Diane Tucker wrote the loveliest blog post on the frescoes done by Giotto, in a chapel called the Scrovegni. The pictures are glorious. I would only add that, when I read the story I didn’t pay enough attention to the picture showing the entire chapel interior. Look closely and realize that all the frescoes are side by side and cover everything!

Giotto reads the room

I have a faint quarrel with Diane Tucker calling Byzantine icons lifeless.

Anyway here is Dante on Giotto

Canto 11, Purgatorio **

“Then “Oh!” said I, “Art thou not Oderisi,
the glory of Agobbio and the art,
which is in Paris called ‘illuminating’?”
“Brother,” said he, “more smiling are the parchments
which Franco Bolognese paints; the glory
is now all his and only partly mine.
…
O empty glory of our human powers,
how short a time green lasts upon its top,
unless uncultured ages overtake it!
Once Cimabùe thought that he would hold
the field in painting, yet the cry is all
for Giotto now, hence that one’s fame is dark.”

This URL has a direct comparison of Cimabue and Giotto painting the same subject. https://www.italian-renaissance-art.com/Cimabue.html. I had a lot of fun looking for Oderisi and Franco Bolognese but couldn’t find anything simple to share.

Dante mentions the Scrovegni family in Canto 17 in Inferno. That is to say, he mentions three moneylenders, two from Florence and one from Padua. The one from Padua is identified as Reginaldo from the Scrovegni family. These sinners are identified solely by their heraldic emblems. Henry Cary translates.

“Noting the visages of some, who lay
Beneath the pelting of that dolorous fire,
…
…pendant from his neck each bore a pouch
With colors and with emblems
…
And one, who bore a fat and azure swine
Pictur’d on his white scrip, addressed me thus;…”

That is to say, a fat blue pig is the arms of the Scrovegni family from Padua. The pig is supposed to be pregnant.

Anyway go look at Diane Tucker’s glorious article.

** The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. The Italian Text with a Translation in English Blank Verse and a Commentary by Courtney Langdon, 3 volumes (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1918, 1920, 1921). The text is in the public domain.
https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/alighieri-the-divine-comedy-in-3-vols-langdon-trans