The Rough Guide to Venice and the Veneto

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Padua and the southern veneto
| Padua
obliging anyone left outside to pay for another slot. Once inside, a high-tech
system lowers the humidity of the waiting room to that of the chapel, and
filters away any stray spores and pollutants. Fourteen minutes later another
door leading to the chapel itself opens and you have a quarter of an hour to
take in the frescoes before being ejected through a third glass door back into
the grounds of the museum.
The chapel was commissioned in 1303 by Enrico Scrovegni in atonement
for his father’s usury, which was so vicious that Dante allotted him a place in
the Inferno – he died screaming “give me the keys to my strong box” and was
denied a Christian burial. As soon as the walls were built, Giotto was commissioned
to cover every inch of the interior with frescoed illustrations of the
lives of Jesus, Mary and Joachim (Mary’s father), and the story of the Passion;
the finished cycle, arranged in three tightly knit tiers and painted against a
backdrop of saturated blue, presents an artistic vision of the same order as that
of the Sistine Chapel. Looking towards the altar, the tiers on the right depict
(from top to bottom) The History of Joachim, The Childhood of Christ and The
Passion; the tiers on the left comprise The Life of the Virgin, Christ’s Public Life
and Christ’s Death and Resurrection.
Although Duccio and Cimabue, the two earliest major figures of Italian
painting, had done much to relax the stylized, icon-like conventions of painting,
it was in the work of Giotto that a consistent humanism first appeared.
The Scrovegni series is a marvellous demonstration of this new attention to
the inner nature of the protagonists – the exchange of looks between the two
shepherds in The Arrival of Joachim is particularly powerful, as are The Embrace
of Joachim and Anna at the Golden Gate and The Visit of Mary to Elizabeth. On
occasion even the buildings and landscape have been manipulated to add to
the drama, for example in the Deposition (immediately right of the Crucifixion),
where a strong diagonal leads the eye straight to the faces of Jesus and Mary.
Beneath the main pictures are shown the vices and virtues in human (usually
female) form, while on the wall above the door is the Last Judgement, with rivers
of fire leading from God to hell, and two angels rolling back the painting
to remind us that this is an imaginative scene and not an authoritative vision
of eternity. An alleged self-portrait (fourth from the left at the bottom) places
Giotto firmly amongst the redeemed, and directly above the door is a portrait
of Scrovegni presenting the chapel; his tomb is at the far end, behind the altar
with its statues by Giovanni Pisano.
The neighbouring Musei Civici degli Eremitani (Tues–Sun 9am–7pm;
e10, or Padovacard), formerly the monastery of the Eremitani, is a superbly
presented museum complex that contains the Museo Archeologico, Museo
d’Arte-Medioevale e Moderna and the Museo Bottacin. The archeological
collection, on the ground floor, has a vast array of pre-Roman, Roman
and paleo-Christian objects, with an absorbing section on the unique language
spoken in the Veneto before the establishment of Roman hegemony.
Upstairs, the vast Museo d’Arte houses extensive and varied collections of
fourteenth- to nineteenth-century art from the Veneto and further afield,
usually arranged in roughly chronological order. There are tracts of workaday
stuff here, but names such as Titian, Tintoretto and Tiepolo leaven the mix,
and spectacular high points are provided by the Giotto Crucifixion that was
once in the Scrovegni chapel, and a fine Portrait of a Young Senator by Bellini.
In the midst of the ranks of French, Flemish and miscellaneous Italian paintings
you’ll also happen upon a shockingly vivid sequence of pictures by Luca
Giordano, featuring a repulsive and medically precise depiction of Job and his
boils. The offshoot Capodilista collection contains a rich seam of sixteenth-