Dante and Giotto's Scrovegni Chapel Frescoes
Dante's Purgatorio is swarming with artists — poets, musicians, manuscript illuminators, painters — and none of the names mentioned there is more familiar to the modern ear than that of the medieval painter Giotto di Bondone. As Dante's Oderisi da Gubbio declares in Purgatorio 10,
"In painting Cimabue thought he held the field, but now it's Giotto has the cry, so that the other's fame is dimmed."
— Purgatorio 10:94-96, trans. Jean and Robert Hollander
It is almost certain that Dante met Giotto around 1305 while the painter was busy at work on one of his most enduring masterpieces, the frescoes of the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. Dante himself at that time was enduring the early years of his exile from Florence and was just germinating the poem that would become Inferno. It is tantalizing to speculate on what words were exchanged between the two great medieval Italians, or what impressions Giotto's striking murals may have had on the development of Dante's poetic vision.
Almost the entire wall space of the sixty-eight-foot-long Scrovegni Chapel is covered with Giotto's frescoes, some depicting episodes in the life of Christ, others with the life of the Virgin Mary. The so-called counter-facade or rear interior of the chapel (pictured at the top of this page and to the left) may have made a particular impression on Dante, as it features — on a grand scale — the Last Judgement (below), with visually arresting depictions of both Heaven and Hell.
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The explicit subject of Giotto's Scrovegni Last Judgement is the state of souls after death, a common theme in medieval Christian art, and, if we believe that Dante's Epistle to Can Grande is authentic, also the stated authorial theme of the Commedia itself. Giotto's work draws upon many standard medieval iconographic conventions. The bottom left shows the resurrection of the dead at the end of time, their naked bodies clambering out of graves. The empty Cross stands as the focal point of the bottom center, and from there the viewer can follow the division of the risen souls into two camps: the blessed, who abide with God in the left and upper
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portions of the fresco; and the damned, whose torment in Hell graphically dominates the lower-right corner. God sits within a mandorla in the center, judging both the living and the dead. Note that, from God's point of view, the blessed are below him on his right and the damned on his left.
Some among the older generations of Dante scholars believed that Giotto must have read Dante's Inferno and drawn many of the details of the damned from the poem. We now have a better sense of chronology and know that, if anything, Dante was influenced by Giotto. It is clear that, in both the Scrovegni Chapel and the Commedia, many of the souls are depicted as individuals. (While Dante repeatedly drops names, Giotto relies more on iconographical references to "types": The Last Judgements frescoes present lecherous clergy, proud aristocrats, greedy merchants, etc.) The Chapel and the Commedia also both differentiate types of infernal torment: some souls hang from trees, some are stuffed headlong into a deep pit, some are flayed by demons, some are being eaten, others eviscerated ... Most notably, Satan in both works has three mouths, an infernal parody of the Trinity, each masticating on a sinner, though Giotto's are not as readily identifiable as Dante's Judas, Cassius, and Brutus.
Some among the older generations of Dante scholars believed that Giotto must have read Dante's Inferno and drawn many of the details of the damned from the poem. We now have a better sense of chronology and know that, if anything, Dante was influenced by Giotto. It is clear that, in both the Scrovegni Chapel and the Commedia, many of the souls are depicted as individuals. (While Dante repeatedly drops names, Giotto relies more on iconographical references to "types": The Last Judgements frescoes present lecherous clergy, proud aristocrats, greedy merchants, etc.) The Chapel and the Commedia also both differentiate types of infernal torment: some souls hang from trees, some are stuffed headlong into a deep pit, some are flayed by demons, some are being eaten, others eviscerated ... Most notably, Satan in both works has three mouths, an infernal parody of the Trinity, each masticating on a sinner, though Giotto's are not as readily identifiable as Dante's Judas, Cassius, and Brutus.
As Teodolinda Barolini and others have pointed out, Dante's depiction of heaven relies on almost no written antecedents. But it is clear that he took a few hints from the Scrovegni Chapel. Paradiso 33's final vision of God, with nostra effige, the "face of a man," embedded within concentric circles surely bears some resemblance to the rainbow-encircled God of Giotto's fresco. And the arrangement of the blessed upon thrones, in an arena-like space is suggestive of the seating plan of the Celestial Rose that Dante devises in the final cantos of Paradiso. Moreover, the Chapel's vaulting features inset portraits of saints among the stars, redolent both of Dante's eighth heavenly sphere and, maybe even more importantly, the word/image that binds together all three canticles of the poem: stelle.
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The images below focus on details from the Scrovegni Last Judgement that may have been particularly suggestive to Dante.