Giotto: The Arena Chapel Frescoes - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0500236674 ISBN 13: 9780500236673

Publisher: Thames & Hudson, 1993

Synopsis

The Arena Chapel is a small plain brick building in Padua whose interior is entirely covered with frescoes by Giotto, painted shortly after 1300 and still miraculously intact. Thirty-six large panels tell the stories of Joachim and Anna (the Virgin's parents), the Virgin Mary, and the life of Jesus from birth to resurrection; and on the entrance wall opposite the altar is a Last Judgment. These frescoes have always been seen as the starting point of Renaissance art, and are among its most famous masterpieces.
In 1961-64 the paintings and their setting were cleaned and restored, but they are still threatened by dust from the surrounding streets, damp, movement of the building's structure, and chemical pollutants. As part of a continuing conservation campaign, between 1988 and 1991 they were thoroughly examined and recorded in minute detail.
The results of this recording are now made available for the first time in their entirety. All the paintings are shown complete and in a series of details, many of them actual size, in which expressions and brush strokes speak out vividly across seven hundred years. The reproductions are printed in color to the highest standard. Accompanying texts provide the art-historical background, explain the narratives, and describe the frescoes' survival through the centuries.
Giotto: The Arena Chapel Frescoes captures as never before the artist's supreme achievement in all its epoch-making power - his magisterial representation of weight and volume, his genius for storytelling, his compassion and his irresistible sense of drama. This is the definitive record of one of Western art's greatest treasures.

About this title

Reviews

The luminous frescoes depicting the life of Jesus and the Virgin Mary that Giotto painted in the Arena Chapel in Padua are among the greatest works in Italian art. This splendid volume, the fruit of an ongoing restoration project, reproduces all the frescoes in plates that convey their muted yet glorious colors, their commanding tension and sense of drama. Basile, who heads the Chapel's conservation efforts, explores how Giotto set up a complex system of cross-references: the seven Vices and seven Virtues correspond to each other across the nave in paired opposites, and the narrative sequence of the frescoes, completed by 1306, culminates in a powerful Last Judgment scene. He also investigates Giotto's eclectic sources, which include the Apocryphal Gospels and a popular 13th-century lives of the saints.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Thames & Hudson
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0500236674
• ISBN 13: 9780500236673
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 388
• Editor: Basile Giuseppe