Giotto and the Arena Chapel

"Part I rigorously examines a wide variety of evidence in order to answer many of the questions surrounding the chapel's history. In the fullest biography of the chapel's patron yet published, the author calls into question received opinion about his motivation for building the chapel. Interpreting documentary material together with physical evidence found in the chapel itself, she proposes a new understanding of the chapel as a multi-functional social space, divided along lines of gender and social status, and intended for use by very different constituencies. She also demonstrates that the chapel's design and construction were dynamic processes subject to change over the course of just a few years, and that Giotto's own involvement with the project fluctuated. Reassessing workshop practices in the light of the recent restoration of the frescoes, she offers new insights into Giotto's role as one of the founders of the western art tradition.

Most controversially, she proposes a radical reconstruction of Giotto's original design of the Arena Chapel frescoes." "Part II of the book turns to the interpretation of Giotto's frescoes in the light of these discoveries. The author adopts a number of different perspectives, always with the aim of recovering viewers' experiences of the chapel, and their potential understanding of the frescoes. She highlights the ideological content of Giotto's images, suggesting that the frescoes express the interests and insecurities of the new, entrepreneurial class to which both the artist and his patron belonged. Far from being a source of fear and loathing, wealth is re-branded in the frescoes as a social good. The manners and mores of the newly-rich are reflected and reinforced on the walls of the chapel, which show a world characterised by socially-harmonious inequality of the sexes and social estates.

In what is possibly the earliest programme of confraternal imagery yet to be discovered, the Apostolate is presented as the idealised 'mirror' of a corrupt and elitist confraternity. Yetthere are also profound moral and spiritual lessons to be learned from the frescoes, which place every viewer within an unfolding history of human salvation and offer each one the hope of Heaven through the exercise of their own moral choice."--Jacket.