Art Travel Vacation to Padua, Italy

 

Padua was extensively bombed during World War II, and thus it does not preserve for the traveler a wholly intact historic fabric such as seen in Venice. However, it merits a day trip nevertheless, for spared was an exquisite chapel that is the most perfect expression of Early Renaissance art in Italy . This is the Arena Chapel, painted by Giotto da Bordone in the first years of the fourteenth-century. The interior is decorated with over forty scenes from the Life of the Virgin, and of Christ.

The Arena Chapel was financed by a Paduan nobleman, Enrico Scrovegni, in expiation for his family's sins. Enrico's father was guilty of usury, that is, lending money at exorbitant interest rates. His ill-gotten reputation must have been quite well known, for he makes an appearance in Dante's Inferno in the seventh circle of Hell, still with a moneybag hung about his neck. If you look just above the entrance door to the chapel, you will see a portrait of the son. He offers a little building -- in fact, a model of the Arena Chapel -- to the Virgin Mary, and she reaches out her hand to him in acceptance and forgiveness.

One of the most moving of the narrative scenes in the chapel is the Lamentation, or mourning over the dead Christ. Christ's body is limp, and the Virgin Mary wraps herself around him as she looks in anguish into his closed eyes. One hand seems to feel for a pulse in his neck, but Giotto's depiction of her creased brow and shadowed mouth tells us she is at the moment of recognizing with finality that her son no longer lives. The angels make explicit her emotions, as ten of them fill the sky with their wailing. Notice the impressionistically painted tails of their robes, which convey a whooshing sense of movement, and were perhaps inspired by the artist's observation of comets in the night sky.