Page - 11 - in Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, Volume LIX

VOYEURISTIC stimuli 11 its environment, with one wall removed to offer a gaze at an intimate domestic, perhaps private, event (figs. 1, 2).12 Earlier studies have ascribed this ploy either to the influence of medieval thea- tre wagons and to an early evolutionary stage in Giotto’s artistic exploration of naturalism,13 or to the necessities of medieval narratives, as argued by Wolfgang Kemp.14 Neither of these assump- tions, however, explains why the ‘interior’ was not stretched, so to speak, to the format edges, thereby omitting completely the view of the entire building and creating a more reasonable space, as customary at that time in Sienese painting and even in other paintings by Giotto in the Arena Chapel.15 Moreover, rather than representing the interior over most of the front plane, Giotto intro- duced an artificial opening, providing a simul- taneous portrayal of interior and exterior. This simultaneous apparatus yields several different proportional systems in the same representation, thereby undermining any realistic endeavor. Both the Annunciation to St. Anne and the Birth of the Virgin (figs. 1, 2) take place in a similar architec- tural backdrop – a boxlike edifice, crowned with pseudo-classical pediments, flanked on its right by a porch with a balcony and a staircase.16 While the space of the porch is open to the viewer by its nature, the interior of the house, in which the sacred history occurs, is artificially opened, with a wall removed to offer the viewer a lingering gaze. Giotto, further, introduces a double-mechanism of opening devices in the paintings, one that Anna Rohlfs-von Wittich labeled Handlungsöffnung and Schauöffnung.17 The Handlungsöffnung is desig- nated for the existence, action, and development of the narrative and its protagonist (in our case the door leading from the porch to the interior room and the window); the Schauöffnung is a fic- tive opening (in our case, the missing wall) of which the protagonists are unaware. It is designed to afford the viewers communication with the depicted event. As noted by Wolfgang Kemp, the fictitious nature of the mural surface and the Schauöffnung is accentuated by the repetition of the decorative pattern framing both the mural itself and the artificial opening.18 The dual nature of Giotto’s openings is thus aimed at both internal and external communication exchanges, within and outside the painted surface, establishing sev- eral levels of interior-exterior. 12 This pictorial device was already noticed at an early stage of research, as for example, by J. J. Tikkanen, Der maler- ische Stil Giotto’s, Helsingfors 1884, p. 28. 13 The exact chronology of the frescos in the Arena Chapel remained in dispute for a long time. Fritz Baumgart, for example, considered the upper register as the last to be executed, see F. Baumgart, Die Fresken Giottos in der Are- nakapelle zu Padua, in: Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 6, 1937, pp. 1–31; Recent observations on the giornate, how- ever, suggest that the opening register on the Eremitani side, where the Annunciation to St. Anne is located, was the first to be executed, see G. Basile, Giotto. The Frescos of the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, Milan 2002, pp. 24–29. For a detailed study of the theses, see: M. V. Schwarz, Giottus Pictor. Band 2: Giottos Werke, Vienna/Cologne/ Weimar 2008, pp. 91–92. See also J. White, Giotto’s Use of Architecture in The Expulsion of Joachim and The Entry into Jerusalem at Padua, in: J. White (ed.), Studies in Late Medieval Italian Art, London 1984, pp. 301–318; idem, Art and Architecture in Italy: 1250–1400, Harmondsworth 1966, pp. 207–209. On the possible influence of medieval theatre on Giotto’s composition, see for example E. Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art, London 1965, pp. 132, 135–136, 137, 139; M. Barasch, Giotto and the Language of Gesture, Cambridge 1987, p. 11; L. Jacobus, Giotto’s Annunciation in the Arena Chapel, Padua, in: The Art Bulletin 81/1, 1999, pp. 93–107. 14 This is one of the main theses discussed throughout in: Kemp, Die Räume der Maler (cit. n. 5). 15 Ibidem, p. 51. 16 Giotto thus introduces several action kernels with a single narrative value distributed in several spaces, see M. Imdahl, Giotto. Arenafresken: Ikonographie, Ikonologie, Ikonik, Munich 1980, pp. 43–51, 61–83. 17 A. Rohlfs-Von Wittich, Das Innenraumbild als Kriterium für die Bildwelt, in: Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 18, 1955, p. 109. 18 Kemp, Die Räume der Maler (cit. n. 5), pp. 29–30.