We know it as the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, not by its actual name, the chapel of Santa Maria della Carità. Ernico Scrovegni was the immoderately rich son of an usurer made immortally resident in Hell by Dante. Scrovegni sought expiation from his father’s sins through Giotto’s genius. The chapel’s ecclesiastical name now is forgotten to all but art historians and the sundry tourist who bothers to read the chapel brochure while waiting for airlock admission to the chapel. The patron’s name remains, but not the memory of the patron or the purpose of his patronage. Giotto and his art alone live on.
Oh what an exuberant space is the Scrovegni Chapel! A rich, starry blue ceiling drapes a space defined by frescos remarkable for their qualities of humanity, passion, and authentic emotion, qualities not, in fact, found in the grandeur of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel or the cunning strategies of Leonardo’s Last Supper. Walls dense with Giotto’s images rise high on the sides of the narrow nave, forcing any viewer to crane his neck to take in any one panel. In fact, it cannot really be done, suggesting that Giotto conceptualized the chapel not as an exhibition space, but as the private storage compartment for the complex and conflictual emotions of the son of the damned.
The main frescos depict the life of the Christ. Centrally located, and more accessible to the viewer than other frescos, is the Kiss of Judas. The panel depicts the moment when Judas delivers the kiss of betrayal in the Garden of Gethsemane. Luke tells us that Judas and a multitude appeared as Jesus urged the other eleven disciples to awake and pray, lest they fall into temptation.
Giotto gives us the throng. We see the central figures of Judas and Jesus. Surrounding them crowd the priests, one of whom suffers the loss of an ear at a disciple’s sword, an ear Jesus soon miraculously will restore. Behind and around the priests hang the soldiers. Giotto purposely obscures their faces, offering us only unequal accumulations of helmets from which lances and occasional hands erupt. A horn arcs up from a face at the edge of the smaller accumulation. These accumulations throb, but not humanly. They throb with the clicking ill ease of roaches. In its blind fear and loathing, mankind has devolved to force alone.
Jesus had retired to Gethsemane to pray, meditate, contemplate. That he chose a garden matters, as the concept of garden at first suggests purity, virtue, and deliverance from sin and venality. We have the Garden of Eden, the Norbolinkga, Kew Gardens, or Yaun Ming Yaun in old Beijing – all places of respite from the rapacious world.
But gardens are not what they first may seem. Eden became the locus of original sin. Norbolinkga masked the misery of feudal Tibet. And Yaun Ming Yaun vanished at the hands of torch-bearing English in 1860 because its very existence suggested refinement and sophistication that no English invader could accept so long as they had to perceive the Chinese as inferior. No doubt some of the same soldiers who laid waste to Yaun Ming Yaun later assuaged their troubled souls ambling through Kew.
Rather than a cliché metaphor for goodness, the concept of garden instead defines the nexus, if not integration, between good and evil. The garden offers redemption, even as it offers the space to find the need to redeem oneself. Giotto seems to have understood as much, for he pointedly gave us a garden, one hardly recognizable as such. We do not see any plants, even through neighboring frescos in the Scrovegni Chapel make clear that Giotto knew how to paint them. We see only trampled brown dirt.
Giotto has no need for the overt metaphor of the garden. Rather than have plants tell stories, sophisticated stories to the Renaissance eye, Giotto calls to us through the figures. The figures offer the good news of redemption through the Savior.
Most remarkable are the two central figures of Judas and Jesus. Judas’ robe is curious. It nearly completely obscures Jesus’ body. The yellow of the robe mimics the gold in the nimbus arching over Jesus’ head, and the spread of the color yanks the eyes immediately to the slightly soft, slightly contorted, torso of Judas. We see Judas’ arms reaching around Jesus’ shoulders, pulling his body up into the Savior as his lips aim up to Jesus’.
The two look deep into each other’s eyes.
Judas searches for forgiveness even as he betrays Jesus.
Jesus forgives him even before he asks.
© Geoffrey Wren 2009
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