. The several ways of portraying Christ illustrate Ratzinger’s assertion that each portrait of Christ includes the suffering Christ, the risen Christ, and Christ in Majesty. 219 Building a Catholic Church in the 21st Century: Tradition Observed, Part II are about 4m high). The earlier ones depicted Christ still alive. By the beginning of the 13th century Christ on the cross is shown already dead, but surrounded by scenes depicting episodes that followed the Crucifixion: On the same panel are often to be found the Crucified Christ and the Risen Christ, and...

:Giotto's O: Narrative, Figuration, and Pictorial Ingenuity in the Arena Chapel

:<i>Giotto's O: Narrative, Figuration, and Pictorial Ingenuity in the Arena Chapel</i>

Giotto and Renaissance Perspective

A careful geometric examination of the blind arcades (coretti) depicted in Giotto’s fresco on the choir wall in the Arena Chapel in Padua shows that they were designed and painted according to the rules of what I term “progressive costruzione legittima” and thus represent simulations of visual images. Because no images of this type have come down from Classical Antiquity and because the literary references remain silent in this respect, the coretti must be considered, according to today’s knowledge, the oldest monuments manifesting the application of the costruzione legittima. This means the history of the central (linear) perspective must be rewritten. In any case it was not a Renaissance invention. I expressly agree with the researchers who see Giotto’s painting in conjunction with the findings of the Scholastic “optics specialists” (such as Grosseteste, Witelo, Bacon), who all stood with their feet firmly planted on the ground of Euclid’s rigidly geometrically conceived visual theory and its Arab commentators.

Padua, its Arena and the Arena Chapel: A Liturgical Ensemble

Previous articleNext article No AccessPadua, its Arena and the Arena Chapel: A Liturgical EnsembleMichael Viktor Schwarz and Michaela ZöschgMichael Viktor Schwarz Search for more articles by this author and Michaela Zöschg Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes Volume 73, Number 12010 Published for the Warburg Institute and the Courtauld Institute Views: 7Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/JWCI41418713 Views: 7Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright © 2010 by The Warburg Institute. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Henrike Christiane Lange Giotto’s Triumph: The Arena Chapel and the Metaphysics of Ancient Roman Triumphal Arches, I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance 25, no.11 (Jul 2022): 5–38.https://doi.org/10.1086/718972

Anne Derbes and Mark Sandona, The Usurer's Heart: Giotto, Enrico Scrovegni, and the Arena Chapel in Padua. University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008. Pp. xxii, 237 plus 1 black-and-white figure and 40 color plates (2 foldout); black-and-white frontispiece, many black-and-white figures, and 2 maps. $75.

Anne Derbes and Mark Sandona, <i>The Usurer's Heart: Giotto, Enrico Scrovegni, and the Arena Chapel in Padua</i>. University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008. Pp. xxii, 237 plus 1 black-and-white figure and 40 color plates (2 foldout); black-and-white frontispiece, many black-and-white figures, and 2 maps. $75.

Giotto's O: narrative, figuration, and pictorial ingenuity in the Arena Chapel

Andrew Ladis begins his book with Giorgio Vasari's famous story of in which the artist drew a perfect circle freehand, baffled Pope Benedict IX's foolish messenger, and demonstrated his artistic brilliance to those qualified to understand. The fundamental premise of Ladis' work is that the Arena Chapel, like Giotto's mythical O or tondo, must be understood as a complete, unified whole. He tells us, 'the cycle of murals in the Arena Chapel has a depth that underpins the whole, an unpretentious profundity manifested in a formal order, and as in the case of the O, one must have the wherewithal to discern Giotto's achievement beyond the directness and emotional power of the narrative'.Ladis does not write about the program from the more expected standpoints of patronage or audience, or via extensive analysis of archival source material. Instead, without discounting the former approaches, Ladis considers Giotto's conception of the Arena Chapel in terms of biblical exegesis, a central geometry, and what he sees as the program's carefully planned symmetry. He urges the viewer to abandon the temporal narrative and follow 'visual cues that encourage readings that transcend narrative time,' and so he moves through a discussion of Giotto's frescoes, offering new insights about particular passages and continually considering how the meaning of each section resonates with others throughout the chapel.

Amy R. Bloch. Review of "The Usurer's Heart: Giotto, Enrico Scrovegni, and the Arena Chapel in Padua" by Anne Derbes and Mark Sandona.

Amy R. Bloch. Review of "The Usurer's Heart: Giotto, Enrico Scrovegni, and the Arena Chapel in Padua" by Anne Derbes and Mark Sandona.

Breaking the silence: pictorial narratives of the Nazi period presented to modern audiences

If easel paintings tend to be ‘still’, pictorial narratives are fluid and articulate.313 Accessing such visual sequences was a complex process even in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, as studies of mural decorations in Italian churches have shown. The pioneering book by Marilyn Aronberg Lavin documented a remarkable repertoire of expressive designs, with intricate criss-cross patterns undermining linear chronology. 314 Building on this research, the approach adopted by James Elkins distinguishes between three principles underlying traditional pictorial narratives: ‘occurrence’ (the order in which events happened), ‘telling’ (the order in which events are told), and ‘reading’ (the order in which the viewer experiences the narrative). Taking the example of Giotto's narrative cycle in the Arena Chapel, he illustrates the complexity of the reading process. The relationship between the order of occurrence and the order of telling is so convoluted that the viewer has to walk round and round inside the chapel several times as if ‘surrounded by a scroll’. Applying this approach to modern works by Beckmann and Balthus, Elkins concludes that a comprehensive reading is impossible, since - unlike works of the Christian era — they are not sustained by 3 an ‘original text’.315

Giotto's Circumspection

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.