The Chapel (29 page)

“But I simply cannot agree with my two eloquent colleagues about the chapel bestowing fame upon Giotto. The oft-repeated anecdote characterizing his response to an envoy sent by Pope Boniface VIII might serve as evidence in this informal setting.” The speaker was a big woman with a British accent and a brutish bouffant of white hair. She wasn't that old, but she looked aggressively old-fashioned in her floral print dress and pink kitten heels, which were standing at either side of her stockinged feet under the table on the dais, where she and two anemic men in pale summer suits constituted the panel of experts for Mitchell's first chosen event on the CPOCH schedule,
In and Out of Favor: Forensic Architecture in Scrovegni's Chapel.

“By the age of thirty, although his major commissions had come to him at the favor of his master, Cimabue, Giotto was already being sought out by the Vatican for its renewal plans in advance of first celebration of the Jubilee Year in 1300.” I spun around in my seat, hoping I might spot Ed among the small crowd scattered around me. The woman cleared her throat, as if she'd noted my inattention, and then continued. “The envoy of the pope requested samples of Giotto's recent work. Giotto demurred. He secured a piece of, let us imagine, vellum, upon an easel, dipped a paintbrush into a pot of red paint, placed one of his hands on his hip, and leaned forward—he was, in effect, turning his body into a drafting compass. Giotto then painted a perfect circle in one go. This, he told the astonished envoy, was his application to the pope. Giotto was granted the Lateran commission, as surely we all recall. But my point is this: Giotto at that moment conferred fame upon himself. He asserted,
with that circle, that he was above his competition. He knew it. For heaven's sake, even the pope knew it. Giotto was famous when he arrived in Padua and surely would have demanded more control over the architectural program for the chapel than has so far been alleged by my colleagues.”

“A nod to the inestimable critic John Ruskin might be in order here.” The slope-shouldered man to her left tilted his head forward and surprised everyone when, in a basso profundo, he continued. “‘I think it unnecessary,' Ruskin wrote, ‘to repeat here any other of the anecdotes commonly related of Giotto, as, separately taken, they are quite valueless.'”

“Um—all right, okay.” This was the other little man on the panel. He had leaned way back in his chair. “Maybe now is the right time for the ten-minute break we promised everyone earlier.”

The white-haired woman would not leave it there. “‘Yet much may be gathered from the general tone of these anecdotes,' Ruskin went on to say, if I recall his words correctly.” She slid back into her shoes, stood up, and soliloquized:

It is remarkable that they are, almost without exception, records of good-humoured jests, involving or illustrating some point of practical good sense; and by comparing this general colour of the reputation of Giotto with the actual character of his designs, there cannot remain the smallest doubt that his mind was one of the most healthy, kind, and active, that ever informed a human frame. His love of beauty was entirely free from weakness; his love of truth untinged by severity; his industry constant, without impatience; his workmanship accurate, without formalism; his temper serene, and yet playful; his imagination exhaustless, without extravagance; and his faith firm, without superstition. I do not know, in the annals of art, such another example of happy, practical, unerring, and benevolent power.

She had recited this from memory, or else she had a teleprompter in her shoes. While she waited for the enthusiastic applause to die down, she tilted her head toward the panelist who had attempted to discredit her. It wasn't clear if she was bowing triumphantly or threatening to ram him with her helmet of hair the next time he challenged her authority. “In short,” she added, “almost from the moment he took up a paintbrush, Giotto di Bondone was secure in his genius and confident of his acclaim. When we reconvene, we shall have the opportunity to examine the physical evidence of the control he exerted over the architectural arrangement of the chapel.” She left the stage.

As most of the audience filtered out, the two other panelists eyed each other wearily and then disappeared out a side exit. I was one of four people left in the auditorium. I didn't need a break yet. I'd missed most of the first thirty minutes because I'd stopped at my hotel room on the way back from the café. I wanted to pick up my copy of Sara's map to orient myself in the chapel. And the day had gone hot and humid, and my saggy cardigan was sticking to my blouse, making my back furiously itchy, as if blue dye were leaching into my skin. I found my Marimekko shift waiting for me in the closet, spot-free. And the belt fit. My three linen shirtdresses were still missing, but that barely dimmed my delight. Despite the Bolognese and brioche, I'd lost at least five pounds.

Eventually, the three other audience members deserted me. I was content to have the place to myself, imagining that the white walls of the little room were the white plaster walls of the chapel before Giotto got his hands on it. Had Scrovegni paired up with another painter, I would not have been there, and maybe no one but a few neighbors and a few friends of Scrovegni would ever have known or cared that the place existed. This seemed to me a kind of illumination of my marriage and so many others—which, like most churches and chapels, were not
particularly well made or uplifting, but ordinary and serviceable arenas for the sustaining rituals of a few hopeful people. I didn't have to denigrate the hard work Mitchell and I did to make a marriage and to make it work to admit that it was a disappointment—not inspiring, not especially imaginative, not even much of a model for our unmarried son and our divorced daughter.

I finally checked my program and discovered that no one was coming back to join me. Everyone else had reconvened outside, on the chapel grounds. By the time I found my group, the basso profundo was finishing up his description of the chapel's strange little apse, a polygonal tower that housed both the altar and Scrovegni's tomb. From the outside, the apse looked like a brick rocket ship pasted onto the end of the chapel's barrel vault. He promised we would soon go inside and see that its frescoed walls were unrelated to the panels Giotto had painted in the body of the church and could be confidently attributed to much lesser artisans. “In my reading of the arrangement, the apse indicates that Giotto was not the sole or even the lead architect on this project. The hastily painted wooden panel above the altar—I will point out the ersatz image of God the Father stuck into that obvious hole near the top of Giotto's work—rather seals the case.” He set off down the paved path.

The white-haired woman did not budge. “Perhaps the original wood panel was lost.”

The basso profundo said, “I can't imagine Giotto instructed the workmen to cut a hole in the middle of the plaster wall he had just frescoed to make room for a piece of wood.”

The woman nodded. “But there is reason to imagine that Giotto had always intended for there to be a hole high up in that wall at the apse end of the barrel vault, a kind of trapdoor used for freeing doves or shining a dramatic bit of candlelight during the liturgical pageants hosted by Scrovegni and his family.”

The basso profundo smiled. Most of the rest of us were caught between him and his adversary. He said, “I rather agree with the more informed speculation that we lost a stained-glass window in that spot, possibly designed by Giotto before the architecture was revised—without his participation. There is evidence that Scrovegni had hoped to build a genuine transept with two side chapels, which would have made sense of Giotto's original stained-glass window. A window above the chancel arch would have admitted much-needed additional light. Surely it was a window that had to be patched up with a panel of wood.”

The third panelist meekly suggested we move directly inside as we had already devoted more time than anticipated to the apse.

The basso profundo agreed.

The white-haired woman followed for a few paces and then planted her little heels directly in front of a bricked-up indentation in the chapel's exterior. This peculiar niche was a six-foot-high arch of no apparent use, not deep enough to have held a statue or any ornament. “This is where we encounter incontrovertible evidence of Giotto's alteration of the architectural plan of the chapel.”

We all stared at the blank space, as if we expected the Virgin to appear and fill us in on the details.

The basso profundo snaked through the crowd to find his meek colleague and, in a very effective stage whisper, said, “I cannot listen for another minute to that migraine of a woman,” and then headed toward the dehumidifying chamber.

The meek man said, “I think many of us are overheated. Perhaps the significance of the brick indentation can be explained while we are all seated in the cool antechamber.”

I had developed a deep loyalty to the pushy woman on the panel, but my back was getting furiously itchy again, so I followed the others into the air-conditioning. We dried out, but the debate about who
designed the chapel building did not dry up, both sides fueled by questions and speculation from members of the audience. Once we were herded into the chapel, the crowd gathered in the front half of the nave to study the controversial painted wood panel.

I was more puzzled by Mitchell's interest in this topic. There were several other morning lectures whose titles looked more promising, and one was devoted exclusively to circular and cyclical elements in the work of Giotto and Dante. His choices for later in the day didn't make any more sense. If I stuck it out, I would be learning everything I never wanted to know about moneybags and sacred animation. I drifted to the back, trying to locate where that odd niche in the brick outside showed up inside the chapel. I visited briefly with my faceless friend with the noose, Despair, and when I turned around, the little meek man waved from the other side of the aisle.

“It was over here,” he whispered, “behind the figure of Charity.” He looked exhausted, his dark eyes set in dark circles on his round face, and when I got closer, I saw that someone had shaved away a small patch of the thinning brown hair just above one of his ears. An infection? A bite? He had the demeanor of a sad sack, the guy in a crowd who would be singled out by a nasty crow or an angry hornet. He said, “Is your name really Mitchell, or is it Michelle? The Italians aren't champion spellers.”

“Neither,” I said. “My husband's name was Mitchell.”

“My partner's name was Michael,” he said, as if this gave us something in common. “He left me a few months ago.” He looked up into the deep blue sky above us. “Which I have recently taken to telling strangers,” he added. “Maybe I'm hoping people who didn't know us will act surprised. Or we can debate the significance of this Charity panel.”

I said, “I'm not a scholar.”

He said, “Welcome to the club.”

I said, “I'm not sure what I think I'm doing here.”

“Everyone else is doing their best imitation of a scholar,” he said.

I said, “I don't even know what CPOCH does.”

“Plans expensive guided tours of significant artistic sites for people who are willing to pay $5,000 and up annually to be treated like VIPs and lectured at by college professors from the provinces.” His affect had not changed since he'd waved to me.

“So my husband must have been a paying member,” I said.

“Sustaining member—that's what the blue-and-white badge means. I think that's the $10,000 level,” he said.

He must have noticed the strain in my facial muscles.

“Or maybe he got a discounted membership. They do offer come-ons. Was this his first year as a member?” He eventually filled in my silence. “You should be receiving a biannual copy of the Centre's bulletin. You'll find your husband's name among the Centre's Panel of Scholars.”

Maybe it was reflexive loyalty, or maybe it was a genuine hope that Mitchell had got something for his money, but I said, “I suppose the Centre has more standing in Britain and on the Continent than it does in the States.”

“I doubt it,” he said. “It's mostly Americans who sign up. And a few Canadians from the mainland. The three of us are based in Halifax. At the College of Art & Design.”

“All of these experts teach in Nova Scotia?” I had meant to make that sound like a point of interest, but my dismissive tone echoed right up to the heavens. I sounded like a typical Harvard wife. In an effort to muffle the insult, I said, “That arch of brick we saw outside is on the other side of Charity?”

She was one of the Virtues, and like the other Seven Virtues and the Seven Vices, she was painted all in gray tones, as if she were a statue of herself, a beatific young woman with plaited hair holding a basket laden with fruit and nuts in one hand, and either a giant fig or
a small artichoke in the other, which she had raised up toward a tiny haloed figure who had popped into the top of the painted frame to accept her gift. On the ground beside her feet were two sacks of coins, apparently ready for distribution to the needy.

He nodded.

I said, “These are as unlike the rest of the frescoes as that God the Father they're all debating.” The crowd had moved right into the sanctuary, spread out around the altar as if readying a lamb for sacrifice. “Are we sure Giotto did these strange, gray paintings?”