The Usurer’s Heart: Giotto, Enrico Scrovegni, and the Arena Chapel in Padua (review)

The title of this book comes from a miracle of St. Anthony of Padua where a moneylender’s heart was posthumously found, not in his bodily chest, as it were, but in the chest that held his treasure. Later, Dante relegated Rinaldo Scrovegni, a Paduan, to the place in hell reserved for such usurers. It has long been supposed that his son, Enrico, founded a chapel in the old Roman arena in Padua and employed Giotto to produce paintings for it in expiation for this mortal sin by which his family was tainted. However, this view has been challenged in recent times. Here, Anne Derbes and Mark Sandona show fairly conclusively that the old orthodoxy is, more than likely, correct.

First, by considering some previously overlooked contemporary evidence that relates to father and son, they demonstrate that Enrico did decide to make financial recompense to his city and spiritual recompense to his Maker by such a charitable act, for the chapel is dedicated to Our Lady of Charity, and, in it, that greatest of all virtues is shown treading down the moneybags of avarice, the greatest of all vices. Second, they present a breath-taking analysis of the imagery in the chapel, based on this unique focus in the overall scheme and, within it, the unusual representation of individual narratives. Regarding the former, they identify the antithesis of charity and avarice (or usury—money-lending at extortionate profit) in divine providence, from God’s decision to send his son to redeem mankind, above the chancel arch, to the Last Judgment, painted above the main doorway. On the chancel arch, the unusual scene of Judas’s pact with the high priests is prominent. Opposite it is the Visitation, emphasizing the fruitfulness of procreation as against the barrenness of gold. In the Last Judgment, Judas’s eviscerated body hangs amongst the usurers in hell opposite Enrico himself, who, kneeling among the Elect, offers his ill-gotten gains, in the form of the chapel, to the Virgin Mary. The authors find such antitheses throughout—justice against injustice, the old dispensation against the new—the latter suggesting renewal and change through repentance, which was, apparently, the main motivation for Enrico’s charitable gesture. Here, specific penitents—Enrico’s exemplars—are unusually prominent in the narratives—Mary Magdalen, whose sins, unspecified in the Gospels, were assumed, by this time, to have been venal, and, like usury, against the natural order of things; Matthew, the converted tax collector; Zacchaeus, the repentant rich man. In the Raising of Lazarus, St. Peter unwinds the burial shroud to signify his—and, by association, the papacy’s—role in the posthumous forgiveness of sins.

While such subtleties are brilliantly identified and observed, questions yet remain—to whom were the images addressed, by whom were they devised, and what role did Giotto play in their conception. The chapel, although primarily for Enrico’s family, was open to all on important feast days. The public saw first Joachim rejected from the temple, as Enrico himself felt excluded. On leaving, they saw St. Peter, who, at Pentecost, exhorted the multitude to repent, in a tableau about penitence. Some years ago, Claudio Bellinati plausibly suggested that the program’s divisor was Enrico’s confessor: the learned jurist Altegrado Catteneo. That view is followed and developed here. However, Giotto’s participation in the conception of the iconography is not explored very far. If, according to one near contemporary, he was at the time “still quite young,”¹ could he have usefully contributed to the theological discussion? If older, and experienced at Assisi, was his contribution more than merely artistic? Finally, why did Enrico choose Giotto?

Nevertheless, this is an excellent book, challenging for the scholar and fascinating for the general reader, especially when the vice in question is the very one that has brought modern...