Mysteries of the Middle Ages

by Thomas Cahill

  Exorcism of the Demons of Arezzo by Giotto, Basilica of Saint Francis. (Photo Credit 6.13)

  Saint Francis Mourned by Saint Clare by Giotto, Basilica of Saint Francis. (Photo Credit 6.14)

  The last scene we shall examine in this cycle is Saint Francis Mourned by Saint Clare, a fresco in which Giotto’s assistants probably had a hand. It is a pity that the face of Clare is ruined, but the stance of her body leaves no doubt as to her attitude. Francis, even dead, seems more alive than any of the grieving onlookers, and the inclination of his head to Clare’s, and hers to his, resolves all ambiguity: here was a mighty friendship. Francis often warned his followers that they should not be surprised if he turned up one day with children of his own. This was taken by pious interpreters like Bonaventure to mean that Francis was conscious in his holy humility that even a saint could fall into the most despicable of sins. I rather think he meant that, though he had been given his life’s commission by God and had to follow it, he was a man like other men and would much have preferred to take a wife, know fleshly intimacy, and love the children of his body. Here his bier is laid out before San Damiano, the chapel he had restored and later turned over to Clare and her sisters; and his face in Giotto’s depiction still gives off an aura of the romantic masculinity that might have taken him to a far more ordinary, more obvious, more human way of life, rather than to weary death at forty-five. He married a concept, whom he gallantly called Lady Poverty, but he gave every evidence of being a man of tangibility, who constantly ran his fingers over the world of the senses and loved everything those fingers touched.

  Detail of Saint Francis Mourned by Saint Clare. (Photo Credit 6.15)

  Though death anchors the foreground of the fresco, this is, as the Veronese critic Francesca Flores d’Arcais calls it, “one of the most animated scenes in the cycle … The nuns pour out of the church in a fluttering of veils with the vivacity of an airy flight of brown swallows,” volatile, unstable testaments to chastity. The men of Assisi in their “brightly colored clothes,” purchased, for all we know, from old Bernardone, cluster together weightily in democratic fraternity, their heads bobbing. They are the people from whom Francis sprang, the men he might have remained among and been one of. Beyond them a boy—a child like the one Francis and Clare never had together—climbs a tree to get a better look. But Francis and Clare occupy the lower center of the picture, as they occupy the minds of every viewer, medieval and modern. Here, at this nearly breathing still point between Francis and Clare, “is a feeling” as Flores d’Arcais puts it, “of intense rapport.”

  As Francis brought new tangibility to the life of the spirit, Giotto restored a like tangibility to art. But the Francis cycle at Assisi was almost a finger exercise compared with what came next.

  In the first decade of the fourteenth century, Giotto, now in his mid-thirties, was invited to execute a commission in Padua by Enrico Scrovegni, an ambitious and very wealthy merchant-banker. Ser Scrovegni had recently purchased the ruins of the ancient Roman arena in his city, and there he intended to build an imposing palace for himself with an adjoining chapel. Would Giotto decorate the chapel? It was to be a relatively small, private family chapel, but Scrovegni had big plans for it: he wanted an artistic jewel that would wow his friends, intimidate his enemies, and last forever. He got what he wanted.

  Padua (Padova to Italians) hosts the second oldest university in Italy, nearly a century old by the time Giotto finished his chapel, and its streets and cafés have long echoed with the lively clamor of student laughter and student despair. The city boasts some of the largest and best-proportioned piazzas in Italy, as well as a twisting fantasy of domes and towers—the breathtaking Basilica of Saint Anthony of Padua, dedicated to the Portuguese Franciscan who died several decades before Giotto was born and became one of Christendom’s best-loved saints. As many as five million pilgrims a year still visit his basilica, which is called Il Santo (The Saint) by all Padovani. Padua, almost impossible to drive into today because of its latticework of one-way streets and its absence of parking spaces, may have been only marginally more accessible in Giotto’s time, for it has always been a crowded, not-so-negotiable place, laid out awkwardly in the shadow of Venice. But once you succeed in dismounting your horse or getting out of your car, Padua yields the sort of refreshing and stimulating encounters that no pilgrim would willingly pass up. Even today, its principal jewel is not the Scrovegni palace, pulled down in the nineteenth century, nor even the miraculous apparition of Il Santo, but the unassuming building of modest proportions called the Scrovegni (or Arena) Chapel, the sole survivor of Ser Scrovegni’s monumental building program.

  A visit to the chapel today can be a disappointment, if only because its present keepers push visitors through with such alarming alacrity. If ever one needed a generous amount of time to ponder a work of art, it is in this unique room, some sixty-seven feet by twenty-eight, nearly sixty-one feet high, roofed by a tunnel vault. The overwhelming impression on entering is of Deep Blue, somewhat darker and more vibrant than azure and tending here and there toward turquoise. Not only do most of the scenes that adorn the walls show this blue as background, the whole of the dominating vault is painted blue, interrupted by little else than small gold stars, which seem only to intensify the color. This is the sky, of course, but not quite the sky at earthly midnight or midday but a sky that seems to have exchanged places with the sea, a sky of cosmic spectacle and mysterious comfort.

  Interior of Scrovegni Chapel, Padua, with frescoes painted by Giotto. (Photo Credit 6.16)

  On the entrance wall, Giotto has painted a Last Judgment, a fearful enough representation, yet something to contemplate rather than quake under. Unlike the later and more famous version by Michelangelo, this Judgment does not rise up over the altar but is behind us, something to be reminded of on one’s way back into the world, not something to crush the viewer here and now beneath its awesome power. Each of the side walls holds four layers of scenes, the highest layer giving us the life of Mary and her parents (as narrated in apocryphal gospels), the second and third layers giving us the life of Christ (as narrated in the four canonical gospels of the New Testament). The lowest layer, just above the choir stalls, contains depictions of the Seven Virtues and Seven Vices, thus echoing gently the scene of Judgment that looms behind us.

  The Virtues and Vices, painted as marbleized trompe l’oeil panels, are both charming and (in the case of the vices) comical, but they will not detain us now. The chapel has no apse; its principal focus—if one may speak of focus in a room so plenteous in attractions—is the triumphal arch that frames the sanctuary. The heavenly scene at its height is of God the Father instructing the Angel Gabriel that he is to bring to Mary the news of her impending pregnancy. Just below this scene are two panels on either side of the arch: on the left Gabriel descends to Mary; on the right Mary receives the news. Unsurprisingly, the chapel is dedicated to this Annunciation of the Incarnation.

  The richly pleasurable narrative scenes on the side walls, which command the bulk of the chapel’s space and send one’s eyes in all directions, are “read” by starting at the highest panel on the right, then moving rightward along the length of the top layer on the right-hand wall and then the left-hand wall till one has reached the top panel on the far left, the Procession at Mary’s Wedding to Joseph. Facing the triumphal arch and taking in the scenes of the Annunciation, one then drops down a level, studies the Visitation (Mary’s visit to her cousin Elizabeth, pregnant with John the Baptist), and then begins again at the nearest scene on the second level of the right-hand wall, the Nativity of Jesus. Making a circuit of the second level rightward along the right-hand wall, then rightward along the left-hand wall, one arrives at last at the Triumphal Entry of Jesus into Jerusalem (on what is called Palm Sunday). Facing the arch once more, one turns to read the first of the panels on the third level, the Last Supper. This is followed by a reading of all the panels on the third level, as one maintains a rightward direction down the right-h
and wall, then up the left-hand wall till the Descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost is reached, the last panel on the left-hand wall closest to the arch.

  Angel Gabriel appears to Mary, Scrovegni Chapel. (Photo Credit 6.17)

  I give these directions to emphasize how elaborate is the chapel’s plan and how much a successful visit to this shining room will be aided by prior study. To examine each scene in detail, however, would take a separate book (and several good ones are already available). All that can be done here is to point out one further complication in Giotto’s scheme and in so doing to draw your attention to three of the most compelling sets of scenes.

  Mary receives Gabriel’s message, Scrovegni Chapel. (Photo Credit 6.18)

  Though the obvious and most initially rewarding way to approach the chapel is to read its scenes chronologically, using the same order as we would for written text—from left to right and from top to bottom—it is also possible to read the scenes in columns from top to bottom. Often, if not always, Giotto has managed to enrich the meaning of one scene by the supporting presence of another. Take, for example, the Nativity of Jesus, in which we see Giotto moving toward a new sense of perspective. Though the rules for attaining three-dimensionality by the use of perspective would not be fully understood till after his time, Giotto takes significant steps in that direction by the dramatic use of foreshortening (the neck of the donkey, the placement of the stable, the half-hidden arm of the shepherd). Most innovative, however, is the charged seriousness of Mary’s profile as she stares in love and fear at her newborn Babe, while the nodding head of Joseph, old and weary, offers such a contrast. The ritualistic placement of the infant between mother and nursemaid has eucharistic significance. “This is his Body,” the two women could well be intoning, as they present the baby to one another, to the animals, and to the world. Any doubt that this is Giotto’s intent is dispelled by the scene directly below the Nativity, which is the Last Supper, at which Jesus, just prior to his crucifixion, offered his body as bread to his disciples with the words “This is my Body.”

  Nativity of Jesus, Scrovegni Chapel. (Photo Credit 6.19)

  Last Supper, Scrovegni Chapel. (Photo Credit 6.20)

  Similarly, the Marriage Feast at Cana has eucharistic significance because it was at Cana that Jesus changed water into wine and because every mass is, to an extent, a marriage feast between Christ and the communicant. In support of this, we are given, in the scene just below the Marriage Feast, the Lamentation over Jesus, in which two women once again hold Jesus, offering him to us as they did at his Nativity. But this time they are holding the head of a fully grown dead man while three other women hold his hands and feet. The grief of the many human mourners is mirrored and strengthened by the mourning of angels in Heaven. Once again, “This is his Body” would provide the appropriate caption.

  Marriage Feast at Cana, Scrovegni Chapel. (Photo Credit 6.21)

  Such eucharistic messages will become only more explicit as Western art progresses. In Bernardino Luini’s remarkable version of the Lamentation, for instance, an early-sixteenth-century painting, the body of Jesus is presented to the viewer even more directly—from an altarlike stone platform covered in a linen cloth, which is the typical covering for a Catholic altar. A startlingly comprehensive exhibition that opened at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts in late 1997 under the title “The Body of Christ in the Art of Europe and New Spain, 1150–1800” demonstrated conclusively that Catholic artists, from before the time of Giotto to well after, have repeatedly made connections between the Word-Made-Flesh—the Babe born at Bethlehem—and the eucharistic body of Christ offered in the mass. The Catholic belief that the mass is not merely a reenactment of the Last Supper but a kind of re-offering of the sacrifice of Jesus’s life on the cross at Calvary forms the ultimate theological basis for this visual connection.g

  Lamentation over Jesus, Scrovegni Chapel. (Photo Credit 6.22)

  But why, if we are not traditional Tridentine Catholics, should we care about this? What is this peculiar theological development to us?

  Just as the Catholic Eucharist acted as catalyst for the development of Western science, it provided a basis for the development of artistic realism. The question “What is the Eucharist?” was soon followed by natural philosophers (one day to be called scientists) with the question “What is matter?” The same pondering on this Eucharist sparked in medieval artists a desire to present reality more fully, more accurately. Giotto’s Catholicism could conceivably have sent him in a completely different direction—toward, say, fanciful legends about the Holy Grail,h toward abstruse symbols and mythical animals like the unicorn, toward more gold and even less realism. Instead, his eucharistic Catholicism, informed by a Franciscan spirit, pushed him toward a nearly scientific quest to reproduce more exactingly in art the very things his eyes could see, his hands could touch, his heart could love—and preeminently among these lovable things the human body itself.

  Ugly Giotto, lover of the human body and of human interactions. His ugliest subject is neither the crucifixion nor the figure of the dead Christ but the betrayal of Jesus by Judas in the Garden of Gethsemane on the night before Jesus’s crucifixion. Judas, you will recall, had told the temple priests that for money he would identify Jesus with a kiss so that the Roman guard could arrest him. At the picture’s center, Judas embraces (in fact, envelops) Jesus, who studies him with sad compassion not very different from the expression of his mother Mary on the night of his birth, for both mother and son can see what lies ahead—the hideous suffering this night will bring in its wake. On the left, Peter severs the ear of the high priest’s servant, on the right an armed Roman soldier resolutely steps toward Jesus as soldiers at his back move in for the arrest. The night rings out with activity, torches and clubs are brandished aloft, and a shofar bleats its warning. It is by far Giotto’s most violent and upsetting picture. And Judas is so ugly, not because of his physiognomy but because of his expression, the resolute ugliness of someone cruelly set on doing evil.

  Betrayal of Jesus by Judas, Scrovegni Chapel. (Photo Credit 6.23)

  (Photo Credit 6.24)

  In the back of the chapel is another face, the face of Giotto himself, painted by one of his assistants. Like Judas, he is shown in profile, the technique that Giotto championed. He stands, however, among the anonymous elect at the Last Judgment. Perhaps if seen full face he would look ugly, perhaps his body if separated from those on either side of him and turned toward us would be displeasing. But Giotto’s life has led him to eternal life with God. He has been saved, he’s on his way into Heaven; and his contentment, his beatitude, his high expectations for what comes next suffuse his features with a satisfying glow. The opposite of Judas’s screwed-up grimace, the face of Giotto, who labored without rest and with such dedication on an immensity of works, both surviving and lost, is just sublimely relaxed.

  His work is done. His influence on generations to come, whether direct or indirect, on sculptors as well as painters, on Renaissance and modern artists as well as late-medieval ones—on Pisano, Ghiberti, Donatello, the Della Robbias, Fra Angelico, Masaccio, Piero della Francesca, and Mantegna, on the inevitable trio of Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael, and perhaps especially on that inspired superrealist Caravaggio—will be immeasurable. He, grandfather to them all, can at last let himself off the hook and enjoy his eternal rest.

  And that is how life became art.

  Giotto in yellow hat on his way to Heaven, Last Judgment, Scrovegni Chapel. (Photo Credit 6.26)

  Campanile di Giotto, Florence. (Photo Credit 6.27)

  Giotto’s Carraia Bridge, now destroyed, Florence. (Photo Credit 6.28)

  a The words we now distinguish as cleric and clerk once referred to the same sort of person, one who could read and write and was therefore capable of acting clerically—as secretary to a man of importance, whether secular lord or bishop. For clerics in minor orders—those who had been ordained to simple tasks such as bellringer and acolyte but not to the d
iaconate or priesthood—ordination changed little in their lives, except that they could petition to be tried for a crime in ecclesiastical, rather than in the harsher secular, courts. The church preferred that all masters be ordained, at least to minor orders, because this gave the church greater control over university instruction. In addition to the diocesan clergy, attached to cathedrals, churches, and universities, there were monks abiding in monasteries, only some of whom were ordained as clerics. The others were called “brothers” and had no more clerical status than nuns or “sisters.” Friars, who were not confined to monasteries, were free to travel. Besides the Dominicans or Blackfriars (founded in 1216) and the Franciscans or Greyfriars (1223), the most prominent friars were the Carmelites or Whitefriars (1226) and the Augustinians or Austinfriars (1256). A friar might be an ordained priest but was more likely to be a simple “brother.”

  b Though in this controversy the Dominicans come off with far less mud on them than the Franciscans, the Dominicans are covered in historical shame because of their support for and staffing of the Holy Inquisition and their embarrassing enthusiasm for burning heretics. During the late Pope John Paul II’s millennial year of apologies, the Dominicans somehow failed to apologize for their inhuman persecution of the Albigensians and many other “heretics.” Franciscans also played their part in these sadistic rituals, which ended often enough in the victim’s being burned at the stake, surrounded by splendidly costumed clerics and courtiers prancing in procession; but in the fourteenth century the Inquisition burned several innocuous Franciscan Spirituals. The object of the Inquisition was always the ferreting out of Christian heresy—that is, till the infamous Dominican Tomás de Torquemada, Grand Inquisitor in Spain from 1487 to 1498, initiated the persecution of thousands of Muslims and Jews on generally trumped-up charges.