Giotto and Antiquity. An early-Christian model for the frescoes in the Palatine Chapel in the Castel Nuovo in Naples

Giotto's remarkable fresco decoration of 'Stories from the Bible' survives nestled in the intrados of a few windows in scanty ornamental fragments in the Palatine Chapel inside the Castel Nuovo in Naples. One of them, in particular, outstanding for its excellent execution and clear retrospective intention, is a fruit-themed frieze situated in the two -light window on the eastern head of the apse, on the axis with the high altar and the celebrant. The frieze was already deservingly praised by critics, but from an out-of-focus perspective, be it of the iconographic antecedents, as well as for the painter's intentions; it testifies how, at the end of his career, the Florentine painter shows the meditated dialogue he engaged with Antiquity. Comparisons at hand, the article's author advances the hypothesis that Giotto drew inspiration from the mosaics in the early-Christian baptistery of San Giovanni in Fonte in Naples, which had returned to its ancient splendour following a period of decline, precisely in the years he spent in that city (1328-1332). Giotto used the Hellenistic figurative motif born as an ornament of altars and tombs and particularly prized among Roman painters throughout the Middle Ages with a 'philological' bent, and on the semantic level, he emphasised its evocative power in connection with the Christian mysteries of Baptism and the Eucharist.