Giotto’s genius blooms afresh in Padua

Flowers for Christmas have traditionally been flowers indoors; pink and white azaleas, potted orchids or top-heavy hippeastrums with big red flowers like open lilies. Outdoors, I have just found a dianthus in flower, a hardy pink that is supposed to open in early July.

This Christmas, my most precious flowers are those glimmering in my mind’s eye, imprinted there during a recent visit abroad. Spectators usually miss them. They are flowers painted by Giotto, the maestro of medieval art. Some of them, I realise, have living lookalikes in my flower beds. As ever, art, flowers and gardens intertwine.

Giotto was born in Tuscany. He was active from the 1290s until his death in 1337, not only as a painter but as an architect too, designer of the base of Florence’s multicoloured bell tower beside its cathedral. Modern critics like to decentre famous names and discover neglected talent among their contemporaries. Giotto was a genius, so much so that they tend to skirt around him. I have just checked what Kenneth Clark had to say about him in his wonderful BBC series, Civilisation, first broadcast in 1969. In episode three, Giotto, he declared, “ is one of the supreme painters of the world”.

Wearing a neatly pressed suit with a folded handkerchief in his top pocket, Clark spoke in the Arena chapel in Padua. In early October I stood there too, handkerchief-free in sagging trousers. Clark dwelt on some of the paintings that most captivated me, but said nothing about the items I have learnt to value. He presented Giotto as a master of human gesture, form and painted drama. Indeed he was, but Clark did not say that he was also a master artist of plants.

The Arena, or Scrovegni, chapel was built and painted for a businessman who would have enjoyed FT Weekend if it had been available in a medieval Italian edition. Enrico Scrovegni was a major money lender in Europe, even more so than his father, whom Dante, Giotto’s contemporary, put in a lowly pit in purgatory because of his sins as a lender at high rates of interest. Bankers have a bad press in social history, but without them many of the finest frescoes in Italian churches would simply not exist. Bankers commissioned them and paid for them.

I had previously thought of Giotto’s landscapes as bare and rocky, unlike his lively human figures. His Nativity scene shows Mary lying on her side under a wooden roof and engaging with her baby Jesus, but the setting is a barren hillscape in which angels are bringing shepherds the glad news. However, in his Resurrected Christ, Giotto painted plants around Christ’s feet. The excellent restoration of the chapel’s frescoes has brought out the details. Christ has a laurel bush, a strawberry tree, or arbutus, and plants of parsley and dill behind him and a variety of calamintha under his feet. They are painted with exceptional precision. Some of the leaves on the parsley are yellow, just as in older age.

When Giotto painted The Dream of Joachim, father-to-be of the Virgin Mary, he also put in individual plants, this time on a rocky hill; borage, chives and a spiny thistle. When Clark discussed it in close-up, he ignored them. In the previous scene, Joachim’s Sacrifice, Giotto painted a goat eating a pink-flowered plant in the foreground. It is a clover, exactly painted, and around it there is a marigold and another chamomile.

Genius is capable of almost anything in its field: Giotto, I now realise, is a brilliant botanical artist. How and why did he paint particular plants? His Resurrected Christ is the Christ whom Mary mistook for a gardener. I do not think that he therefore showed plants behind him. Nor does Maria Autizi, one of the restorers who worked at close quarters on Giotto’s paintings.

Christ has a laurel bush, a strawberry tree, parsley and dill behind him and a variety of calamintha under his feet. They are painted with exceptional precision

In 2023 she published a fascinating book, excellently illustrated, The Scrovegni Chapel: Giotto and the Canticle of Nature. Giotto had already worked for the Franciscans at Assisi. He even named his son and daughter after saints Francis and Clare. Autizi suggests that his paintings of plants were inspired by Francis’s view of nature, birds and animals as evidence of God’s presence in creation. I think they are too sparse and selective for that theory to account for them.

In my garden, calamintha attracts bees beside the front steps. My marigolds are good too, especially the French-African hybrid Konstanz. I also grow dill for fish stews. Thanks to Giotto, I now look on them with Christian episodes in mind but he did not include them for that purpose. The palm trees in his Palm Sunday scene are precisely painted for obvious reasons, but surely his other plants are grouped with symbolic meanings. Autizi gives the opinion that a clover symbolises the Trinity and that arbutus has links to death, but if so, I find it odd that it is present in a scene of the Resurrected Christ. As for marigolds, she follows those who connect them to mourning as their flowers close at night. However, a garland of marigolds is also worn by a woman in the painting of the joyful Wedding at Cana.

We do not have the meanings that Giotto had in mind. Later texts should not be read back into them, because symbolism varies from one source to the next. Autizi observes that no coloured herbal book was compiled in Padua by 1305, but experts have listed for me ones in Florence and elsewhere in Italy that Giotto could have known. However, his plants have a vitality that theirs do not. My hunch is that he also painted from real specimens. He might have obtained them from a guild of pharmacists: Dante belonged to the one in Florence.

Below the biblical scenes, he painted virtues paired with vices. Injustice, a bearded man, sits before a city wall with ivy on it. In front are exact trees, a young pine, ash, alder, cypress and oaks. Below, Injustice is exemplified in the theft of a horse, men stripping a prostrate woman, what Autizi calls “the first depiction of rape in medieval art”, and two warriors advancing.

Injustice may seem a fit warning to our time but I prefer to dwell on the choosing of Joseph as Mary’s groom. He and the other suitors bring bare branches to the Ark of the Covenant, knowing that one will burst into life and indicate Mary’s bridegroom. Overnight, Joseph’s branch does so, and in the next scene he advances with it to his bride, who looks modestly down. It has sprouted a white lily on which a white dove, symbol of the Holy Spirit, has come to settle. In gardens, Madonna lilies are best planted as bulbs in July. Mine flower the following year but a pigeon never settles on them. If it did, they would collapse, and yet that dove is fluttering, a source of hope in my pre-Christmas thoughts. 

In 1868 the Italian family who owned the Scrovegni chapel agreed to sell Giotto’s frescoes to the Victoria and Albert Museum. Imagine: pre-Christmas crowds would be filing past these masterpieces in Kensington. At the last minute Padua’s city council banned the sale. In Padua, visitors are now timed and dehumidified, preserving these wonders, plants and all, in their true home.

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