SCROVEGNI CHAPEL

The Scrovegni Chapel, known by the surname of its patron Enrico, is dedicated to Santa Maria della Carità and is famous all over the world for the extraordinary cycle of paintings by Giotto.

The work is the greatest fresco masterpiece of the artist and testifies to the profound revolution that the Tuscan painter brought to Western art. The cycle frescoed by Giotto in just two years, between 1303 and 1305, unfolds over the entire interior surface of the Chapel narrating the History of Salvation in two different paths: the first with the Stories of the Life of the Virgin and Christ painted along the aisles and on the triumphal arch; the second begins with the Vices and Virtues, addressed in the lower section of the main walls, and ends with the majestic Last Judgement on the counter-façade.

The first great revolution made by Giotto in Padua is in the representation of space: we can admire examples of "perspective" and the rendering of the third dimension that anticipate the Renaissance theories of a hundred years.

The second is the attention paid to the representation of man, in his physicality and emotionality: this is well expressed by Giotto in the Stories of the Life of the Virgin and of Christ in which the human joys and sorrows emerge with intensity, of which significant and famous examples are the tenderness of the kiss of Joachim and Anne in The Meeting at the Golden Gate and the desperation of mothers in tears in The Massacre of the Innocents.

The vaulted ceiling is a blue mantle of stars and has round figures of Mary, Christ and the Prophets. In the presbytery is still preserved the sculptural group Madonna with Child between two angels made by the great sculptor Giovanni Pisano at the beginning of the fourteenth century.

The frescoed cycle of the Scrovegni Chapel has been inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2021 as part of the serial site "The frescoed cycles of the 14th century in Padua".