The Carrara Among the Angels in Trecento Padua

In the 1350s, the Paduan painter, Guariento di Arpo, completed an ambitious decorative scheme for the palatine chapel of the Reggia, the seat of Padua’s ruling dynasty, the Carrara. On the chapel’s walls, the artist depicted two tiers of subjects in fresco drawn from Scripture. Along with these, in a sequence of over thirty panel paintings, he portrayed a celestial vision: the Virgin and Child accompanied by Four Evangelists, surrounded by the hierarchies of angels – all with extraordinary coloristic effect. The program is a milestone in the artist’s career, expressing not only his debt to fourteenth-century Venetian works and Byzantine models, but also a newfound maturity prophetic of the artist’s celebrated (mainly lost) Paradise for Venice’s Palazzo Ducale (1365-1368). In this essay, I reconstruct this distinctive program, and connect it to Carrara identity and the family’s ambitions for Padua