What was the Arena Chapel used for?
What was the Arena Chapel used for?
The Scrovegni Chapel is also known as Arena Chapel The space was where an open-air procession and sacred representation of the Annunciation to the Virgin had been played out for a generation before the chapel was built.
What is depicted on the walls of the Scrovegni Chapel?
The frescoes tell the story of the lives of Mary (beginning with her parents, Joachim and Anna) and Christ on the long walls. By the altar, Giotto painted the Annunciation, and at the other end, on the entrance wall, the Last Judgment.
Who built the Arena Chapel?
Enrico Scrovegni
Arena Chapel, also called Scrovegni Chapel, (consecrated March 25, 1305) small chapel built in the first years of the 14th century in Padua, Italy, by Enrico Scrovegni and containing frescoes by the Florentine painter Giotto (see photograph).
Why was the Scrovegni Chapel built?
The Scrovegni Chapel was built to atone for the wages of greed but ended up becoming home to one of the great works of Western art. The chapel was built in 1305 by wealthy Italian banker Enrico Scrovegni.
Who owned the Arena Chapel?
The Arena Chapel was commissioned to Giotto by the affluent Paduan banker, Enrico Scrovegni. In the early 1300s Enrico purchased from Manfredo Dalesmanini the area on which the Roman arena had stood. Here he had his luxurious palace built, as well as a chapel annexed to it.
Why is the Arena Chapel blue?
Giotto, compositional elements of the Arena Chapel, Padua. The same ‘heavenly’ deep blue of the vaulted ceiling is used as sky in the narrative scenes, which creates an eerie light, somewhere between night and day. This also helps create a sense of an alternate reality.
What happened to the Scrovegni Chapel?
Modern period. The chapel was originally connected with the Scrovegni palace, which was built on what remained of the foundations of the elliptical ancient Roman arena. The palace was demolished in 1827 in order to sell the precious materials it contained and to erect two condominiums in its place.
Why is the Scrovegni Chapel so important?
2) The Scrovegni Chapel is the best preserved painting by Giotto, “the most sovereign master of painting in his time,” wrote his contemporary Giovanni Villani. Giotto’s painting technique revolutionized Italian art, with the Scrovegni Chapel representing his most influential work.
Did Giotto use lapis lazuli?
Giotto used lapis lazuli blue on the ceiling vault (and what a fortune that must have cost) to depict Heaven itself. Thus you are standing up and looking right into another world, with the Virgin Mary, Jesus and saints. The colour thus becomes emblematic of the divine.
What is Titian blue?
In effect we can say that Titian’s blue is not a colour. The azurite sky that dominated his childhood landscape made an impact. Under it he covered various figures with it. To say that blue is not a colour and that it both does and does not belong to the painting reminds us of Ariadne’s and Acteon’s hands.
What was Giotto’s style?
Gothic artProto‑Ren…Italian Renaissan… painting
Giotto/Periods
Why was blue paint so expensive?
The name comes from the Latin ultramarinus, meaning “beyond the sea”, because the stones were imported from mines in Afghanistan by Italian traders in the 14th and 15th century. Ultramarine was so expensive that some paintings were never finished because the painter couldn’t afford to buy more pigment.
Why is Giotto famous?
For almost seven centuries Giotto has been revered as the father of European painting and the first of the great Italian masters. He is believed to have been a pupil of the Florentine painter Cimabue and to have decorated chapels in Assisi, Rome, Padua, Florence, and Naples with frescoes and panel paintings in tempera.