Today is Palm Sunday. In five days time it will be Good Friday, which falls, this year, on a date pregnant with significance in the Christian calendar, namely 25 March, the Feast of the Annunciation. As coincidence would have it, Good Friday also marks the 600th anniversary of the consecration of the Arena Chapel in Padua. The chapel was dedicated to the Virgin on 25 March 1305, having been decorated with frescoes by the early Renaissance master Giotto di Bondone. This week’s picture is Giotto’s Crucifixion, from that great cycle of paintings.

 

The gaunt, pathetically emaciated figure of the Saviour hangs from a cross that rises from a rudimentarily painted rock, beneath which a skull can be seen – indicating that this is Golgotha, “the place of the skull”. To Christ’s left, or sinister side, Roman soldiers argue about who shall have which of his clothes as a sorrowful St Peter looks on. To Christ’s right, there is a gathering of the righteous. Mary, supported by the holy women and comforted by St John, swoons in pity and pain. At Christ’s feet, Mary Magdalene weeps over his bloodied wounds in a frenzy of sorrow. Her agonies are echoed by the cries of the angels, hovering about the body of Christ in Giotto’s dark blue sky.

 

The artist was influenced by sacred theatre as well as by the ideal of empathetic piety preached by the mendicant orders of his time, such as the Franciscans. Pictures such as this were intended to help those gazing upon them to feel as though they were eyewitnesses at the Crucifixion itself, and thereby to feel the nature of Christ’s sufferings all the more keenly. Giotto’s design is stylised and symmetrical, the juxtaposition between mourners and soldiers intended...

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