The Scrovegni Chapel: Giotto's revolution

Description

There Giotto revolutionises the language of painting by means of a new realism, describing emotions and paying minute attention to details, to architectural design, and to new space depths in a triumph of colour and light. By focusing piece by piece on each and every scene, Giuliano Pisani unfolds for us a fascinating and complex tale of sacred history, providing a long-awaited coherent and organic reading of the fresco cycle. The numerous symbols are clarified and the adviser who provided Giotto with the conceptual schema and the theological programme is identified in the Augustinian Hermit Friar Albert of Padua. It emerges that their collaboration is what gives life to Giotto's masterpiece. Its wondrous treasure trove calls for us to meditate on our moral choices, and it invites us to take up our responsibility both as individuals and as a community, showing the way to goodness, justice, hope, and love.

He is the author of the bestseller I volti segreti di Giotto. Le rivelazioni della Cappella degli Scrovegni ("The Secret Faces of Giotto", Rizzoli 2008), which earned him the 2009 City of Padua Bookseller Award (16th edition). His publications include the essay on the Scrovegni Chapel in the catalogue of the exhibition Giotto e il Trecento ("Giotto and the Fourteenth Century") held in Rome in 2009. He was co-curator, with Alessandro Tomei, of the exhibition Magister Giotto held in Venice in 2017. He is the author of the text that welcomes visitors into the Technological Ambience Chamber of the Scrovegni Chapel. He is a permanent member of the Galilean Academy of Sciences, Letters and the Arts and other prestigious academies, and he is Knight of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic.