As a student I visited Giotto’s Scrovegni Chapel in Padua and in my ignorance I was pretty much unimpressed: all those awkward figures with their tent-like garb and narrow eyes, doing inscrutable biblical things. Coming up in October is the third Learn Italy study holiday in Padua – and some forty-five years later how differently I see Giotto’s achievement. For anyone interested in medieval art, the Chapel must be seen. Though other works traditionally ascribed to Giotto are in doubt, his authorship of the Scrovegni Chapel is certain. The individual pictures are wonderful, but also the arrangement of the stories is very interesting (the lives of Mary and Christ, the Annunciation and the Last Judgement), and the surrounding material equally thought-provoking. At the beginning of his long chapter devoted to his fellow Florentine, Vasari asserts that it was Giotto who started to draw from life with such ability that he was able to break with the Byzantine style and give life to modern painting, a judgement more or less accepted by art historians ever since.
