The building
The Chapel is located between the ruins of the ancient arena of Padua, probably erected between 60 and 70 AD.
In the 14th century it was bought by the Scrovegni, a rich Paduan family of bankers and moneylenders, who built their palace here in 1300.
Between March 25, 1303 and March 25, 1305, the Chapel dedicated to the announced Virgin was erected by Enrico Scrovegni in suffrage of the soul of his father Reginaldo, placed by Dante (Divine Comedy) in Hell as a usurer.

Scrovegni Chapel at night
The Chapel presents a very simple architecture: an elegant gothic trifora on the façade, high and narrow windows on the south wall, inside a single room ending at the bottom with a presbytery in which there is the sarcophagus of Enrico Scrovegni, by Andriolo de Santi.
We do not know the architect of the building: for some it should be the same Florentine painter Giotto.

To decorate the building, intended to welcome himself and his descendants after his death, Enrico Scrovegni called two of the greatest artists of the time: Giovanni Pisano commissioned three marble statues representing the Madonna and Child between two deacons, to Giotto the pictorial decoration of the wall surface.
Giotto was an already famous artist: he had worked for the Pope in the Basilica of S. Francesco in Assisi and in S. Giovanni in Laterano in Rome, in Padua in the Basilica of S. Antonio and in the Palazzo della Ragione.

The frescoes
Giotto was entrusted with the task of depicting a sequence of stories taken from the Old and the New Testament that culminated in the death and resurrection of the Son of God and in the Last Judgment, in order to urge those who entered the Chapel to rededicate their sacrifice for salvation. humanity.

Chapel of the Scrovegni
On the side walls, above a plinth that shows the face of the seven Vices and the seven Virtues with allegorical figures, and under the suggestive starry vault, there are 38 panels, arranged in three frescos, depicting the history of salvation. starting from the story of Joachim and Mary.
The story begins with Gioacchino chased out of the temple and continues in a spiral up to the box of the Last Judgment, in which the Scrovegni appears in the center while offering the chapel to Christ in glory.

On the opposite wall is the Annunciation, and at the center still a Christ in Glory, but painted on a table. A Giotto Crucifix, painted on wood, was once hung in the presbytery, but is now in the Museum of the Eremitani.

Finally, the ceiling, completely painted blue, presents within images the images of Christ between Evangelists and Prophets.

In the presbytery, a Giottesque painter, around 1320, depicted the Dormition and Glorification of Mary. The two Madonnas of milk are attributed to Giusto de 'Menabuoi.

The work was completed in a very short time so that in 1305, after only two years of work, the Chapel was all decorated and was consecrated for the second time.

Giotto ai Scrovegni's cycle constitutes the highest masterpiece of the painter and of the history of Western art, equal only to the Sistine Chapel of Michelangelo in Rome.
With this work Giotto begins a new era in the history of painting, overcoming the formal abstraction of the then dominant Byzantine current, to propose more natural and realistic human forms and for this was also defined as the first modern painter.

The Chapel can be visited only by reservation.