Imago humilis
Humor, Irony, and the Rhetorical Wit of the Sacred in the Arena Chapel, Padua
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21322307 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Anne L Williams (University of Hong Kong, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 61 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 57-80 |
| Publication date | 2022-03-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Gesta (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0016-920X • E-ISSN: 2169-3099 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1086/718048 |
| OpenAlex | W4280612477 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 13 |
In 1986, Andrew Ladis identified the extensive visual humor in the Arena Chapel’s pictorial cycle as a testament to the master painter Giotto di Bondone’s legendary wit. Yet scholarship on fourteenth-century devotional and ecclesiastical art still tends to cast “low,” “secular” humor as the antithesis to “high” veneration and theology. This essay challenges this notion by reassessing humor’s purpose in the Arena Chapel. Rather than serving as an indicator of Giotto’s personality alone—a product of nascent Renaissance humanism colored by comic literature—humor played a role in the cycle’s scheme of paradoxical contrasts (oppositio), its presence likely motivated in part by ties to rhetorical traditions favored particularly by Franciscans. Humor and wit were intimately tied to the dynamic of oppositio in the sermo humilis (sermon in a plain or humble style), a genre preached daily and considered most appropriate for conveying the irony of the Christian God’s Incarnation, the focus of Giotto’s pictorial program
Art · Art history · Chapel · Comics · Intertextuality · Irony · Literature · Rhetorical question · Sermon · Style (visual arts) · Theology · Veneration · Historical and Religious Studies of Rome · Medieval Literature and History · Philosophy · Renaissance and Early Modern Studies
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |