Giotto’s Sky: The Fresco Paintings of the First Floor Salone of the Palazzo della Ragione, Padua, Italy
Issue: Vol 7 No. 4 (2013) The Imagined Sky
Journal: Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture
Subject Areas: Religious Studies
Abstract:
Giotto’s frescos in the Salone of the Palazzo della Ragione, Padua, were painted across three registers. The upper register contains celestial astronomical imagery that few scholars have been able fully to understand. Using two sections of this upper register as case studies, I reconstructed the skies over Padua in the medieval period using astronomical and astrological software, together with the knowledge of poetic astronomy and naked eye astronomy. This approach showed that, rather than being simple decorations, these images are instead reflective of the constellations that dictated the seasons and the cycle of the year as seen over Padua c. 1309. Furthermore, they reveal a night sky that was populated with a constellational iconography that, I argue, was part of an ensouled cosmology.
Author: Darrelyn Gunzburg
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