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Giotto's Peruzzi Chapel Frescoes: Wealth, Patronage and the Earthly City*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Julie F. Codell
Julie F. Codell*
Affiliation:
University of Montana
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Extract

Giotto's fresco cycles of the lives of St. John the Baptist and St. John the Evangelist in the Peruzzi Chapel in Santa Croce, Florence, have not enjoyed as much scholarly attention as the vast fresco cycle in the Arena Chapel. Scholars have analyzed the space depicted in the frescoes, the striking monumentality of the figures, and the depiction of architecture oblique to the picture plane; thematic content, however, has received less attention than form and space. In this essay, I will propose some religious and secular iconographic and thematic unities: themes of rebirth, resurrection, and communitas, which correlate with fourteenth-century Florentine attitudes toward wealth, historiography, and a belief in the spiritual role of the earthly city. The themes of the frescoes articulate the social and political structures of early fourteenth-century civic life, as Giotto transformed traditional subjects into images of contemporary significance in these frescoes.

Type
From the National Conference of 1988
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 41 , Issue 4 , Winter 1988 , pp. 583 - 613
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1988

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Footnotes

*

This paper was previously read at the Northwest Pacific Renaissance Conference, affiliate of the Renaissance Society of America, in Tacoma, Washington, in March, 1980. Co-winner of the 1986 Nelson Prize.

References

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