Padua: Beyond the Scrovegni Chapel
Limelight Arts Travel Staff
25 November 2022
Padua’s Scrovegni Chapel is undoubtably a masterpiece of late medieval art, but there is far more to this city than its most famous site. It is also home to one of Europe’s oldest universities, whose faculty and students have included Galileo, Copernicus, Vesalius and William Harvey, as well as one of the oldest botanic gardens in Europe and masterpieces by Donatello and Mantegna.
Perhaps what makes Padua so special is the comfortable way its cultural monuments sit within this vibrant university town, with a dolce vita pace created by its students. Padua’s sense of ease is apparent almost from the moment one steps out of the Scrovegni Chapel, into the wide park surrounding it. History here takes an understated form, with an amphitheatre reminding us of the city’s ancient past.
Padua had been one of the chief cities of the Venetii, the group of tribes who called this part of north-east Italy home and joined with the Romans as allies against the common enemy posed by the Gauls. Later Padua was absorbed within the Republic and, along with a host of other loyal cities, granted the municipal status and voting rights that allowed it to flourish.
The amphitheatre, or Arena, stands as a reminder of Padua’s ancient past, one of only a handful of ancient structures visible today. A key strategic point in northern Italy, the city suffered at the hands of Attila the Hun and other foreign forces and, in the Middle Ages, was caught up in a northern Italian power struggle between imperial vicars and local barons. By the fourteenth century, Padua had fallen to the Venetians and remained loyal to the Lion of St Mark for centuries.
Piazza dei Signori, one of the network of piazza’s in central Padua
Piazzas and paintings
When you stroll around Padua, there is little sign of this medieval drama. In the midst of the turmoil, Padua flourished as a market town, as the string of piazzas at its heart still shows. Centres of religious and political life, the Piazza del Duomo and Piazza dei Signori flow into the larger and vibrant Piazza delle Erbe and Piazza della Frutta, still given over to an 800-year-old daily market.
The Piazza delle Erbe and Piazza della Frutta are wide, elegant spaces, bounded by medieval and Renaissance palaces and today lined with bars and restaurants. They are separated by the Palazzo della Ragione, an immense structure completed in the thirteenth century but substantially renovated after a fire in the early 1400s. It served a multitude of functions, and housed the local government chambers and merchants’ tribunal. Its upper floor is beautifully frescoed, with a sequence of images organised according to an encyclopedic scheme devised by a local medieval professor, Pietro d’Abano.
Giusto dei Menabuoi’s stunning frescoes in Padua’s baptistery
The Palazzo della Ragione frescoes are just one of the many medieval fresco cycles extant in the city: from Giotto in the Scrovegni Chapel to his lesser-known followers, such as Giusto dei Menabuoi and his exquisite work in Padua’s baptistery; local painter Altichiero da Zevio in the Oratory of St George; or the extraordinary restoration work that has been undertaken on a cycle by key Renaissance artist Andrea Mantegna, who trained in Padua, following WWII damage.
Collectively, Padua’s frescoes show us how fresco developed as a narrative medium in Italy. The form in Italy, and indeed Western Europe, was irrevocably shaped by Giotto’s capacity in the Scrovegni to instil his scenes with high drama and to allow for playful retellings of familiar stories.
Padua University’s Anatomy Theatre, built in 1595
The University of Padua
Padua’s fresco cycles, declared a single UNESCO World Heritage site in 2021, are as entwined with the fabric and history of the city as its university. Just a stone’s throw from Piazza delle Erbe is Palazzo Bo, a fine Renaissance palace that became the seat of the University of Padua in the 1490s.
The University just might be Padua’s greatest achievement. Founded in 1222 by students and faculty who wished to break free from the strictures of the University of Bologna (Europe’s first university), it was initially a cooperative of students who paid their professors’ board in exchange for instruction. This arrangement was quickly institutionalised, causing occasional tensions between a more conservative administration and its intellectually liberal teachers and students.
Nevertheless, Padua retained a reputation for intellectual freedom – it was Europe’s premier university for the sciences, especially medicine and astronomy. Galileo and Vesalius taught here, while Copernicus and William Harvey were students.
Anatomy, botany and pharmacology
The intellectual achievements of such great scientists still have a tangible presence in Padua: inside Palazzo Bo is the oldest surviving anatomy theatre. Dissection had been practiced in Padua since the thirteenth century, when Pietro d’Abano, a professor of medicine, took up a post at the university. The teaching of anatomy through dissection was problematic, with only so many students able to gather around a body, and ‘permissible’ corpses were also in short supply.
A new anatomy theatre constructed in 1595 solved this problem. A small, steeply raked amphitheatre, it allowed students to view dissections from above while their professors worked below. It became the model for anatomy theatres across Europe.
Yet the anatomy theatre is not the only surviving piece of Padua’s scientific heritage. On the edge of the historic city is Europe’s oldest surviving botanical garden, another UNESCO World Heritage site. Its plantings were arranged according to common physical traits (e.g. types of citrus) or by common uses. The latter in particular allowed for a more systematic approach to pharmacology.
As the botanical gardens grew across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, their diversity increased and they hosted specimens from around the world. Today, you’ll come across some extraordinary sights, from a palm tree planted in 1585 to Italy’s first acacia (planted 1662) and a 250-year-old gingko.
Left: statue of Elena Cornaro Piscopia in Palazzo Bo, Padua (photo: ThreeCharlie, Wikimedia); right, artist unknown, Portrait of Elena Cornaro Piscopia, Ambrosiana Library, Milan
The first PhD
Padua is also where the PhD was invented. Up until 1678, the highest educational achievement a European university awarded was a Doctor of Theology – regardless of the discipline one studied, one emerged as a Doctor of Theology.
But theology was a domain largely forbidden to women, so when leading scholars in Padua and Venice recommended that noblewoman Elena Cornaro Piscopia be awarded a laurea (undergraduate degree) and continue her studies towards a doctorate in theology – well, there was a problem!
The Archbishop of Padua couldn’t countenance the idea that a woman – especially one born out of wedlock – be recognised as a theologian. Elena, however, was indomitable, excelling in almost every discipline she turned her mind to. By age seven, she had mastered Greek and Latin as well as French and Spanish, with Hebrew and Arabic acquired from Venice’s best tutors shortly afterwards.
In addition to languages, Piscopia proved a gifted musician and talented mathematician, with one of her tutors dedicating a geometry treatise to her when she was only 22. One of her first published works, a philosophical commentary on a Spanish theological text that Elena translated into Italian, was published in 1669 when she was 23 years old; it went through multiple editions in a matter of years.
Numerous masters and doctors at Padua petitioned the University on Elena’s behalf, and in 1678 the more conservative of its leaders reached a compromise: rather than conferring on Elena the Doctor of Theology, the university would grant her honour with the title Magistra et Doctrix Philosophiae.
Elena did not defend her thesis at the university, but rather in front of a larger audience in the city’s cathedral. She lectured in flawless classical Latin for over an hour, explicating two randomly-selected passages from Aristotle and graduating with an ermine cape and a laurel wreath. Today a statue of her stands in the stairwell leading up to the University of Padua’s Aula Magna, with students filing past Elena on their own way in to graduate.
Donatello’s Gattamelata, outside of Sant’Antonio in Padua
Other sites of interest
There’s much more of interest in Padua, and a ‘long weekend’ of three days would probably suit those looking for a cultural getaway. If you’re down near the Botanic Gardens, for example, be sure to stop outside the monumental basilica known as Il Santo. This huge church is dedicated to St Anthony of Padua, the city’s patron saint and a very popular patron today. (There are many outstanding works of medieval art inside, but conduct any tourist visits with sensitivity as this is very much a pilgrims’ church.)
You don’t have to go inside the basilica to admire an unexpected masterpiece by Donatello, however. This life-size equestrian statue in bronze was the first such statue to have been cast since Antiquity, inspired by a statue of Marcus Aurelius on horseback that is still on the Capitoline Hill in Rome. In Padua, the triumphant figure astride the horse is Gattamelata (‘Honey Cat’), a mercenary general or condottiero employed by the Venetians in their fifteenth-century conquest of the mainland.
Beyond Il Santo is the baroque Prato della Valle, a vast and theatrical set of interlocking squares, lawns, canals and statues. Its elegance is echoed back in the historic centre at Caffé Pedrocchi, a nineteenth-century coffee house that retains its eclectic interiors and was a haunt for writers from Byron to Dario Fo, and a meeting point for revolutionary students plotting to overthrow Austria in 1848.
Pedrocchi’s signature coffee is enlivening, served with an emulsion of fresh cream and mint and dusted with cocoa. Once you’ve taken a seat, you can sit back and enjoy Padua’s easy-going lifestyle – talking, reading, and watching the world go by against a profoundly rewarding historical backdrop.
Venice In Depth
Dates: November 2023
Tour Leader: Robert Veel