FIDM Los Angeles Giotto The Movie 1 4

Buongiorno, everyone. So usually, the first day of class every semester, my students arrive in Florence. The first question that I always get is, where did you learn your good English? My good English was learned in Providence, Rhode Island, which is where I was born and raised. But I have lived in Florence now for the last 16 years. Presently, I'm teaching for American institutions like Kent State University from Ohio, like Syracuse University. I teach for Boston College as well. And for many of you, I'm sure you're familiar with the fact of just how popular Florence is as a destination for study abroad. If you're curious, in 2011, there were something like 46 American universities and colleges that were represented in Florence with study abroad programs. And the total number of American students equaled your own student body. There were about 8,000 American students studying in the city of Florence last year. It's really high profile, if any of you have been. It's a relatively small city of about a half million people. So close to 2% of the city's population is made up of people like you. I encourage all of you to come when you get the opportunity, because in my opinion, it is the most beautiful city in the world. Ironically, this afternoon, we're not talking about Florence. We're talking about a Florentine artist whose name is Giotto, or as we pronounce it in English usually, Giotto. An artist who was working in another Italian city called Padua, or as we call it in Italian, Padova. And if any of you have been to Venice, if any of you are going to Venice anytime soon, Padua is located about 20 minutes west of Venice. Any train going to Venice will pass through the city. So the next time you're in the area, you roll into Padua, hop off the train, walk 10 minutes down from the train station to visit what I think is one of the most extraordinary decorative complexes in the entire world, and that is the chapel that I'm showing you right now. In English, we call this chapel the Arena Chapel. In Italian, it's referred to as the Scrovegni Chapel. And remember the Italian name, because if you do go to Padua, you won't see Arena Chapel written anywhere. I think in English, we use the name Arena Chapel because the word Scrovegni is a mouthful. It's easier for us to pronounce the word arena. And if you visit the chapel, you'll discover that just in front of it are, in fact, the remains of an ancient Roman amphitheater or an ancient Roman arena, hence the name the Arena Chapel. It's not much to look at on the outside. In terms of size, it's probably about the size of a large American garage to be perfectly direct with you. And if you were standing in front of the building, your head would reach up to about there. So it's quite small, quite undecorative on the outside. But the inside is really, I think, what you want to see. What you have, essentially, is an interior space whose entire wall and ceiling surface is covered in a medium called fresco. And if you're not familiar with fresco, what that means is that you're mixing your pigments in water and then applying directly to wet plaster. So it's not actual painting on the wall. It's painting in the wall. There's a chemical reaction between the pigments and the calcium carbonate that make up the plaster that actually makes the pigments become part of the surface. And as you notice, considering that these frescoes are 700 years old, fresco, in fact, is one of the most durable of artistic media. And the artist, as I mentioned, Giotto is responsible for the entirety of the decoration that you see. The scenes, which read, essentially, left to right, top to bottom through the entire chapel, depict three subjects. The top tier represents scenes from the life of the Virgin Mary. The middle tier, scenes from the childhood and mission of Jesus Christ. And then the lowest tier that you see represents scenes from the passion of Jesus Christ. Now, I'm not going to show you this image again. So when we start reading the actual scenes, we're going to start right here and go left to right, top to bottom as we go through. Notice the ceiling decoration. How many of you have been to the Sistine Chapel in Rome? Before Michelangelo painted that ceiling, that's what it looked like. The most common motif for ceilings was blue paint with gold stars attached. So this helps you visualize what the Sistine Chapel looked like before Michelangelo came along. This is looking into the chapel. This is looking back out of the chapel. So there is the inside of the door that you saw in the earlier image. And very often in medieval churches and chapels, the subject of the painting painted on the interior facade wall is one of the most popular subjects in Christian painting, heaven and hell. And it's the final decision concerning who's going where. So we call this last judgment. It's referred to as the apocalypse. It's referred to as Armageddon as well. Christians believe that time will eventually come to an end. Christ will come back to earth a second time and he will judge all of us. And his judgment is normally indicated with his hand gestures. His right hand is normally doing this, meaning that he's inviting a group of people up there to heaven. His left hand is normally doing this. It's a downward condemning gesture into the eternal sufferings of hell. Now, most medieval last judgments are pretty pessimistic in terms of numbers. In fact, if any of you guys wanna read up on the last judgment and what will actually occur, you go to the last book of the Judeo-Christian Bible, which is called the book of Revelations. In there, you'll find the exact number for the capacity in heaven. The book of Revelations maintains that there is only room for how many of us up there? 144,000. That's it. Then they shut the doors. That's not the most encouraging number that you've probably ever heard. Now, the number is symbolic, technically. It means 12,000 times the 12 tribes of Israel, but of course, in the Middle Ages, the church took that number literally. 144,000 of us, then they shut the doors. So what that means is that a majority of us are instead going to hell. So when you see most last judgment images, the actual proportion of hell to heaven is usually about three-fourths to one-fourth, of course, if the majority of us are going there. Jotho, instead, has about a one-to-one proportion. It's perhaps the most optimistic last judgment that you will see in the history of art. In fact, Christ, who's normally looking out of the last judgment, is instead looking down to what side? His right side. So why linger on the fact that most of us will suffer for all eternity? Instead, he's focusing his attention on those who instead will be allowed up into heaven. It's a very uplifting last judgment. Very different from what most artists normally depict. Now, I'm gonna show you a series of details. The first is right here. Then I'll show you a heaven detail. Then I'll show you a detail from hell. And then I'll show you the piece right here in the upper left-hand corner. Here's the first. Here's a man, neatly, offering up a chapel. Does anyone recognize the chapel? Right, it's the Arena Chapel. It's the Scrovegni Chapel. And this is the patron of the chapel, a man named Enrico Scrovegni. He's the guy responsible for paying Jotho. Some say to actually build the chapel, but at least to decorate the walls the way I just showed you there. And Enrico Scrovegni is actually quite famous, one, because of the chapel that we're looking at, but two, because his father was pinpointed in the early 1300s as one of the most notorious usurers in Italy. Father's name was Ronaldo degli Scrovegni. And he was pinpointed in the most important piece of literature in the early 14th century called the Divine Comedy. And in that first book of the Divine Comedy, which is called the Inferno, Dante is walking through the circles of hell. He comes across the circle where usurers are being punished. Does anyone know what a usurer is guilty of? Lending money on interest. Any of you read The Merchant of Venice by Shakespeare? Shylock, of course, the famous usurer, the famous money lender. And according to Christian law, lending money on interest was illegal. Someone asked you for a loan, you should give them the money they need, not expect any interest in return. So being pinpointed by Dante in the Divine Comedy is not very good PR, let's say, for your particular business. So a lot of people think that Enrico Scrovegni invested all of the money that he did into this chapel in the simple attempt to atone or make up for daddy's sins. Daddy is pinpointed as this nasty money lender. Along comes Junior, who invests exorbitant amounts of money to religious purposes, so that he's kind of making up for the sins of his father. There's one problem with that. Most of the time, if you read up on the Arena Chapel, you'll read that that's exactly what happened. The chapel was built in response to Dante's work. The first book of the Divine Comedy, the Inferno, was published in 1314. The frescoes that we're looking at were painted between 1303 and 1305, 10 years earlier. So if anything, some people think, I agree, that Dante may have put Scrovegni in the Inferno because of just how glorious this chapel was. In other words, when he saw the frescoes, he said, this must have been one rather nasty person if he's spending this much money on Christian art. And the relationship between these two artists is not random. That is Giacomo the painter, Dante the author. Because the most important or innovative aspect of Dante's Divine Comedy was the language in which he wrote the Divine Comedy. Which language did Dante use? Yeah, he used the vernacular or the locally spoken language, right? Italian is what we call it today. In other words, he didn't write the Divine Comedy in Latin. All texts, whether academic, religious, or what have you, were written in Latin. By writing the Divine Comedy in the vernacular, he made it more accessible. That doesn't mean that more people could read the Divine Comedy because the literacy rate at the time remained startlingly low. Anyone wanna guess what the literacy rate was around the year 1300? 1%, so one out of 100 people could read. But what it meant is that if that one person read to the other 99 people, they could understand the Divine Comedy, you follow? So he brought this literature down to a very human level. And Giotto, as you're gonna see in just a minute here, did exactly the same thing with his paintings. We're talking about religious subject matter, but it's depicted in such a human way that you almost forget that it is religious, right? So I was gonna call this lecture Giotto and the Visual Vernacular, but I figured by calling it Giotto the Movie, more of you would actually come to the lecture, right? It sounds like a more interesting sort of topic. Okay, so this is Enrico giving the chapel over to these virtuous women that you see there. Here's a pre-restoration detail. You notice the quality here is much worse than what I've been showing you so far. The chapel was actually restored in the late 1980s, early 1990s, and I think you can all see the difference. Here's heaven, and heaven is almost always depicted the same way, right? It looks like a English soccer stadium, right, where everyone's kind of ordered and in line, and they're all looking up rather gratefully to the figure of Christ who allowed them inside. And then on the other side, here's a detail of hell, okay? So as optimistic as Giotto might be in his last judgment, when he gets down to the sort of nuts and bolts, if you will, of the infatuation of hell, he really lets the dark side of his imagination run wild. This is one of the few places where artists can do so. Nudity itself is almost unheard of in medieval art, but because in hell, of course, we're all suffering these punishments, it seems somewhat more acceptable. So let's look at some of the punishments. Can you all make out this man here who's been impaled through his anus and mouth and being turned on a spit? Or this lady, feminine nudity, unheard of in the 14th century, but there she is. You can clearly see her breasts. And the demon who's squatting over her was originally pouring molten gold into her mouth. She was probably guilty of greed, whichever of you said that, right? So she now gets her fill, if you will, of the gold that she desired. This figure, can you all see the hood that he's wearing? And he has this particular haircut. He wears a ringed haircut, something we call a tonsure, which is what most monks and friars did to their hair, right? It evoked the crown of thorns worn by Christ at his crucifixion. So this man is a priest. Can you all make out what the demon is doing here? He's applying a set of pincers to a very sensitive place on his anatomy, right? And we wanna dwell on what he is guilty of. Here's another priest or cleric hanged by his tongue, a woman hanged by her hair, another priest hanged by his genitalia, a woman hanged by hers. I mean, this is ex, ex, ex type stuff, right? Even today, it's kind of stomach turning. This lovely man having a iron rake dragged along his back. And then the lady next to him receiving what seems to be a hickey or something like that from this lizard-type dragon that you see, right? You guys get the chance. I know you all travel sooner or later through Europe. You come to a Last Judgment image. Look carefully at the hell imagery. You will be shocked by how graphic, by how sexual the punishments actually are. And Giotto, in that sense, is no different from any other artist, okay? All right, here's the last detail. Can anyone make out what's going on here? Not folding it back, but folding it up. And what is folding up exactly? So the idea.