(piano playing)
Narrator: One of the most powerful scenes
in the chapel is The Lamentation.
Christ has been crucified, has been taken down
off the cross, and he's now being mourned
by his mother, by his followers.
Female: And that word that we use for this scene
lamentation, comes from the word to lament, to grieve.
Narrator: This is one of the saddest images
I've ever seen.
We have Mary holding her dead son
and it reminds us of a scene that is across the wall
of the nativity where there is this tenderness
and this relationship between Mary and her infant son
and now we see Mary again, holding her adult,
now dead son.
Female: On her lap, the way she does as a mother
when he's a child.
Narrator: The idea of representing Christ
as dead is a modern idea.
Putting emphasis on Christ as physical, as human.
Female: I think we're struck by the simplicity
of the composition.
Giotto is placing all of this emphasis on the figures.
He's simplified the background,
but where we might expect to see,
the most important figure, Christ, in the center
Giotto has moved him off to the left.
The landscape is in service of drawing
our eye down toward Christ, that rocky hill
that forms a landscape that moves our eye down
to Mary and Christ.
Narrator: And at the top there's a tree
and the tree might look dead,
but of course, it might also be winter
and that tree might grow leaves again
in the spring and it is an analogy to Christ
and his eventual resurrection.
Female: It's not just that the dead Christ
is on his mother's lap.
Look at how she's raised her right knee
to prop him up.
Look at how she bends forward with ...
Narrator: And twists her body.
Female: And puts her arms around him,
one hand on his shoulder, another on his chest.
She leans forward as if to plead with him to wake up
as if in disbelief that this could have happened.
Narrator: At Christ's feet we see Mary Magdalene
with her typical red hair, who is attending
to his feet and, of course, that's appropriate
given the biblical tradition as well
because she had anointed Christ's feet
and there's a real sense of tenderness there.
You know, Giotto is so interested in naturalism
that he's willing to show two figures
where we only see the backs.
There's no representation of their faces at all
and we would never have seen this
in the medieval period.
Female: And that's because those figures provide
no information to the narrative.
All that they do is frame Christ and Mary.
They draw our eye to those most important figures.
Narrator: We look at Christ and Mary
as they're looking at Christ and Mary.
Female: Exactly. We become like them,
surrounding the body of Christ,
but they also help to create an illusion of space.
It's amazing to me how close they are to us.
Their bottoms almost move out into our space.
Giotto makes it clear that these figures
are looking in and therefore, there's an in to look into.
There's space here for the human figures to occupy.
Narrator: But there are other than human figures
here as well. There are angels,
but these angels are not detached figures.
They mourn as we mourn.
They rent their clothing. They tear at themselves.
They pull their hair. They are in agony.
Female: And therefore shortened.
So, like the figures with their backs to us,
they assist in Giotto's creating an illusion of space
and like the angels above them,
the human figures display their grief in different ways.
Some are sad and resigned and kind of
keep to themselves, other figures throw their arms out.
There's a real interest in individuality,
in the different ways that people experience emotion.
I always like to look at the feet
and the feet of the figure on the far right,
that sense of gravity and weight of a figure
really standing on the ground
just like the figures who are sitting,
not the medieval floating figures that we've come to expect.
Narrator: Well, that ground is used
for several purposes, to root those figures,
but also to draw our eye down to Christ
or, in another sense, to allow us to move
out of the picture because as we move
from the Lamentation, we move to the next image,
which is the scene where Christ says,
"Do not touch me."
Where Mary Magdalene recognizes him
as he has been resurrected and you'll notice
that Giotto has continued that mountain.
Our eye then moves down and so there is
this visual relationship that is drawn
between Christ's death, Christ's mourning
and Christ's resurrection by the landscape
that frames them.
In the trompe-l'oeil depictions of inset stone
there is another painted scene in
the little quatrefoil.
Female: And here we see Jonah being swallowed
by the whale and we see water.
Narrator: Well, it is a giant fish.
Female: Well, throughout the chapel we see this.
An Old Testament scene being paired
with a New Testament and specifically
Old Testament scenes that in some way
prefigured the life of Christ.
Narrator: So Jonah is swallowed by this giant fish,
by this whale, prays for forgiveness
having betrayed God and is delivered from this fish.
It is a perfect Old Testament analogy
to the New Testament story of Christ's crucifixion
and ultimate resurrection.
It's a tour de force of emotion.
It's such an expression of his late
medieval period, his moving towards what
we will eventually call the Renaissance.
(piano playing)