Between Sacred and Profane: Unveiling the Sacred

Giotto’s scenes move far beyond the simple presentation of events like Jesus’ first miracle of turning water into wine; in the cycle’s Wedding Feast at Cana, Mary casts her eye incredulously toward the gluttonous, imbibing wine steward, whose pot-belly mimics the adjacent amphorae. Giotto’s visual parodies continue in his rendition of Joachim, Mary’s father, as he receives the angelic message that God has heard his prayer for a child. Wide-eyed and prostrate, with clenched, “paw-like” hands, Giotto “makes one smile by drawing a mischievous analogy between his posture of frozen attention and the rigid stance of a frolicsome sheep who readies to withstand a butt from a dark-coated friend.”

But in a seminal 1986 article, Andrew Ladis revealed the instrumental role of laughter in the pictorial cycle of Padua’s Arena Chapel, painted by Giotto di Bondone between 1303 and 1305: rather than negating its purpose, humor endowed the images with greater humanity, thereby rendering them accessible to the viewer.

Yet Giotto’s visual humor eschews an educational role–and this is particularly evident when considering the chapel’s primary audience, the Paduan banker Enrico Scrovegni (d. 1336), his family, and his elite circle of visitors from Padua and the surrounding Veneto. Like the function of the religious image itself, by 1300, humor’s purpose must have shifted beyond simply making a difficult message accessible to the uneducated.

I propose that humor is a key component of the Arena Chapel’s scheme of paradoxical contrasts (oppositio), an inclusion motivated partially by ties to Franciscan rhetorical traditions. Although rhetorical oppositio structures the chapel’s pictorial cycle as a whole, humor and wit have never been considered integral to it. Nevertheless, they were closely linked to the oppositio central to the sermo humilis (sermon in a plain or humble style), a genre with roots in Late Antiquity celebrated by Francis of Assisi (1181/82–1226), his thirteenth-century followers including Anthony of Padua (1195–1231), and Franciscans throughout Italy who preached daily to crowds of listeners. Giotto employs the devices of humor, realism, and irony as a visual expression of rhetorical techniques that counterbalance humble detail with lofty meaning, and as ideal vehicles through which to convey the irony of the Christian God’s Incarnation in human form, the focus of the chapel’s scheme. Humor was a component of a popular rhetorical scheme of paradoxical contrasts propagated by late medieval mendicants, familiar to Paduan audiences, and harnessed by a painter intimate with Franciscan tradition.

In 1300, the banker Enrico Scrovegni renounced the practice of usury, or moneylending with interest, an act probably inspired by the jubilee of that same year proclaimed by Pope Boniface VIII (1294–1303). To begin his process of expiation Scrovegni immediately bought land for a new chapel to be dedicated to the Virgin of Charity. A papal bull secured in 1304 granted indulgences to visitors to the chapel on each Marian feast day and during the week following it. The Arena Chapel’s commissioning functioned as a kind of ex-voto, or offering, intended to counterbalance a mortal sin during a time when usury and usurers were under particular attack in Padua. Although the chapel presents a rather plain, brick exterior, its interior glows with frescoes that cover the entire barrel vault, the walls, the apse, and the east chancel arch framing the apse.

The cycle is interrupted, however, by the east chancel arch’s central presentation of God the Father, who sends the Angel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary at the Annunciation below; this scene of the miraculous conception of Jesus bridges the north and south spandrels of the arch. This interruption of the Virgin’s narrative ultimately continues the cycle by inaugurating the story of the Nativity, which begins Jesus’ early life in the middle register of the southeast corner.

As Anne Derbes and Mark Sandona have emphasized, the Arena Chapel’s entire program is structured around the idea of usury as a “sin against nature” and its opposite in the form of the Virgin’s charity. Christened Santa Maria della Carità, the chapel presents a systematic program of symmetrical, fundamentally oppositional figures and meanings, such as the unusual pairing of Judas’ pact to betray Jesus with the pregnant Mary’s and Elizabeth’s Visitation as pendants below the Annunciation on the east chancel arch.

It is here that Judas’ associations with Avarice–and by extension Enrico Scrovegni’s need to expiate for his own sin–are paired with and fulfilled by the Visitation’s affiliations with the virtue of Charity; Mary’s freely-offered ministry to her cousin contrasts sharply with Judas’s sale of his services to the high priests.

The Virtues located on the dado level of the north wall and the Vices in the corresponding position on the south wall likewise reinforce the systematic program of jarring juxtapositions. Derbes and Sandona attributed these contrasts to the use of rhetorical oppositio, a technique grounded in Aristotelian, Ciceronian, and Augustinian oppositional contrast propagated by the Dominican theologian Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) and particularly by the Franciscan theologian Bonaventure (1221–74), who frequently harnessed the Aristotelian notion that “everything seems to assert its identity more forcibly when juxtaposed with its opposite.” Janet Robson’s work has also demonstrated how a rhetoric of binary oppositions could structure Franciscan programs particularly, as in the Lower Church of San Francesco at Assisi, where Giotto also worked both before and after coming to Padua, and where, as discussed below, wit is a theme in the decoration.

The central tenet of the Arena chapel’s pictorial program–the meaning of the Visitation as an act of Mary’s charity–was a theme developed explicitly by the Franciscans, whose focus on virtue and ministry to the poor inspired their observance of the feast of the Visitation before any other community. In addition to the organizing principle of oppositio, the prominence of this scheme on the chancel arch bespeaks Franciscan influence on the chapel’s program. Collaboration with Franciscan advisors is likely, considering their prominence in Padua, as hypothesized by previous scholars. As a resident of Padua and a beloved painter for Franciscans in Padua, Assisi, and Rimini, Giotto was already well acquainted with Franciscan principles by 1303; according to the chronicler Riccobaldo Ferrarese, before painting the Arena Chapel, Giotto’s prior work had benefitted Franciscan patrons almost exclusively.

The Arena Chapel has been noted not only for its innovative pictorial scheme, but also for the oddities of its extended cycle devoted to Mary. However, a recent re-evaluation of Cimabue’s deteriorated late thirteenth-century fresco cycle decorating the transept and apse of the Upper Church of S. Francesco at Assisi enables the recognition of new, significant parallels with that site’s pictorial program–parallels best explained by Scrovegni’s employment of an artist already familiar with the site, and in fact, Riccobaldo documented Giotto’s connections to Assisi both before and after coming to Padua. The Arena Chapel’s unusual inclusion and extension of narratives relating to Mary’s conception, birth, infancy, and marriage mirror (and amplify) the Franciscan mother church’s Marian scheme–a scheme that, as Holly Flora has demonstrated, reflects the Franciscan theologian and Minister General Bonaventure’s concept of “double fruitfulness” with respect to the miraculous conceptions of Jesus and John the Baptist. This parallel between Mary’s and Elizabeth’s fruitfulness is central to the Arena Chapel’s rhetorical scheme as well. Both cycles likewise lend unusual prominence to the elderly Joachim’s own miraculous annunciation and to Joseph’s importance as Mary’s divinely ordained spouse (supported by Bonaventure); Joseph appears twice in Cimabue’s cycle, which was entirely unprecedented in a monumental fresco cycle.

Giotto embellishes the theme of Mary’s miraculous fruitfulness by expanding the gathering of her suitors and her marriage into four distinct scenes, two more than Cimabue’s unprecedented expansion. This Bonaventuran influence in the Padua cycle makes particular sense as a counterbalance to its focus on the sin of usury, which was conceived as the “unnatural” reproduction of money through interest–in other words, usury constituted an inversion of Bonaventure’s fruitfulness and of the particularly Franciscan pursuit of voluntary poverty. But Giotto’s expansive focus on the lives of Mary and Joseph in the Arena Chapel also allowed him to expand upon the Assisi scheme through his visual wit, a rhetorical tool employed to enhance the Bonaventuran theme. His details draw even further attention to the theme of miraculous fertility by placing unusual emphasis on the irony of the elderly and reluctant Joseph’s pairing with the youthful Mary, whose maidenhood seems especially amplified in Giotto’s betrothal and marriage scenes.

In Giotto’s Marriage of the Virgin (Fig. 7), it’s a shock to everyone that the ninety-year-old Joseph’s rod is the one that has flowered; as an expression of phallic fecundity that ironically foreshadows the old man’s cuckoldry by God the Father, the flowered rod’s prominence amidst the barren sticks of the surrounding youths surely amplified the situation’s absurdity–an absurdity elucidated in a medieval play from Abruzzo by Joseph’s unsuccessful attempts to hide his rod, his embarrassment about being part of the group of youths, and his complaints about marrying a “girl.” In the adjacent Collection of the Rods (Fig. 8), we witness Joseph hiding the problematic stick, his reluctance evident in his distancing himself to the point of being nearly cut out of the picture in the Prayer Before the Rods (Fig. 9). But God’s selection prevails; in the Marriage (Fig. 7), it is “the inequality of the match that makes the priests frown, the maidens smile, and the youths mutter; skepticism, no longer politely discreet, moves one irrepressible youth to the verge of laughter as he gives the old man the traditional slap on the back,” a comic ritual component of medieval wedding customs in Italy. The humor of the scene becomes even more overt in the work of Giotto’s pupil, Taddeo Gaddi, who in his version of the Marriage in the Baroncelli Chapel of the Florentine Franciscan Church of Santa Croce turned Giotto’s wit into full-on spectacle (Fig. 10; ca. 1330): Joseph’s slap on the back turns nearly violent, a young man breaks his sterile rod in overt frustration, and another thwarted suitor carts in a girthy, foliated trunk to rival Joseph’s more delicate stem.

The ninety-year-old Joseph’s newly established step-paternity likewise created situations ripe for Giotto’s comedic exposition, the humor of which is elucidated by comparisons to plays performed in early trecento Italy. In Giotto’s Nativity (Fig. 11), all humans, angels, and animals are enraptured by their newborn savior, but not Joseph, who is asleep on the ground next to the huddled sheep. As he tells his wife at the Nativity in a play of ca. 1320, composed as part of a laudario for a Perugian confraternity of flagellants, he is tired, and so he nods off amid the flock, an act which the shepherds mock and attribute to his “great age.” Even as it evokes the prophetic nature of his dreams, Joseph’s exhaustion goes far beyond the biblical account. In the adjacent Adoration of the Magi (Fig. 12), as in the play, the grizzled saint defies the impossible by sleeping through the most epic baby shower of all time, during which not even angels and a shooting star, nor braying camels, can rouse the newly minted step-father. In the Flight into Egypt (Fig. 13), the stooped old man’s frown at the youth behind him seems to mirror his grumbling in the play, in which he begs his young wife to slow down and let them stop beneath a shady tree; he is tired and overburdened, and according to Mary, not particularly helpful.

Like the complaining, elderly Joseph, the aged Joachim’s bestial prostration in shock at the angelic news of his wife’s miraculous fecundity (Fig. 3) would have been quite funny to a trecento audience; comparisons of humans with farm animals and sudden, ironic, and drastic reversals of fortune, like Joachim’s realization that he will have a baby, were popular themes of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century jokes. In one of the most amusing tales of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron the narrator Lauretta mocks the fatuous physician Simone, who arrives in Florence in a doctoral gown covered in gray and white fur, by comparing him to a sheep. By the end of the thirteenth century and throughout the fourteenth century, compositional parallels between lowly beast and unenlightened human were common forms of mockery in illuminated books of hours and Psalters, whether the intent was to mock peasants or to play upon a beloved saint’s foibles; an example of the latter appears in the Rest on the Flight into Egypt of a French book of hours (ca. 1440; Fig. 14), in which Joseph and his donkey water themselves in beastly fashion (a parody rendered explicit by the marginalia). As authors including Jonathan Alexander, Michael Camille, and Paul Freedman have shown, such bestial parallels speak to idleness, boorishness, rusticity, or foolishness, as unequivocal markers of mockery. Joachim’s crouching contrasts clearly with conceptions of ideal human comportment outlined in thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century revivals of Aristotelian physiognomic theory, in which human parallels with animals including goats and donkeys have behavioral and moral significance. In his Expositio problematum Aristotelis, completed in Padua in 1310, the philosopher and physician Pietro d’Abano (d. 1316) mentioned Giotto specifically when discussing the question of why men make images of the face; he noted Giotto’s exemplary ability to depict his figures’ character and morality through physiognomy. Twelfth-century monastic treatises advance similar notions. The Cistercian William of St-Thierry (1085–1148) cast the deformation of the ideal, upright human body as a sign of potential animal-like depravity: the “erect man, reaching toward heaven and looking up, signifies the imperial and regal dignity of the rational soul . . . It shows that man has received from the Creator dominion over all the beings that look down, and that he has much in common with that which is above if he maintains the dignity of his inborn likeness.”

Giotto’s barefoot, club-wielding, clown-like Stultitia (Folly; Fig. 15) on the dado of the chapel’s north wall inverts such dignified aspirations. Although he wears a crown of feathers and a bird-like train of rags, the stones encircling his belt prohibit flight as he stretches futilely to the heavens. As Ladis noted, a trecento audience felt little guilt about such condemnatory, superior laughter, for Stultitia’s external characteristics expressed interior nature. Thus, Scrovegni could laugh at the folly of the shortsighted, jug-like, gluttonous steward who guzzles the wine before the actual wedding party at Cana, for he serves as a foil to the worthy, obedient servant who is rewarded with Jesus’ blessing in the same scene (Fig. 2). As Scrovegni turned to exit his chapel through the north door to his palace, he could see the animal-like wild man and the blind ignorance of the crowned woman who appear in the decorative border above (Figs. 16–17). Although the woman holds a book, the clubs emanating from her eyes prevent her use of its knowledge and mirror Folly’s own club that he wields like a scepter directly below; she is the ideal foil for the book-wielding Prudentia (Prudence) immediately across from her in the south dado. As Scrovegni approached the Last Judgment on the west wall, he would have been reminded of the consequences of such shortsightedness and of the reason for the chapel’s commission. Moneybags proliferate throughout Giotto’s vision of Hell in the lower right corner of the west wall, forming a visual pendant to Judas’s bribe on the east wall (Fig. 5). Here, too, wit conveys the message. One damned soul attempts to escape his fiery fate by hiding behind the wooden cross adjacent to the kneeling Scrovegni (Fig. 18), an object he “doubtless never embraced so firmly in life.” In the depths of Hell, a friar kneels piously before his superior, a bishop still wearing his miter, who receives his cherished moneybag while enthroned upon his demon cathedra (Fig. 19). So-called money-centos illuminate the popularity of such jokes in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; these satirical collections of Latin verses mock clerical greed particularly through wordplay, such as replacing cardinales, or cardinals, with carpinales, meaning graspers.

While Giotto’s visual wit is sometimes condemnatory, it is also deeply meaningful in its celebration of key theological precepts. The humor of the elderly Joseph’s floriated rod reinforces the miraculous fertility of the Virgin’s womb by underlining his lack of carnal involvement in the matter. As a representative of the Old Law, the sheep-like Joachim, Jesus’ grandfather, is by necessity unenlightened; his enactment of the ritual sacrifice on the altar before him (Fig. 3) reinforces this, while the sacrificial lamb “roasted by fire” (Exodus 12:8–11) prefigures the Eucharistic Incarnation enacted below on the chapel’s altar: according to Bonaventure, “The flesh of Christ is a certain burning ember . . . thus the flesh of this Lamb must be roasted.” Giotto’s mockery of Joachim’s dumbfounded realization that he will have a child, another miracle baby, both foreshadows and inaugurates the entire history of Jesus’ Incarnation and Passion presented on the walls of the chapel.

For Ladis, Giotto’s visual jokes bore witness to the legendary artistic personality as the generator of Renaissance painting. He conceptualized Giotto’s wit as a product of nascent Renaissance humanist pursuits, entirely in line with the classical topos of the witty artist, based on descriptions of Giotto’s personality in Boccaccio’s 1350 Decameron and Franco Sacchetti’s 1390 Trecentonovelle, both examples of comic literature influenced by classical literary precedents. But Ladis’s insights left an important question unanswered: what was the use of humor for the sacred function of the chapel? Far from being purely personal to Giotto, humor and wit were prevalent in the Franciscan preaching Giotto, Enrico Scrovegni, and his circle would have heard regularly. The background of this rhetorical tradition illuminates Giotto’s innovative introduction of visual wit into sacred narrative.

The sermo humilis as a genre emerged in Late Antiquity through the adaptation of classical rhetorical theory to Christian use. This combination produced not a new theory, but rather an intermingling of previously distinct subject matters and styles. For example, Cicero’s threefold classification of style appropriate to subject matter, from “low” to “lofty,” was repurposed to fit a new function. In ancient rhetorical theory, humilis had determined the low style, with its connotations of inferiority; it was therefore only appropriate for speaking about the most base, everyday things. But in Christian literature and thought, the term’s pejorative meaning was transformed. The humility of the Christian God’s Incarnation as a human baby, and of his life lived among the poor, celebrated, for example, by his triumphal adventus into Jerusalem on the back of a lowly ass, “derives its full force from the contrast with Christ’s divine nature: man and God, lowly and sublime, humilis et sublimis.” In a rhetorical style that celebrated the ironic paradox of a god made flesh, Augustine’s sermons contrasted Jesus’ humilitas with the superbia of the Platonists’ hatred for the body. He described the apostles as lowborn, illiterate, ignorant, and of the lowest condition. The Bible itself he described as a sermo humilis, characterized by a lowly style that possessed profound sublimity. Humilitas appeared through vulgarisms and realism in Augustine and Jerome; both authors used comical and satirical passages in their sermons, as did the popular Franciscan preachers of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy like Bernardino da Siena (1380–1444), who continued to propagate the tradition of the sermo humilis and the notion of humility as closest to God. Humor is key to this humility. Erich Auerbach considers satirical passages to be hallmarks of the sermo humilis, because they appear in situations concerning “serious or profound matters” and are transformed by them. Of course, humor and humble details could also serve as useful tools for provoking lay attentiveness and engagement, particularly in a sermon. But above all, humor was considered rhetorically appropriate, along with irony and realism, as a component of humilitas. The realism or lowliness of humor, the irony of its use to present profound matters like the life of Christ–or in a Christian adaptation of rhetorical theory, the low style–was ultimately considered appropriate to the sermon’s sacred function, celebrating humility most overtly.

Perhaps the best known Franciscan preacher, Anthony of Padua, followed Francis of Assisi in using the sermo humilis when speaking to the laity, preferring this to the sermo modernus, which focused on scriptural explication by means of complex scholastic theology. According to his biographer Thomas of Celano (ca. 1185–1265), Francis did not compose his sermons ahead of time. He relied particularly on the use of exempla, as did Anthony of Padua. From contemporary accounts of Anthony of Padua’s preaching, we know that he, like other Franciscan thirteenth-century preachers, frequently induced laughter through comical and satirical material and witticisms, often through incorporating anecdotes and stories about the crafts and trades. But although we have the early fifteenth-century sermon collection of Bernardino da Siena, whose sermons are filled with humor, satire, and realism, the engaging and lively sermons of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Franciscans contemporary with Giotto and Enrico Scrovegni were unfortunately never preserved in their entirety. This was primarily due to the fact that the writing down of such sensational material in the vernacular was often considered dangerous. Both the Franciscans and Dominicans strongly discouraged writing sermons down, lest the laity get their hands on them and practice their own forms of preaching. Written Latin redactions were acceptable only for other friars’ use. Anthony of Padua is the first Franciscan preacher whose sermon outlines survive. But although Anthony’s and his successors’ redactions are full of learned references, they lack the full content that filled and enlivened the sermon, that, in the tradition of Francis, rendered the Bible actually present.

Although we lack this laughter-inducing sermon content, Franciscan chronicles and vitae provide abundant insight into the nature and importance of humor for early Franciscans of the Italian peninsula; these tales were beloved by the later friars as a means of cementing communal identity. Early accounts of Francis of Assisi, both eyewitness and hagiographical, describe how the saint and his companions would delight in laughter and humiliation, to the point of rolling around on the ground in hysterics. Francis and his early followers were well known for intentionally humiliating themselves by mimicking animals in public, calling themselves “God’s jongleurs” (joculatores Domini). In the Speculum perfectionis (Mirror of Perfection), written ca. 1317–18, Francis paraphrases Bernard of Clairvaux while discussing preaching and the use of exempla: “In the eyes of the worldly people we have the air of performing tours de force. All that they desire we flee, and what they flee we desire, like those jongleurs who, head down and feet up in an inhuman fashion, stand or walk on their hands and attract the eyes of everyone.” The Speculum’s account of Francis’s words revives an earlier version of the story in which Francis tells his followers to become joculatores Domini, using their jocularity to preach the truth by “lifting up the hearts of men to spiritual joy.” Jordan of Giano’s Chronica (ca. 1260) recounts that at the General Chapter of 1219, Francis spent the entire time lying on the dirty floor at the feet of his deputy. According to Thomas of Celano, Francis became so enraptured in the midst of delivering his sermon that he “bleated like a sheep” at his famous Christmas celebration at Greccio in 1223. During a visit with Pope Innocent III (d. 1216), Francis impersonated a pig by rolling around in a pigsty, primarily to embarrass the pope for not taking him seriously. According to the Vita Aegidi, written ca. 1260, a follower and close friend of Francis, Giles of Assisi (d. 1262), ate tree leaves in order to avoid conversing with those around him, and insisted that all should imitate “not Christ but instead the donkey that he rode on into Galilee.” One Franciscan contemporary of Giotto, Jacopone da Todi (d. 1306), apparently followed suit during a feast in Todi, stripping naked and crawling on all fours in the public square while saddled and bridled like an ass. His audience was reportedly terrified but “touched to their hearts” (tanto terrore, che tucti foro commossi ad compontione de core). In the fifteenth century, the Franciscan preacher Bernardino da Siena’s extensive mimicry of animals likewise grounded his performance of the sermo humilis.

Giotto’s visual parodies, such as that of Joachim, resonate particularly with these Franciscan chroniclers’ love of human/animal parodies. In Giotto’s Entry into Jerusalem (Fig. 20), as a crowd struggles to untangle themselves from clothing intended to be placed at the foot of their fast-approaching savior, one more successful boy prostrates deeply on all fours. He seems to gaze intently not toward Jesus, but toward the foal beside him. Animal-mimicry was not officially in keeping with Franciscan modes of conduct around 1300, but it clearly played a not-insignificant role in preaching. While Giotto’s mockery of Joachim (Fig. 3) exploits such humor more overtly, equally charming is the exhausted, crouched Joseph’s affiliation with the huddled sheep of the Nativity (Fig. 11), a parallel that mirrors Joachim’s own dreams among the sheepfold (Fig. 21); even here, as Ladis notes, the stubborn dark sheep seems to lean longingly toward his butting partner. Giotto’s attention to human/animal relations foreshadows a slew of bestial comparisons in Joseph’s later iconography that more overtly mock his affinity to the ass and ox of the Nativity (evoking, often, his nature as cornuto). An Adoration of the Magi panel (Fig. 22) that Giotto produced for Franciscan patrons around 1320 cleverly associates the eager saint with a four-legged, horned companion through his stance and wispy, pointed beard. Close attention to the panel, part of a series of seven probably produced for a Franciscan altarpiece, reveals that Joseph’s line of sight extends not toward the Christ child, nor to Melchior, from whom he had just received the precious gift of myrrh, but to the gold still held by Caspar; the recumbent Mary meanwhile casts an incredulous glance toward her husband who seems to be missing the whole point of the magnificent retinue.

While some late thirteenth-century Franciscan authors reacted negatively to the humiliating behavior ascribed to Francis and his early followers, around 1300 a group of sources manifest a resurgent interest in celebrating characteristically Franciscan practical jokes: these include the Speculum perfectionis (an anonymous account of Francis’s life written ca. 1317-18), the Fioretti (ca. 1337), and Jacopone’s vita, which revives the traditional pranks attributed to Francis and his companions. Public humility–even stripping naked–was central, after all, to the history of Francis and his imitation, as alter Christus, of Christ’s humanity, humility, and poverty; Francis’s renunciation of his merchant father’s inheritance led him to divest himself publicly of all his clothes, a scene which Giotto’s workshop captures, not without wit, in the Bardi Chapel of of Sta. Croce. Public humiliation and jokes intertwined for Franciscans as means of celebrating the humility Francis and Jesus shared. In Franciscan (and Bonaventuran) theology, humility was the central tenet of the Incarnation and Passion, and of its reenactment in the Eucharist. Francis particularly stressed the humility of God’s Incarnation as a human child, and the humility of his daily Incarnation in the Eucharist: “Behold each day He humbles Himself as when from His ‘royal throne’ into the virgin’s womb; each day He Himself comes to us, appearing humbly.” This understanding resonates particularly with Giotto’s pictorial scheme, which uses humor and realism, like Franciscan sermons, to celebrate the story of Jesus’ Incarnation. The Arena Chapel cycle’s focus on the ancestry and life of Jesus provided a subject matter most appropriate to the use of rhetorical humility–humilitas–because of its celebration of both the humility of God’s Incarnation and the supreme debasement of his Crucifixion–resulting in the ironic and joyous twist of his Resurrection.

Although we cannot link Giotto’s visual jokes in the Arena Chapel directly to period sermons, because they do not survive in their complete forms, we also should not expect them to correspond directly to literary precursors–nor is it necessary to characterize Giotto’s jokes as exclusively Franciscan in order to consider his Franciscan inspiration. But it is impossible to ignore the fact that Giotto’s sacred wit resonates particularly with the kind of preaching he would have heard in Padua and throughout his time working for Franciscan patrons. We may also note the association of the Arena Chapel’s wit with Giotto’s later work for the Franciscans of Assisi and elsewhere, as well as that of his pupils like Taddeo Gaddi in other Franciscan contexts, discussed in the following chapters. Despite Ladis’s insistence that Giotto’s Arena Chapel provides a unique example of trecento humor in painting, in the infancy cycle of the Lower Church of the Basilica of San Francesco, Assisi (ca. 1313), Giotto and his associates likewise introduced an element of comic relief in their depiction of the saint at the Presentation at the Temple (Fig. 23). Why completely block the body of the old saint behind a pillar, if not to parody his lack of involvement in the begetting of his step-son? Anna the prophetess, Joseph’s compositional parallel, receives a far more esteemed position in front of her pillar. Rather than turning to secular literature and classical tropes of witty artistic genius later revived by Boccaccio, Sacchetti, and Giorgio Vasari to explain Giotto’s introduction of wit into sacred narrative, we need only consider the culture of Giotto’s immediate surroundings.

Like Giotto’s unprecedented realism, humor–and the irony of its use to convey profound messages of the New Testament–provided a profound vehicle for enhancing the devotional efficacy of the Arena Chapel’s scenes. Even as the first intellectual Franciscans at universities like Paris and Oxford played down the more shockingly rebellious aspects of early Franciscan humor, such as tales of Franciscans stripping naked and flaunting their genitalia, they simultaneously sustained humor’s importance, and particularly the notion of laughter’s capacity to reveal higher wisdom. By the late thirteenth century, the mendicant orders were actively encouraging the use of humor in preaching, but potentially also in devotional practices–a notion that merits further research with respect to the visual arts. Bonaventure differed from earlier theologians in stressing the necessity of images to stimulate “sluggish affections” and to arouse devotion, writing that “our emotion is aroused more by what we see than by what we hear.” Much attention has therefore been paid to the violent and sorrowful details of Crucifixion scenes and their ability to elicit tearful compassion, an affective function detailed by Bonaventure’s devotional treatises. But according to Bonaventure, the devout could also “journey to the mind of God” through joy and laughter; the “bodily sense” of laughter could activate what the theologian called the “spiritual senses.”

Although Bonaventure is often invoked in relation to medieval image theory, scholarship on thirteenth- and fourteenth-century devotional and ecclesiastical art still casts “low,” “secular” humor as the antithesis to “high” veneration and theology, a dichotomy rooted partially in Bakhtinian partitionings of “folk” humor from “official,” serious, ecclesiastical culture. Modern writing on fourteenth- and fifteenth-century art still encourages a conception of humor as antithetical to veneration, particularly with respect to depictions of Jesus, Mary, or the saints. Scholarship on representations of St. Joseph, beginning with Erwin Panofsky, provides a good lens through which to view this dichotomy. Alternatively, humor is interpreted as a function of the need to educate a lay populace unfamiliar with Christian beliefs. The use of humor in a New Testament scene, for example, is considered relevant for its ability to “communicate basic doctrine to a large public that was not particularly acquainted with religious matters.” But just as humor in preaching cannot be attributed exclusively to the influence of secular fabliaux (the biographical history of Francis and the tradition of the sermo humilis both complicate that notion), so, too, might humor in a painted New Testament cycle be taken seriously–or in other words, as a part of the work’s rhetoric.
Although humor could certainly be useful as a tool for teaching the laity, its messages in fourteenth-century religious art, when they exist, often reinforce (and play upon) themes, such as vices and virtues, or Joseph’s old age, that were already well known to potential viewers. Furthermore, humor often joins theological symbolism in works produced for the most educated, upper echelons of society, who also had the benefit of confessors and spiritual advisors. The satirical marginalia of books of hours and Psalters, for example, often served an important role in amplifying the sacred events depicted center stage. The audiences of such satirical commentaries in the margins, as in the Capetian Queen Jeanne d’Evreux’s famous book of hours (ca. 1324–28), probably experienced such motifs as something more than solely educational.

The same may be said for humor in the Arena Chapel. Although accessible to the eyes of pilgrims and the larger public four times a year, the Arena Chapel cycle’s humor and realism are not fully explained as tools for re-stating the major themes and rendering them more readily comprehensible to the viewer. The chapel’s primary audience consisted of Enrico’s family, the occupants of the adjacent palace, as well as occasional guests of the Scrovegni who came from the upper echelons of the commune and the Veneto. In any case, the subjects explicated by Giotto’s jokes was already well known by even the most uneducated of audiences; mockery of Joseph’s old age highlighted the nature of his cuckoldry by God, for example, a tenet so fundamental to the Christian faith that everyone would get the joke. Furthermore, the analysis of Derbes and Sandona substantiates the notion of a sophisticated audience capable of reading the entire pictorial program comparatively and with a certain level of doctrinal literacy.

Furthermore, elements of rhetorical humilitas appear in devotional contexts in which they are clearly not diversionary. The irony of humanizing holy events and figures through the use of humble details like farm animals–such as Joachim’s parallel with the sheep–is equally evident in devotional treatises that expand beyond biblical narrative to encourage the devotee’s empathy. In the Meditations on the Life of Christ (ca. 1300 or 1346–64), a manuscript likely compiled in Tuscany by a Franciscan friar for a nun of the Poor Clares, ironic juxtapositions throughout the text mirror the rhetorical techniques of the sermo humilis. For example, as the preacher employs an exemplum in his sermon, the author compares the profound experience of witnessing Christ’s Sermon on Mount Tabor to the lowly activity of observing a hen and her chicks, an analogy with rhetorical, affective, and mnemonic functions. Such ironic parallels have, to my knowledge, never been given serious consideration for the light they shed on the use of rhetoric in late medieval religious art. But the relationships evoked between the functions of sermon exempla and the functions of pictures in Bonaventuran thought suggest that rhetorical theory easily transcended the categories of word and image. An image’s or program’s humilitas could therefore offer jokes and ironic juxtapositions that spoke not just to the triumph of humility, but also functioned as a sort of invitation, a subtle persuasion, through direct affective appeal. Giotto’s innovative appeal to humilitas could extend beyond rhetorical propriety and into the affective function of his frescoes to spur contemplative devotion. If, as Mary Carruthers suggests, “it is to rhetoric and not theology that one should go first” to understand the medieval arts, humor’s role in this experience might be far more important than previously thought.

Much like the interweaving of period Franciscan sermons with comic exempla, in the Arena Chapel’s pictorial cycle Giotto employs humor, realism, and irony with biblical narratives to counterbalance humble detail with lofty meaning, a practice that reflected the contemporary aesthetic of oppositio. Humor was a meaningful component of the Arena Chapel’s rhetorical scheme of paradoxical contrasts, which moved far beyond good and evil, virtue and vice, or life and death. The prevalence of humilitas as a rhetorical technique enlivens our understanding of humor and realism in the Arena Chapel’s cycle, and potentially in other works produced within the realm of Franciscan influence. Humor, satire, and realism also characterized the sermons of the Dominicans and Servites of Tuscany and the Veneto. But Giotto’s extensive personal contact with Franciscans, the Arena Chapel’s incorporation of particularly Franciscan themes, and the prominence of the Franciscans in Padua renders his exposure to Franciscan humilitas impossible to ignore; to separate Giotto’s innovative wit from the religious context of Padua and the Arena Chapel would negate a critical ingredient in his work.
Understanding the overall syntax of the Arena Chapel–the why behind Giotto’s details–encourages an appeal to rhetoric, but potentially also to affective and mnemonic practices related to the spurring of the “spiritual senses.” If one could “journey into the mind of God” through joy and laughter, such details, perhaps even more than a scene’s overall illusionism, could function as the beholder’s cues or points of access into an affective response encouraged by period sermons and devotional literature. There existed, therefore, a sacred function for humor in Giotto’s pictorial cycle, which might be called a kind of imago humilis. Humor was no mere detraction; it was a means by which devotion, and the image, could come to life. By acknowledging humor’s rhetorical role, we might begin to understand how it amplified the image in the context of trecento devotion, and to consider Giotto’s wit as something far more meaningful.