The spectacle of the Baptistery of Padua: the frescoes by Giusto de’ Menabuoi

Whoever enters the Baptistery of Padua, especially if it is the first time, always feels a strong amazement: thanks to the spectacular frescoes by Giusto de’ Menabuoi, who covered all the walls with magnificent paintings between 1375 and Inside the Baptistery of Padua there is one of the masterpieces of Paduan painting from the second half of the fourteenth century. The creation of the pictorial decoration of the sacred building was entrusted to the Florentine painter Giusto de’ Menabuoi, who arrived in the Venetian city around 1370. He trained in Florence in the environment of Maso di Banco, but towards the middle of the century he began to work in Visconti Milan, thus also coming into contact with the work of the Lombard Giottesque painters, influenced by Giovanni da Milano. The commission was entrusted to him by Fina Buzzaccarina, wife of Francesco da Carrara the Elder, lord of Padua from 1350 to 1380 and a figure of great importance for culture in Padua: he was in fact a friend of Petrarca, present in the city for the first time in 1349 , and it was he who donated to the poet the land on which the house where he retired in Arquà was built. This was Francis the Elder’s most important cultural friendship, but he maintained relationships with all the main men of culture in Padua of the time. Fina Buzzaccarina is remembered as a cultured and refined woman and the commission for the Baptistery of Padua also allows us to understand that she was a woman well aware of her position and her social prestige.The…