Customer Reviews

Giotto: Frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel

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This book is lacking in comprehensive text (although it does go into some detail with the individual paintings), but it does have the best and biggest possible reproductions of his frescos (with many close-ups of each individual panel). With hundreds of huge pages completely filled with Giotto's Padua paintings, this book is a must for any art lover and will inspire those unfamiliar with art to become art lovers. NOTE: the reproductions are Post-restoration and all the more beautiful because of this.

You'll find here a complete presentation of all of the pictorial cycles at the Scrovegni Chapel: The stories of Joachim and Anne, the stories of the Virgin, the stories of the Life of Christ, the Passion of Christ, Vices and Virtues, and the Last Judgment. Even more important Skira provides in full color, full page detail after full page detail of each story. Usually its six pages of details for a particular story, but for The Crucifixion and The Lamentation we are treated with ten pages of details. Unfortunately there are not any details of the flock of suffering angels in The Lamentation. Another quibble, details would be welcome in the presentation of the exquisite Vices and Virtues---I'm sure Charles Swann would agree. But those specks of dust aside, this is what an art book should be, about 400 out of its 450 pages are color plates.

The frescoes themselves are masterworks of organization, composition, color, detail and invention. Some examples of Giotto's genius are his making the Star of Bethlehem a comet, and the special use of real sunlight in the Last Judgment. You have to love his 3-D nimbuses, cant tell a saint without a nimbus. Some of the images are terrible to see: the pile of children slaughtered by Herod; Giotto's Hell where sexual organs are exposed and mutilated by hairy winged demons, and in one case, eaten by a green marsupial. As I wrote above, the book isnt all pictures, there are 50 pages of scholarly essays about the restoration of the frescoes and the pictorial cycle. It's regrettable that portions of Giotto's brilliant artistic achievement were in such bad shape and were in danger of being lost; just one more reason to shake our fist and cuss out Time (and water vapor).