Coretti

Two lamps hang in two rooms that nobody can enter. Low on the wall around the sanctuary opening of the Scrovegni Chapel, Giotto painted a pair of vaulted recesses. Each has a pointed arch, a narrow window and a suspended metal lamp. There are no saints, worshippers or servants inside. The rooms appear to extend beyond the chapel's wall, offering a little additional architecture precisely where solid masonry encloses the real sanctuary.

These fictive spaces are conventionally called the coretti. The name is a convenient way of distinguishing the pair; it does not establish that either image represents a functioning choir. Their emptiness gives them a special presence. In the surrounding frescoes, bodies and gestures usually direct our attention through an event. Here the meeting of walls, the curve of a rib and the ellipses of a lamp have to carry the picture. Looking becomes a matter of deciding where things stand in relation to one another, and where we stand in relation to them.

The two paintings belong to Giotto's decoration of the Scrovegni Chapel, the cycle dated by the chapel's official account to 1303–05. ^[1] Padova Musei catalogues each recess separately as an early fourteenth-century fresco, approximately 210 centimetres high and 155 centimetres wide. Both occupy the lowest register of the triumphal arch wall: one on the viewer's right, or south side, and the other on the left, or north side, when facing the sanctuary. ^{[2] [3]} They form a pair, but looking at each in turn reveals how much variety Giotto could give to a small architectural scheme.

An opening made from paint

The first invitation to believe in the rooms comes from their fronts. Pale pointed arches rise between slender supports, beneath narrow ornamental bands. Below each opening sits a broad rectangular panel, pale at its centre and enclosed by darker borders. The arch and panel belong to the same orderly frontage. They give the recess a substantial base and an architectural outline before the eye attempts to explore its depth.

Within that frame, the vault seems to turn away from us. Its ribs divide the ceiling into coloured compartments and descend towards supports at the corners. A window in the rear wall offers another plane beyond the hanging lamp. Nothing requires the viewer to reconstruct an entire building. There is enough information to recognise a small enclosed chamber: a front, a ceiling, a rear wall, a lateral wall and an object suspended between them.

The lower rectangular panels make this experience more complicated than a simple illusion of an open doorway. They close off the bottoms of the rooms. We look over a substantial painted barrier into the recesses rather than along a clear path towards their windows. The upper spaces invite the eye inside, while the broad fronts keep the body outside. That closure helps explain why the paintings have been interpreted as funerary niches.

The imagined materials also help organise the distance. The pale framing has the visual weight of dressed stone or marble. Within it, grey and ochre walls carry lines suggesting courses or panels; the roof compartments have a cooler blue-grey colour. These are changes of surface as well as changes of direction. Giotto gives the front a different character from the enclosing walls and gives the vault another character again. Depth becomes something that can be followed through materials.

It is useful to keep the physical object in view while enjoying that transformation. The rooms are painted on the chapel wall. Their rear windows do not open through the building, their lamps cannot be lit, and there is no floor on which a visitor could stand. Yet the paintings use familiar architectural and furnishing details to make the wall feel temporarily permeable. The small scale of the illusion encourages close attention: one can take in the whole opening and then return to the individual things that make it plausible.

Looking at the right and left rooms

The right-hand room has a particularly rich rear surface. Ochre-grey panels are divided by horizontal and vertical bands, and their mottled patterns give the enclosing walls a varied texture. The darkened right wall turns inward towards a slender corner support. Above it, red and green lines articulate the vault against blue-grey fields. The ceiling is strongly foreshortened, so its ribs seem to sweep across the space rather than rise into a high, distant canopy.

The window sits to the left of the lamp in this room. Its two slender lights, gathered beneath a pointed head, contain a conspicuously pale area. Their narrow central division and small ornamental opening above make the window legible even where the surrounding wall is busy with pattern. The lamp hangs forward of it. A viewer can compare the dark metalwork against that pale window and then follow it across the warmer rear wall. The change of background makes the furnishing feel placed within an enclosure.

In the left-hand room, the relationship is reversed. The left lateral wall is especially evident, with ruled divisions that carry the eye towards the back corner. The rear window lies to the right of the suspended lamp, and its lights appear blue in the present painting. The surrounding wall is quieter than the richly mottled surface opposite. Against it, the dark circles and small hanging forms of the lamp stand out with unusual clarity.

The left fictive chamber on the Scrovegni Chapel’s triumphal arch, with the painted vault, suspended lamp and window to the lamp’s right. Photo: © Jörgens.Mi/Wikipedia. Image source. CC BY-SA 3.0. Cropped and proportionally reduced reproduction; no colour or content enhancement.

The left vault also makes its own pattern. Its ribs converge and spread across the painted ceiling, with the corner support well to the left of the lamp. Bands of warm red and green distinguish their edges from the cooler roof fields. Following the ribs brings the eye towards the point from which the lamp is suspended. Following the suspension line carries it down again, through the open air of the chamber. The two movements connect the heaviest architectural element overhead with the lightest furnishing below.

These differences deserve time. At a glance the pair can look like a repeated emblem of architectural skill. In detail, the views expose opposite lateral walls, place the windows differently behind the lamps and vary the apparent illumination and richness of the surfaces. The correspondence is strong enough to bind the paintings together, while the differences make each a separate act of looking. Their shared design does not mean that one identical projection has simply been reversed.

Nor should the present colour differences immediately be turned into a theory of original lighting. The right window reads as pale, the left as blue; that is a useful description of what can now be seen. Establishing why they differ would require more than comparing photographs. Paint condition, reproduction and the original handling of the windows are distinct questions. The visual effect is secure enough: the two little interiors do not have the same atmosphere.

Why the lamps matter

The lamps are the pair's most effective measures of space. A wall can be understood as a decorated surface before it is understood as something receding. A metal ring presents a more immediate puzzle. It is recognisably circular in conception, yet appears flattened by the angle at which we see it. Several rings held above one another ask the viewer to imagine a continuous object occupying the air.

Each lamp has three principal horizontal rings, a central vertical structure and small vessels distributed around its circumference. The rings overlap the walls and windows behind them. Their far and near edges have to be read together; the bowls and suspension details prevent the framework from becoming a merely decorative set of lines. Even without a human figure for scale, this is an object whose construction invites comparison with things encountered in a real interior.

The art historian Michael Viktor Schwarz gives this furnishing unusual weight in his account of the coretti. He argues that the chambers would be substantially less convincing without the three-tiered lamp structures and the carefully distributed oil vessels. The judgment is persuasive because it identifies the point where the architecture acquires a tangible occupant. The room contains no person, but it contains something that appears to hang, weigh and remain suspended. ^[4]

One can test that observation by shifting attention between lamp and vault. The ceiling establishes an enclosure, but its coloured compartments can also be enjoyed as a pattern. The lamp cuts across that pattern and continues into the lower part of the room. Its suspension connects it to a particular point above; its successive rings give it a vertical extent; the separate vessels give its circumference small, readable interruptions. Those relationships make an interval of air visible.

There is a quiet distinction between the lamp's function within the picture and its possible meaning. As a depicted object, it furnishes the chamber and clarifies depth. As a possible funerary light, it belongs to an interpretation of the whole ensemble. The second role does not need to be settled before the first becomes apparent. Its power to organise the room can be seen by any attentive viewer, while the proposed memorial association needs historical argument.

The absence of visible activity lets this ordinary furnishing dominate. In a narrative scene, a lamp might be passed over while attention follows a face or hand. Here its rings become the principal event. There is pleasure in discovering how a small structure, almost entirely made of thin dark marks, can persuade the eye that a broad expanse of painted plaster has opened behind it.

Perspective and a viewer standing in the chapel

The coretti are often approached as early demonstrations of perspective. The description is helpful if perspective means the pictorial ordering of things in depth. It becomes misleading if it implies that Giotto used one rigorously unified mathematical system of the kind later associated with Renaissance linear perspective. The paintings offer a persuasive spatial experience without supplying evidence for that stronger claim.

Schwarz describes the projections as directed towards the chapel's central axis. He also notices features that resist a mechanically consistent construction, including what he calls a reversed perspective in the side walls. For him, these features reveal how extensively Giotto depended on empirical adjustment. ^[4] His account describes the paintings’ mixture of directional force and local adjustment; it does not claim that their geometry has been reduced to one measured scheme.

The painted rooms address someone in the real chapel. They sit low enough for their fronts to have an immediate relationship with the surrounding architecture, while their roofs ask for an upward view. Seen together, their inward orientations relate them to the space between them. Looking at a flat reproduction of either room isolates a beautifully composed picture, but loosens that relationship with the larger wall and the viewer's body.

A photograph also gives the image a stable rectangle and a single scale. In the building, distance and angle change as a person moves. The real supports and sanctuary opening remain in peripheral view, so the eye continually compares built depth with painted depth. The effect need not depend on the illusion surviving every position equally well. Its interest lies partly in the way the image responds to an embodied spectator rather than an abstract observer outside the chapel.

Schwarz, following an observation by Ursula Schlegel, reports that the chambers appear more transversely rectangular when viewed upwards from near the centre of the chapel than they do in frontal photographs, where they can seem square. ^[4] The observation supports his account of practical adjustment. It does not establish a single, precisely recoverable spot that every visitor must occupy. The changing experience of the form is the point: the same painted chamber can disclose a different apparent shape as its relationship with the viewer changes.

Such qualifications make Giotto's achievement more interesting. The coretti show him coordinating several familiar cues: an oblique wall, converging ribs, overlapping objects, a window beyond a lamp and a substantial front. The cues work together strongly enough to produce the experience of a room. Looking for one geometrical rule can distract from the patience with which he manages each of these relations.

Empty rooms among crowded stories

The pair's position on the triumphal arch wall distinguishes them from architectural settings within the narrative cycle. Elsewhere, a building contains or frames an event. Here architecture itself occupies the picture field. The absence of figures leaves the spectator's own position unusually exposed: there is nobody inside the room whose gaze or movement can guide ours.

Above, the Annunciation is distributed across the sanctuary opening, with Gabriel on the viewer's left and Mary on the right. Below that level, the Pact of Judas occupies the left side and the Visitation the right, immediately above the coretti. Schwarz reads the arch wall as an ensemble in which different registers give painted things different relationships with the real chapel. His distinction is useful: an event can be presented as a framed story, while a neighbouring architecture seems to attach itself to the spectator's surroundings. ^[24]

The sanctuary-end arch ensemble showing how the coretti sit below the surrounding narratives. Oblique ensemble view; the central Father image now in the chapel is a conservation copy. Photo: © Jörgens.Mi/Wikipedia. Image source. CC BY-SA 3.0. Proportionally reduced reproduction; no colour or content enhancement.

The coretti share in the wall's architectural order. Their borders meet the painted supports and horizontal divisions rather than floating independently against an unstructured background. Their fronts seem to belong to the chapel's lower wall, while their interiors appear to withdraw behind it. The painting encourages two readings at once: a decorated surface divided into compartments, and an architectural frontage with rooms beyond.

This is particularly effective beside the real sanctuary opening. Built space recedes through the middle of the wall; painted space recedes to either side. The comparison is available without any theory about the rooms' original function. The actual opening helps make the imaginary ones intelligible, while the painted pair enrich the wall surrounding the opening. Their dimensions also keep them subordinate to the larger structure, so that they feel like carefully placed additions to it.

The Visitation and Judas scene add another kind of relationship. Human meetings unfold above chambers that remain unoccupied. Welcome, betrayal, exchange and bodily presence are set against stillness below. The contrast helps explain why the empty rooms deserve attention within a cycle so celebrated for its figures. They interrupt the flow of action, yet remain firmly connected to its architectural setting.

At the chapel's opposite end, the Last Judgement fills the entrance wall. ^[1] Turning between the two ends means moving between different ways of picturing realities beyond the visible building. The coretti keep that question modest and immediate. A window, an overhead vault and a suspended lamp are sufficient to make a little unseen space seem available just beyond the wall.

Chapels, tomb niches or pictorial extensions?

What kind of space did Giotto intend to suggest? The architecture is clear enough to recognise, but its purpose has generated sharply different answers. The possibilities matter because they change the significance of the lower panels and lamps. A fictive side chapel, a substitute for an unbuilt architectural extension and a commemorative tomb niche may use some of the same forms while asking the spectator to imagine very different activities.

Schwarz records earlier proposals that the pair supplied painted substitutes for a missing transept or for side chapels. He then develops a funerary alternative associated with Ursula Schlegel: the openings can be understood as arcosolia, arched tomb niches. In that reading, the broad pale panel below each chamber becomes a sarcophagus front, and the oil lamp becomes a light for the dead. ^[4] These are interpretations of depicted forms, not evidence that the masonry behind the frescoes contains accessible chambers.

The lower fronts give the tomb-niche proposal its strongest visual foothold. They are broad, emphatic and closed, with large pale centres surrounded by darker inlays. If the pictures were simply meant to suggest rooms through which someone might pass, these barriers would require explanation. Under the funerary interpretation, the closure belongs to the imagined monument itself. The empty space overhead can then be read as a sheltered recess accompanying the tomb front.

Schwarz adds a comparison with the tomb of Bishop Rainer in the Florentine Baptistery, whose marble-inlaid sarcophagus front could, he suggests, have offered a model for Giotto's painted panels. ^[4] The comparison helps articulate what kind of object he sees in them. It remains a proposed visual relationship; it does not document a commission to imitate that monument or establish that Giotto intended a recognisable quotation.

He also carries the argument beyond Schlegel's symbolic identification. Could these painted monuments themselves have served commemorative functions? Schwarz suggests that they may have acted as cenotaphs for Enrico Scrovegni and his wife, with burial envisaged in the lower space beneath the chapel. The painted pair would thus have supplied visible focuses for remembrance in the church above. This reconstruction connects the images with questions about the building's changing plans and the eventual location of the patron's tomb. ^[25]

The Scrovegni Chapel looking towards the entrance wall in a 2017 photograph: the Last Judgement closes the interior, with narrative tiers at either side beneath the blue vault. Derbrauni. Image source. CC BY-SA 4.0. Proportionally reduced reproduction; original composition, colour and photographic lighting retained.

The reconstruction involves several successive steps. Recognising a tomb-like front is one argument; assigning a commemorative function is another; identifying two intended people and locating proposed burials below is a further reconstruction. Schwarz presents possibilities at these points. No surviving instruction quoted in his discussion orders Giotto to paint cenotaphs for the couple, and the paintings themselves do not name their occupants.

His assignment of the two sides is likewise conditional. He associates the right-hand chamber and the Visitation above it with the woman and mother of the household. The left-hand chamber, below the male encounter in Judas's bargain, would belong to the household's male patron. That association extends the funerary hypothesis into a reading of the programme. ^[25] It cannot serve as independent proof that the two rooms represent the couple's monuments, because it depends on accepting the proposed identification in the first place.

Laura Jacobus supplies a direct counter-position. In her 2009 review of Anne Derbes and Mark Sandona's The Usurer's Heart, she calls Schlegel's tomb-chamber thesis unconvincing. She also questions confidence that the chapel was originally intended as Enrico's mausoleum, stressing the later addition of the apse containing his tomb. ^[26] Schwarz's detailed visual case and Jacobus's objection should therefore remain in view together. Neither turns a disputed function into an established fact.

Jacobus's review also cautions against making penitence for usury explain the entire chapel. She accepts the value of contrasting Mary's charity with Judas's avarice while challenging the stronger identification of Judas specifically with usury. ^[26] For the coretti, that distinction leaves room for a meaningful relationship with the scenes above without making the pair illustrations of one assumed episode in Enrico's conscience. Their possible memorial role deserves discussion on its own evidence.

The presence of an unoccupied space

A settled functional name would make the coretti easier to label. It would not exhaust their appeal. Their forms support questions about architecture, commemoration and the experience of sacred space because Giotto gives them enough substance to invite those questions. The painted fronts seem solid; the vaults withdraw; the windows imply a further boundary; the lamps occupy the air between.

Their emptiness is essential to that encounter. It makes room for sustained attention to light and enclosure without directing us towards a particular figure. The spectator has to do more of the spatial work, following a rib, comparing a lamp with a window and noticing which side wall comes into view. Even the undecided function encourages a slower look at what is actually present.

Return finally to the two lamps. Each is a small, elaborate structure, held in an imagined interior by a thin suspension. They give the recesses something like a continuing life: a furnished space seems to persist beyond the wall whether or not anyone enters it. Within the busy unfolding of the chapel's sacred history, Giotto allows these two rooms to remain still. Their silence makes the surrounding building, and the act of looking within it, newly noticeable.