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| The Scrovegni Chapel, Padua, interior |
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The long and
the short of it
When were the paintings in the Chapel finished?
Experts are still discussing two possible dates.
Supporters of the "quick time" theory maintain that, when the
Chapel was consecrated on March 25, 1305, the frescoes had been completed
in the nave area (the part carried out by Giotto himself), while those
who favour the "long time" view argue that, by that date, only
the building itself had been completed and the decorations would have
started immediately afterwards, going ahead for quite a long time, since
the only requirement, at least from the documentary point of view, would
be that of not going beyond the citation by Riccobaldo da Ferrara (1312-13).
It should be remembered that another document mentions an important date
in the story of the wall paintings: January 9, 1305, when the Augustinian
friars from the nearby Eremite monastery fired off an angry protest demanding
that the work be stopped since the building did not correspond to the
original plan approved by the bishop. The Eremites felt that their interests
had been severely threatened by the transformation of what should have
been a private oratorio into a church open to the general public, therefore
in direct competition with their own convent church. The final straw was
the erection of a campanile which they viewed as a thoroughly sneaky move.
It is highly likely that by that date at least the wall with the Last
Judgement on it had been largely or completely finished, and the model
of the Chapel depicted there must have reflected the building's overall
original design which was subsequently modified.
Bellinati, one of the leading experts on the Chapel's history, maintains
that the first consecration of the Chapel in 1303 concerned only the space
of what today is the nave, already roofed and therefore usable as a church.
Immediately following this, work began on enlarging the chapel and decorating
it - so that the second consecration in 1305 may have been for the completed
Chapel. In this case, the idea of "quick time" mentioned above,
might well stand and there is little reason to imagine a longer period
of time for completing the decorations.
As far as the wall paintings are concerned, it seems there is little doubt
that they were carried out when the nave of the Chapel had taken on (or
was about to do so) the layout that we see today. In the logical organisation
of the cycle - with its dense and precise "layered" references,
as recent research has shown - and the achievement of particular technical
and formal results, there was no time for substitutions or additions while
work was in progress. One can hazard a guess, therefore, that the work
was completed by 1305 or in any case not later than 1306.
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