widely despised was Riginaldo that Dante, whose Divine Comedy was
begun in 1307, made a place for him in the seventh circle of hell, reserved
for usurers. Enrico Scrovegni himself was also probably a usurer, and he
may have commissioned this chapel to redeem the family reputation and,
perhaps, their souls.
Giotto (according to Giorgio Vasari in his seminal Renaissance work on
the Lives of the Artists) was the pupil of Cimabue, though this account may
simply reÀ ect their stylistic kinship. Already in his late 30s when he came
to Padua, Giotto had established a considerable reputation, with important
works in the fresco cycle at the shrine of St. Francis at Assisi, the saint’s
birthplace, and an enormous cruci¿ x for the Florentine church of Santa
Maria Novella, among others. He also had worked in Rome.
Fresco was the principal medium for painting on walls during the
Renaissance in Italy and for a long time thereafter. The Italian word fresco
means “fresh”—frescoes are painted in water-based colors onto a wet plaster
wall. If painted on top of dry plaster, the result is called fresco a secco (“dry
fresco”); if painted on a thin layer of wet plaster laid onto the dry wall,
the colors are infused into the plaster, and the result is buon fresco (“true
fresco”), one of the most permanent painting techniques. Dry fresco is
usually reserved for ¿ nishing details or used with expensive pigments and is
more fragile and subject to damage.
Because the painting of an area of wet plaster must stop when the plaster
dries, the medium requires speed and con¿ dence. It is dif¿ cult to match one
day’s work with the preceding day’s work, so a discrete area of color—a
¿ gure, for instance—is best painted at one time. After the passage of time,
the sections may be distinguished easily. In Italian, such a section is called a
giornata, a “day’s work.” When frescoing a wall, the painter must start at the
top and work down, or he risks dripping paint on ¿ nished work.
With this background in mind, we return to Giotto’s fresco in the Arena
Chapel. As previously mentioned, the subjects of the fresco cycle are the life
of the Virgin Mary and the life of Jesus. The subjects are ordered in three
tiers. The story begins at the altar end (the far end of the chapel as shown in
the photo), the top tier on the right-hand (south) wall, with scenes of Mary’s