Twenty-something Patrick Bringley quit his busy event-planning job at The New Yorker magazine in 2008 after his brother died of cancer. He needed some quiet time. He wanted to think about grief and moments of beauty and what it all means. So he went to work as a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, an inner journey that grew into his book All the Beauty in the World.
In my first weeks at the Met, the most memorable complaint I overheard came when I was patrolling the Late Gothic and Early Renaissance galleries —
“Goddammit, I’m in the Jesus pictures again!”
I sympathize with our unhappy customer. But although I’m not a Christian, I adore the Jesus pictures. They’re like paging through a family album of a grim but exceptionally intimate kind. There are the baby pictures, the moments of transition in a person’s life, and the unavoidable suffering.
Author Patrick Bringley, “All the Beauty in the World,” 2023
No one embodies Bringley’s point of view more beautifully than Giotto di Bondone, the 14th-century artist who broke free from the stiff, stylized conventions of Byzantine art to develop an entirely new approach.
Portray what it means to be human
Giotto had a strong desire to paint Bible stories about real people in natural settings, instead of flat figures on gilded backgrounds. He was inspired by society’s growing interest in our shared humanity—a profound cultural shift led by poet Francesco Petrarch, writer Dante Alighieri, and other humanist thought leaders of the late 13th and early 14th centuries.
Consequently, sometime around 1305, he began his most revolutionary and influential work: the interior frescoes of the Arena (Scrovegni) Chapel in Padua, Italy. The chapel is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Giotto’s frescoes (water-based paintings on wet plaster) tell the story of Jesus, his parents, and even his grandparents in dozens of pictures that transform the walls of the chapel into a super-sized family album. Viewers start in the upper register and walk from left to right in a spiral progression.
The story begins with Jesus’s grandparents, Joachim and Anne, and their struggle with infertility. In the fresco Expulsion from the Temple, a priest expels Joachim from the temple because he has grown old without fathering a child.
The empty area on the far right side of the picture was a source of intrigue for centuries. Did something or someone previously inhabit that space? Thanks to x-radiography, we now know that Giotto deliberately left the area empty to foreshadow the dark psychological void Joachim is about to enter.
Joachim can’t bring himself to go home
Believing he has lost everything, Joachim leaves the village and wanders through the countryside. In the fresco Joachim Among the Shepherds, he is oblivious to the “side eye” he is getting from two young shepherds.
Meanwhile, in The Annunciation to Saint Anne, his wife prays for him to come home. As with Giotto’s other frescoes, the scene looks a little like a stage play. An angel pops in through the window to tell Anne that she will soon give birth to a baby girl. A maid eavesdrops through the front door.
Instead of going home, Joachim wraps his cloak around himself and spends the night outside. In Joachim’s Dream, the black square behind him, which serves as the entrance to a shed, symbolizes his black mood.
In a beautiful bit of painting an angel materializes to inform him that Anne is pregnant. However, Joachim is skeptical that this is a message from God. A luminous sadness pervades the fresco.
Surprisingly, painting the sky blue was not the norm before Giotto made it popular. Instead, medieval artists used a thin layer of gold-leaf to symbolize the divine light of heaven.
A happy reunion
After a couple of rough weeks, Joachim and Anne reunite in Meeting at the Golden Gate. The couple’s warm embrace forms a triangle that separates them from nosy neighbors.
Giotto’s fresco may well depict the first kiss in Western art history. A dewy-eyed young woman stops and stares while Anne runs her fingers through Joachim’s hair. A second woman partially covers her face with a veil, perhaps because she believes it’s not polite to stare.
Giotto likes to portray diverse groups of people in his pictures. For example, the woman wearing black—an expensive dye color at the time—may be a member of the nobility. The man carrying a straw basket is a shepherd.
In the fresco Birth of the Virgin Mary, the joyful day is here at last. Anne’s small but comfortable home is teeming with nursemaids. Baby gifts are being exchanged across the threshold.
Anne sits up to receive Mary, who is bundled in swaddling clothes. The infant appears again in the foreground, where a nursemaid (you’ll forgive me for thinking) is playing “got your nose.”
The golden bachelor
When Mary turned fourteen, preparations were likely underway for her engagement. In Giotto’s fresco Presentation of the Rods, a dozen eligible bachelors arrive at the temple, each man carrying a bare branch. According to legend, a dove will land on the branch that blooms, signifying the suitor who is purest of heart.
Evidently, the priest has reservations about some of these fellows.
In Watching of the Rods, all of the men kneel down in prayerful suspense. The bachelor on the far left—the man with a golden glow—is a respected local carpenter named Joseph of Nazareth. His branch will be the one that blooms.
Giotto’s fresco The Marriage of Mary and Joseph nicely illustrates the concept of classical isocephaly. Before the Renaissance invention of linear perspective, aligning the heads of figures at a uniform height was key to achieving a more natural-looking composition.
“Is that Halley’s Comet?“
For centuries, astronomers have been fascinated by Giotto’s interpretation of the Adoration of the Magi —
Giotto’s scene is famous because for the first time a comet is depicted over Jesus’s crib instead of the traditional star. The image can be traced to two comets that crossed the sky in 1301 and 1302. One of them is the famous Halley’s Comet.
Curious and alert to everyday reality, Giotto interpreted the words “we have seen his star rise” from the Bible in a completely new way.
Art historian Francesca Flores d’Arcais, “Giotto,” 1995
By all accounts, Jesus was a precocious child who became skilled at carpentry and oratory. He was surrounded by a close-knit group of loyal friends. Or so he thought.
Every family album includes a black sheep
Before I go on, I should mention that Enrico Scrovegni commissioned these frescoes out of guilt and a desire to be absolved of his family’s sins.
Enrico’s father, Reginaldo Scrovegni, was a moneylender so reviled by the Church, he was refused a Catholic burial. Moreover, in Dante’s famous narrative poem titled The Inferno, Reginaldo is condemned to the seventh circle of Hell for all eternity.
In Giotto’s fresco The Pact of Judas, the devil has Judas Iscariot in his grip and the temptation is money. Judas reveals Jesus’s location to his enemies for thirty pieces of silver.
Artists typically depict the pivotal moment when Judas kisses Jesus, revealing his identity to Roman soldiers who stand ready to arrest him. However, in Betrayal of Jesus, Giotto captures the moment right after the kiss, when two former friends lock eyes. It is a breathtakingly intense psychological moment.
The sadness of having you away from me
After his crucifixion and death, Jesus visits his dear friend Mary Magdalene for the last time. In the fresco Noli Me Tangere, she reaches out, her entire body expressing unbearable yearning.
Jesus turns to her and says, “Noli me tangere” (“Touch me not”). Giotto paints him in contrapposto (counterpoise) to convey two emotions at once: the love Jesus feels for Mary Magdalene, and his urgent need to depart this earth now.
The scene conveys not only the transcendent nature of Jesus, but also the very human tragedy of two people close enough to touch, yet separated by an immense metaphysical gulf.
Giotto changed the course of art history
This fresco series in the Arena (Scrovegni) Chapel pre-empts the humanistic and naturalistic impulses of the Italian Renaissance by 100 years. Before there was Leonardo and Raphael, there was Giotto.
A master painter and reputedly a nice guy with eight kiddos of his own, Giotto understood that stories from the Bible are far more relatable than the Byzantine style of representing them might lead you to believe.
“Giotto painted the Madonna and Saint Joseph and the Christ Child, yes, by all means,” said art historian John Ruskin. “But essentially he painted Mamma, Papa, and Baby.”
Postscript: If you happen to be in northern Italy…
You can visit the Arena (Scrovegni) Chapel and see all 39 frescoes in this series. Reservations are required. Click here for more information and to buy tickets.
If Italy isn’t in your travel plans right now, you can always take a virtual tour of the chapel. Simply click here to begin.