Voiceover: But the narrative cycle
begins on the right altar side in the top register.
It introduces Yoakim and Anna,
the grandparents of Christ.
Voiceover: Mary's parents.
Voiceover: Yoakim begins by being
thrown out of the temple -
Voiceover: For his childlessness.
Voiceover: That's right.
He's grown old without children.
Don't take this too literally.
It's not in the Bible.
These are the extra stories that were added to
the Biblical narrative because people wanted
to know what happened in between the events
that really are mentioned in the Bible.
Voiceover: Much of this is from a book
called The Golden Legend that filled in that narrative.
Voiceover: Let's focus on the last scene
on the right side of the upper register
which is the meeting at the Golden Gate.
To get here, what's happened is that
Yoakim has prayed to God, really wanting a child.
Anna, his wife, has done the same
and they've both been visited and been told
that there is hope and they're shown^
coming together for the first time in front of Jerusalem,
in front of the Golden Gate.
Voiceover: Each now with the awareness
that their desire for a child,
this wish, has been fulfilled.
Voiceover: And we have this wonderful example
of the humanism of Giotto.
We see their faces together, it is a kiss,
it is incredibly intimate, so personal.
Their faces come together, they touch,
and almost become a single face.
Voiceover: That makes sense.
The warmth of their embrace,
the warmth of the figures around them who watch,
and something that we see throughout the cycle,
figures who have mass and volume to their bodies,
who exist three dimensionally in space.
Gone are the elongated, swaying,
ethereal bodies of the Gothic period
and Giotto gives us figures that are bulky
and monumental where drapery pulls around their bodies
and taken together with the emotion in their faces,
it's almost like we have real human beings in art
for the first time in more than a thousand years.
Voiceover: Giotto, we think, was Cimabue's student
and learned from that great master
who had begun to experiment with the chiaroscuro
that you're speaking of, this light and shadow,
this ability to model volume, and form, and mass,
but nothing like what Giotto has achieved here.
And you're right, it is the coming together
of both the chiaroscuro as well as the emotion
as well as the human interaction that creates
this sense of the importance of
our existence here on earth.
Voiceover: And I would also add the clarity
of the gestures and the narrative.
Voiceover: Look at the way in which
the city is not rendered in an accurate way.
We have a schematic view
and yet it's everything we need.
We have the gate of Jerusalem.
Now, of course, Giotto had no idea
what the architecture of Jerusalem looked like,
yet from legend he has created this golden arch
and this medieval looking fortified city.
Voiceover: But the forms are simplified.
Voiceover: It's a stage set and he wants
those figures to be front and center.
They are what's most important.
If we move across to the other wall,
the upper register continues the narrative.
Mary is born, she's presented in the temple,
she's married, and then we get back to
the altar side of the chapel
and there we reach the triumphal arch
and we're back to God the Father now,
but below that we have the enunciation.
Voiceover: In the register below now,
we see scenes from Christ's childhood, including -
Voiceover: The circumcision, the flight into Egypt.
Voiceover: The massacre of the innocents
and then moving to the next wall we begin
the story of the ministry of Christ and his miracles.
Voiceover: As the story unfolds from scene to scene,
Christ is often shown in profile,
which is derived from the Roman tradition of coinage,
which is the most noble way of representing a figure
and he's shown moving from left to right,
which is the way that we're meant to read the scenes.
Voiceover: So Giotto is helping us
to move through the narrative from one scene to the next
and here we see Christ on a donkey
with the apostles behind him.
Voiceover: You'll notice that Giotto does not
really care to depict every single one of the 12 apostles.
He's really giving us only three or four faces
and the rest are just an accumulation of halos.
Voiceover: There's that legacy of symbolic representation
that we think of as more medieval.
Voiceover: Look at the way in which
the figures in the lower right, there are three of them,
begin to pull off their outer garment.
One man is pulling his arm out of his sleeve.
The next is taking the garment off his head.
And the final one is placing that garment
at the feet of the donkey in an act of respect,
but it is almost cinematographic.
There is this idea that is, I think,
part of the chapel as a whole that it is about
the movement of time.
This is one of the most innovative aspects
of the entire chapel, I think.
One technical issue.
If you look at Christ, there is a blue garment
that's wrapped around his waist,
but the blue is almost entirely missing
and that's because the Arena Chapel
is painted in bone fresco, true fresco.
That is, pigment is applied to wet plaster.
Voiceover: And when that happens,
the pigment binds to the plaster
and the paint becomes literally part of the wall.
Voiceover: That's right, the wall is stained.
The problem is that blue was really expensive.
Ultramarine blue came from Lapis Lazuli,
which was a very expensive semiprecious stone,
and Enrico Scrovegni, when he drew up
the contract with Giotto, did not want the blue's
brilliance to be diminished by being
mixed with the plaster so he asked that
it be applied as secco fresco.
Voiceover: Dry freso. Voiceover: That's right.
On top of the wall and the result is it didn't last.
Voiceover: Right, it didn't adhere to the wall
as well as the paint that was applied to the wet plaster
and so sadly that's been flaked off
and we really have to use our imagination
to fill in a brilliant blue on that drapery.
Voiceover: Let's move on to the bottom register,
to the end of Christ's life.
On the lowest register,
the register that's devoted to the scenes of the passion,
is the arrest of Christ also known as the kiss of Judas.
Voiceover: So this is the moment when Judas
leads the Romans to Christ and they arrest him,
and take him away, and torture him,
and ultimately crucify him.
And remember, Judas is one of the 12 apostles,
one of those considered closest to Christ.
He betrays him for 30 pieces of silver.
Voiceover: And so it is all the more horrific,
it's all the more a terrible betrayal
because this is one of the people
that Christ trusted most
and Judas has betrayed Christ,
not by pointing at him from afar but with a kiss.
Voiceover: There's chaos here.
Voiceover: Well, that's right.
That idea of the embrace is really important, I think,
because look at the way that Giotto has
the figure of Judas' arm and cloak
wrapping around him, embracing him,
enveloping him and importantly stopping him.
Remember that in almost every scene
we have noticed Christ moving
from left to right in profile,
but here Judas is an impediment.
His progress is stopped.
This is literally arresting his movement forward.
Voiceover: If we compare this, for example,
to Duccio's Betrayal of Christ,
there Christ is frontal.
Here he's in profile, you're right,
but it makes it so that Judas
and Christ look at one another,
look at each other in the eye.
Judas is a little bit shorter.
He looks up at Christ as a sense of,
to me, determination but also at the same time
maybe a hint of beginning to be
sorry for what he's done.
Voiceover: But still corruption in that face
versus the nobility of Christ's.
Voiceover: And the sense that Christ
knew that this would happen, right?
At the Last Supper, he said,
"One of you will betray me,"
and an acceptance of his destiny that
we often see in images of Christ.
Voiceover: Let's go back to that idea
of chaos that you raised before.
Giotto has created this sense of violence
and one of the ways that he's done that
is by reserving half the painting, the sky,
just for those lances, for those torches,
for those clubs, and the way in which
they're not held in an orderly way,
but they are helter-skelter crossing at angles.
They create this almost violent visual rhythm
that draws our eye down to Christ,
down to Judas, but also feel dangerous.
Voiceover: But there's this sense of Judas
and Christ anchoring the composition down
as that chaos takes place around him.
The most remarkable figure to me though
is the figure who leans his left side of his body
and his elbow out of the composition,
almost right into our space.
Voiceover: It's amazing actually
and it almost prefigures the way that Caravaggio,
who, centuries later, will master this idea
of breaking the picture plane.
Voiceover: And then we also see another device
that Giotto employs often in the Arena Chapel
and that is a figure with his back to us
and that figure seems to be pulling something
that's out of the space of the panel.
But look at his feet,
perfectly foreshortened, grounded.
There's that sense of Giotto-esque
weight and monumentality to the figures,
all of that modeling as we can follow
the forms of the body underneath.
Voiceover: And Giotto is giving us
this full sensory experience.
We have this crowd of figures,
the sense of violence.
The crowd is multiplied because we can see
numerous helmets, which by the way
would have originally been silver but have oxidized.
Voiceover: And there's a sense of a crowd pressing in,
of all these faces watching what's going to happen.
Voiceover: And there's one man on a horn
who's blowing, creating the sense of energy,
this audio that goes with this painting
that finishes the whole scene
and it's chaos and it's drama.
Voiceover: Giotto is a master of the dramatic.