Resumen de Giotto's Circumspection
The outlines of an authorial relationship between Giotto, Francesco da Barberino, the Tuscan polymath, poet, and image inventor, and Petrus de Abano, the Paduan scientist, can be traced by reexamining two personifications abovethe north door of the Arena Chapel, part of the Virtues and Vices cycle. The shared motif of branchlike antennae-eyes is based on the extramission theoryof vision. The intellectual relationship between Giotto and Francesco casts light on the design of the Arena Chapel's pictorial program, as an exercise notonly in iconographic innovation but also in visual rhetoric in an age before art theory.
