Scrovegni Chapel

Giotto's Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, looking back toward the entrance wall and its Last Judgment, with Christ the Judge surrounded by angels and apostles. Giotto painted the chapel between 1303 and 1305 for Enrico Scrovegni, a wealthy Paduan who had bought the site of the city's old Roman arena. Stand in the nave and you are wrapped in one continuous story told in tiers of panels, under a vault painted as a blue, star-spangled sky. The weighty figures and plain human feeling in these scenes are a big part of why Giotto is so often placed at the start of Western painting as we know it.