Giotto di Bondone's fresco cycle in the Scrovegni Chapel, Padua (completed c. 1305) is the foundational achievement of Western pictorial art - the work from which the entire tradition of Western painting descends, and the first time in history that the Christian Gospel was told as emotionally comprehensible human drama.
The chapel was commissioned by Enrico Scrovegni, a wealthy Paduan banker, apparently as an act of penance for his family's usury - Dante, Giotto's Florentine contemporary, had placed Enrico's father Reginaldo among the usurers in the Inferno's seventh circle. Enrico built the chapel adjacent to his palace, dedicated it to the Annunciation (Luke 1:26-38), and commissioned Giotto to cover every available wall with scenes from the life of Christ and the Virgin.
Giotto covered the barrel-vaulted chapel with 37 narrative scenes in three tiers, working from the story of Joachim and Anna (the Virgin's parents, whose narrative comes from the apocryphal Gospel of James) through the Annunciation and Nativity, through the full Gospel narrative of Christ's ministry, to the Passion, Crucifixion, and Resurrection. The entire program moves from left to right and top to bottom in a reading order as systematic as a text - this is the Gospels as visual book, designed to be read continuously.
The Lamentation over Christ (the Compianto, based on the convergence of all four Gospel Passion narratives and the tradition of medieval devotional meditation) is the chapel's greatest scene and one of the greatest paintings ever made. The dead Christ lies horizontally across the lower portion of the scene; around him the disciples and holy women mourn with a grief that Giotto rendered with unprecedented and still-unsurpassed naturalness. Mary holds her son's face level with hers, looking into his eyes with the concentrated anguish of a mother. John throws his arms back in a gesture of physical grief that every viewer recognizes from their own body's experience of loss. The angels in the sky above are not serene attendants but grief-stricken beings weeping and gesturing in distress.
Before Giotto, the Passion was depicted in the stylized, hierarchical, emotionally controlled mode of Byzantine art. After Giotto, artists understood that the story of God's death was also the story of human grief, and that painting this story required engaging the full reality of human emotional experience. Luke 23:48 - 'When all the people who had gathered to witness this sight saw what took place, they beat their breasts and went away' - suggests that the original witnesses understood what Giotto's figures enact: that the Passion is not a theological proposition to be contemplated from a safe distance but an event to be inhabited, mourned, and survived.
The chapel's ceiling, painted as a brilliant blue sky with gold stars and medallions of Christ and the Virgin, creates an experience of being inside a jewel box of divine narrative - below, the drama of human life and divine presence; above, the heaven that frames and comprehends it all. No other single space in the history of art so completely immerses the viewer in the Gospel.