Flowering of the Rods

A line of young men advances towards an altar, each carrying a slender rod. In the next painting the rods have been gathered together, and the men have sunk to their knees. The building remains recognisable; almost everything about the human action has changed. Giotto makes the interval between bringing an object and waiting for an answer the subject of two separate frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel at Padua.

These paintings are often approached through the larger story of the flowering of Joseph's rod, the miraculous sign that identifies him as Mary's future husband and guardian. Their immediate subjects are earlier stages: the delivery of the rods and prayer before the divine choice is revealed. The distinction matters when looking. Expectation occupies the pictures, while the following Marriage of the Virgin carries the story forward to its outcome. The two scenes considered here each have their own frame, arrangement of figures and moment in narrative time. ^{[1] [2]}

The rods are small, almost colourless things among large areas of blue, red and pale drapery. Yet they direct the entire action. First they pass from individual hands towards the priest; then they stand together on the altar, drawing the gathered company into a common posture. An extraordinary event is being prepared through familiar physical acts: arriving, handing something over, kneeling and looking.

Two paintings in the Life of Mary

Padova Musei titles the first fresco La consegna delle Verghe, the Delivery of the Rods, and the second La preghiera di Giuseppe e dei giovani al Tempio, the Prayer of Joseph and the Young Men in the Temple. Both belong to the upper register of the chapel's north, or left, wall. The museum locates the Delivery in the third compartment from the left and the Prayer in the third from the right, and gives each an approximate height of 208 centimetres and width of 220 centimetres. ^{[1] [2]} They form part of the chapel cycle generally dated to 1303–05. ^[3]

Their position in Mary's life connects two changes of household and responsibility. Earlier, the Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple has shown the child entering sacred service. The rods episode prepares for her departure from the Temple and her association with Joseph. Within the Christian narrative, this is also preparation for the Annunciation and Christ's birth. Mary herself does not dominate these two compositions: the attention falls on those charged with determining who will receive her.

The central question comes from apocryphal infancy narratives, writings outside the canonical Gospels that supplied elaborate accounts of Mary's childhood. They explore her dedication to God, her virginity and the choice of a guardian or spouse. These texts differ in their details. Giotto's paintings belong to that larger devotional tradition, whose several accounts help explain the sequence without supplying a single compulsory script for every figure. ^{[24] [25] [26]}

Delivering the rods

In the Delivery, the crowd fills the left side of the compartment. A man in blue stands foremost, extending his rod towards the white-bearded priest behind the altar. Immediately behind him, a man wrapped in a pale mantle stretches out another rod. The two nearly horizontal sticks bridge the space between the approaching group and the sanctuary. Their slightness makes the gesture precise: the important movement occurs at the tips of hands and rods, against the much broader masses of clothing.

The men farther back appear chiefly as a sequence of heads and shoulders. Their faces overlap, but the turning profiles give the procession a direction. The foremost figures open out into full bodies as they approach the priest. This progression from compressed crowd to extended arm allows Giotto to make a number of people legible without scattering them across the foreground. The bodies accumulate on the left and release their action towards the altar on the right.

At the extreme left a bearded, haloed man is partly cut by the edge. He is conventionally identified as Joseph. His position gives him a different pictorial role from the young man whose outstretched arm carries the main action. Someone who already knows the story can recognise its eventual central figure before the other participants have received their answer. His halo offers that recognition without making him the leader of the procession.

Opposite the group, a grey-haired figure in green stands beside the altar. His full-length body helps contain the composition at the right edge. Between the two sides, the priest's red mantle and white head covering mark the place where the rods are received. The museum calls this priest Abiathar, the name used in the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew; the Protoevangelium of James names Zacharias in the preceding instructions. Abiathar is therefore a useful identification within one branch of the tradition, rather than a name supplied consistently by every account. ^{[1] [24] [25]}

Delivery of the Rods, the first of two separate Padua compartments. Image source. Public domain. Proportionally reduced reproduction; no colour or content enhancement.

The altar front is a brilliant orange field crossed by a repeating pale geometric pattern. Its dense ornament gives the small sticks a sumptuous setting. Above it, the architecture opens like a cutaway: slender supports rise towards a straight ceiling, while a broad arch encloses a blue half-dome farther back. Smaller arches are visible at the sides. Padova Musei describes the building as a central nave with a flat ceiling and two side aisles. ^[1] The painted structure serves the action by revealing an interior that a solid exterior wall would conceal.

The contrast between the fine rods and the elaborate fabric also gives the offering a peculiar emphasis. Their similar appearance prepares the narrative problem: a divine sign must single out one among objects that human inspection alone cannot rank.

Prayer changes the whole scene

The Prayer repeats the architectural enclosure and the patterned altar front closely enough for the setting to be recognised at once. But the sanctuary is now a destination for the gaze rather than an exchange across reaching hands. The rods stand in a loose, crossing cluster on the altar, between two vessels. The scene holds at the stage of prayer, before the choosing sign. ^[2]

Prayer of Joseph and the Young Men in the Temple, the separate second compartment. Image source. Public domain. Proportionally reduced reproduction; no colour or content enhancement.

Across the bottom of the picture, the standing company has become a succession of kneeling bodies. A man in a pale mantle bends forward near the left foreground. Beside him a young man in red holds his hands together, his face lifted towards the altar. Farther into the sanctuary, the broad red back of the central kneeling figure forms a large curved mass. On the right, another kneeling figure turns towards the rods, his pale rose drapery spreading out behind and below him. Folded cloth makes visible the descent of bodies that were upright in the previous compartment.

The lower bodies tell the story as clearly as the faces. Knees meet the ground; feet trail behind; mantles pool and overlap. Looking from one painting to the other, the spectator can follow a change in bodily level. The first scene leads horizontally through hands. The second draws attention upwards from the bowed company towards the altar. Prayer acquires a visible shape through the relationship between bent backs, raised profiles and the small gathering of rods above them.

Joseph remains near the far left, partly absorbed into the group and close to the frame. Padova Musei identifies him by his halo and stresses his marginal, foreshortened position. ^[2] That placement is especially telling because the story concerns his selection. Giotto allows him to occupy the periphery while the whole company waits. His place at the edge allows the future recipient of the sign to remain among the waiting witnesses.

It is tempting to give every turned head a private thought, or to read rivalry into every young face. The painting supports something more concrete: the men share a direction of attention, but their profiles, hands and degrees of bending vary. Their common purpose does not erase their separate bodies. The scene can hold many versions of the same outward act without giving us access to each participant's inner speech.

Above them, a large stretch of the blue background remains open. The group is concentrated low in the frame, while the altar and building rise over it. Against that spatial arrangement, the crossed sticks become an unusually small focus for so much attention. Giotto makes waiting substantial by surrounding its object with room, architecture and bodily weight.

What the different stories say

The Protoevangelium of James, chapters 8–9, begins this episode when Mary has reached twelve years of age in the Temple. The priests seek guidance about her future, and an angel tells Zacharias to assemble the widowers, each with his rod. Joseph leaves his work to join them. The priest takes the rods inside, prays and returns them. The expected sign is initially absent; when Joseph receives his rod last, a dove comes out of it and flies onto his head. ^[24]

This account places considerable emphasis on Joseph's reluctance. He describes himself as an old man with children and objects to receiving a young girl. The priest insists that he accept the responsibility. The story thus gives Joseph a protective role and explains the difference in age between him and Mary within its own theological narrative. Those statements belong to the text; they cannot establish precise ages for the painted men, whose individual identities are mostly unstated.

The Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, chapter 8, develops a longer sequence. Here Mary is fourteen, and her commitment to virginity creates the question of whose keeping she should enter. A lot falls on the tribe of Judah; men without wives are then summoned with their rods. The rods are placed in the holy of holies overnight. The promised sign is a dove emerging from the end of the chosen rod and flying towards heaven. ^[25]

When no sign appears after the rods have been distributed, the priest prays again. An angel reveals that the shortest rod has been overlooked. It belongs to Joseph, who has been standing last and has not asked for it. On receiving it, he releases the miraculous dove, which flies around the Temple roof before ascending. This is a particularly helpful textual parallel for a visual sequence that gives independent space to delivery, prayer and eventual selection. It does not prove that Giotto followed this version alone, or that the arrangement of his figures reproduces every stage literally.

The title Pseudo-Matthew distinguishes this apocryphal writing from the canonical Gospel according to Matthew. Its traditional association with an evangelist is no warrant for treating it as Matthew's eyewitness testimony. Its imagined Temple procedures likewise belong to a Christian narrative about Mary; the rod test should not be presented as an independently documented Jewish marriage custom.

The Gospel of the Nativity of Mary, chapters 7–8, supplies a further variation and makes the flower explicit. It calls for unmarried men of David's family who are eligible for marriage. Drawing on Isaiah 11, the text connects the rod and flower with Jesse's root and describes a dove settling upon the chosen rod. Joseph initially withholds his rod; after renewed consultation he brings it, and the dove descends from heaven onto its top. ^[26]

The direction of the bird therefore changes across the accounts. In James it emerges from the rod and reaches Joseph's head. In Pseudo-Matthew it emerges and ultimately flies upwards. In the Nativity of Mary it comes down from heaven. The flower and the explicit Isaiah analogy give that last text a distinctive emphasis. Keeping these differences visible makes the umbrella title Flowering of the Rods more understandable: it names a tradition whose details vary, while these two frescoes concentrate on its preparation.

A temple held in memory

Repetition makes the pair unusually rewarding to compare. The altar's geometric fabric is a fixed landmark, as are the pale supports, the open central bay and the curved recess behind it. These features let the spectator recognise a continuing place. Against them, the changing arrangement of people registers the passing of time without needing a new landscape or building.

Yet the architecture also makes each moment readable on its own. The front is open; the altar is placed where hands and faces can address it; the crowd remains sufficiently outside the main enclosure to form a clear body of witnesses. The painted Temple is an organised space for this story. Its churchlike furnishings and accessible interior should be read as Giotto's pictorial means of presenting sacred history, rather than as a measured reconstruction of the ancient Jerusalem building.

Within that setting, cloth carries much of the human movement. In the Delivery, the foremost pale mantle hangs from an upright figure and opens along the reaching arm. In the Prayer, pale cloth drops towards bent knees and spreads along the ground. Red first draws the eye to the receiving priest behind the altar, then to a broad kneeling back below it. Repeated colours become attached to changed shapes. The transformation remains clear even before one sorts out the individual heads.

These are effects of the compositions as they can be seen today. The reproductions also show uneven surfaces and areas of loss. Such visible differences do not, by themselves, identify a particular pigment, restoration treatment or original colour. The larger relations of figures, rods and architecture are the sounder basis for comparing the pair.

Why give waiting a whole picture?

The extended sequence has attracted scholarly comment. Michael Viktor Schwarz observes that the rods story could have been told in fewer than the three compartments it receives at Padua. He places this expansion within the broader elaboration of Mary's early life and the arrangement leading towards the Annunciation on the chapel's triumphal arch. His discussion is a reading of the programme's structure, rather than a surviving instruction from Giotto or his patron. ^[27]

The pictures themselves show what this generosity of space permits. Delivery creates a relationship between separate people and their separate rods. Prayer gathers the objects together and turns the people into witnesses. Selection and marriage can then emerge as a subsequent event. Compressing everything into one scene would give the miraculous result greater immediacy; Giotto's division gives the preceding actions a duration of their own.

For someone following the upper register around the Scrovegni Chapel, that duration is also physical. The eye has to leave one framed compartment and find the next. The repeated altar recalls the earlier scene, while the lowered bodies announce that something has happened between them. Memory and comparison carry part of the narrative.

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 strongest way to look at the pair is to begin with the rods and then follow the hands. In the Delivery they are extended towards the priest; in the Prayer hands are joined or held near kneeling bodies, while the rods have moved beyond individual possession. The coming miracle will identify Joseph, but Giotto has already made its preparation visible. A handful of plain sticks has reorganised an entire company, and waiting has become an event worth a painting of its own.