Page - 19 - in Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, Volume LIX

VOYEURISTIC stimuli 19 ple in the Betrayal of Judas (fig. 4).49 Unlike its medieval precedents that portrayed the kiss being given on the cheek, Giotto depicted the feudal kiss on the mouth. Yet, although Judas’s lips are pursed and prepared for the kiss, the kiss itself is not performed, leaving a space full of tension between the protagonists, a tension which is also reinforced by their mutual stark gaze, eye to eye. The visual gap between the mouths of Judas and Jesus not only charges the scene with dra- matic power,50 but also leaves space for specula- tion about the corporality and sensuality of their interaction, charging it thereby also with naked eroticism. Although a Modernist reading of this 4: Giotto, Betrayal of Judas, 1303–1307, fresco, Padua, Capella degli Scrovegni 49 Anne Derbes and Mark Sandona understood the high eroticism in the depiction of the sinful kiss of Judas as inten- tionally conceived to be an antithesis to the chaste kiss of Anne and Joachim in the Meeting at the Golden Gate, see A. Derbes/M. Sandona, Barren Metal and the Fruitful Womb. The Program of Giotto’s Arena Chapel in Padua, in: The Art Bulletin 80/2, 1998, pp. 274–291, esp. pp. 282–284. 50 Imdahl, Giotto: Arenafresken, (cit. n. 16), p. 94. Whether it is the moment before or after the kiss is still disputable, see Schwarz, Giottus Pictor (cit. n. 13), pp. 119–121.