Much Christian art is simply (and legitimately) illustrations of a sacred story, that is, it portrays the appearance of the action. An artist who wants to go deeper than appearance presents it as narrative, a presentation that sets out the meaning of the event, the character, the intent, of those enacting the narrative.

Giotto is one of the great narrative artists of the Christian tradition. If we wish to understand the interpretation of Christian art, we can learn much from Giotto.

Take, almost at random, Giotto’s narrative of the Raising of Lazarus from the Arena Chapel in Padua. How does he make a narrative from a story?

Giotto makes narrative from story first by a rigorous selection of the critical events with nothing outside the event to distract attention. Then by equally rigorous compression of them into the restricted frame of the picture surface, compressing not only action but time, since all the important stages of the story are contained in the presentation.

Boldly, he places the two principal figures, not in the center as custom would have it but at the sides. The center is occupied by an astonished onlooker who is the junction and transmitter of the currents of feeling that flow back and forth across the picture surface. He looks toward Lazarus while gesturing back toward Jesus. Next to him is an older man gesturing toward Lazarus as he holds one of the grave cloths while he looks back toward Jesus, a chiastic flow of attention and healing force. Mary and Martha are kneeling, almost prostrated, before Jesus as they look up trustingly; the Gospel account has this taking place before the raising.

Lazarus is a corpse, pale and decaying and, as the gesture of those near him shows, stinking. He is erect but weakly so, supported by those at his side.

The small group of the disciples behind Jesus closes off that side of the painting while leading into the picture. Their calm verticality reinforces the majestic vertical of the figure of Jesus. Those around Lazarus emphasize the vertical by their swaying departure from it. They are in a state of excitement, worshipful astonishment.

All the figures are in groups, except Jesus, who stands in domination against the blue of the sky. He raises his hand as he calls Lazarus forth from the grave. All around him, the people move variously, turning or bending away from the vertical. Only Jesus stands fully erect in grave majesty. His silhouetted face is majestically calm amid the surrounding excitement. Whereas the other figures are dressed in white or lovely soft colors, Jesus is dressed in deep, noble colors, again setting him majestically apart. His gesturing hand is isolated against the sky, the source of the imperiously healing energy that is carried along the gesturing arms of the onlookers.

For Lazarus, the gesture is the revivifying energy of the grace of God. To the others the energy of the gesture is the astonishing revelation of the healing power of God present among them.

Jesus's gesturing hand is isolated against the sky, the source of the imperiously healing energy that is carried along the gesturing arms of the onlookers.

For Lazarus, the gesture is the revivifying energy of the grace of God. To the others the energy of the gesture is the astonishing revelation of the healing power of God present among them.

Gesture is the expressive action of the hands. For most of us, gestures, when they do not have an immediate function such as pointing, are aimless, unintelligent movements. With Giotto, gestures proceed from the inner character of the actors in a drama, their emotions made evident in the gestures and postures of their bodies.

Spirit and matter, body and soul, are not separate things, not even two things in some kind of relation. They are conjoined in single bodies that stand solidly on the earth.

These bodies are not "realistic" in the ordinary sense of that word. They occupy space but the space is limited, cut off in the back by a make-believe mountain that limits the space to a kind of stage.
Byzantine art, the immediate forerunner of Italian art, set even scenes of vigorous action against a flat background. Such paintings are objects in our space, not something we look through into an imagined space.

Giotto moved the rear plane back into the represented space so the figures belong in a world that is like our world but they have a distinct existence other than ourselves.

Thus the event is translated into true narrative.

This has been descriptive analysis, done in words, not in art. The descriptive analysis has a peda-gogical function that makes the study of art a communal enterprise, not only a private experience. What I see I can impart to you, what you see you can impart to me. We are different people and respond differently to the same event or representation. We instruct each other to our common benefit.
But does the painting do something that neither the analysis nor the original verbal narration can do?
As is common throughout the Bible, the Gospel account of the raising of Lazarus is a masterpiece of compressed, concentrated narration in words:

"Now Jesus had not yet come to the village, but was still in the place where Martha had met him. When the Jews who were with her in the house, consoling her, saw Mary rise quickly and go out, they followed her, supposing that she was going to the tomb to weep there.
Then Mary, when she came where Jesus was and saw him, fell at his feet, saying to him, "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died." When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled; and he said, "Where have you laid him?" They said to him, "Lord, come and see."

Jesus wept. So the Jews said, "See how he loved him!" But some of them said, "Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?" Then Jesus, deeply moved again, came to the tomb; it was a cave, and a stone lay upon it.

Jesus said, "Take away the stone." Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, "Lord, by this time there will be an odor, for he has been dead four days." Jesus said to her, "Did I not tell you that if you would believe you would see the glory of God?"

So they took away the stone. And Jesus lifted up his eyes and said, "Father, I thank thee that thou hast heard me. I knew that thou hearest me always, but I have said this on account of the people standing by, that they may believe that thou didst send me."

When he had said this, he cried with a loud voice, "Lazarus, come out." The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with bandages, and his face wrapped with a cloth. Jesus said to them, "Unbind him, and let him go."

Giotto’s great quality is simultaneity. The whole event is presented in its immediacy so all its elements are woven together into singleness. This is done in a way not accessible to words. The verbal narrative tells what happened. The painting shows it in greater human depth, showing the feelings, the emotions, of those who were part of the action, if only as spectators.
This leads us to the most important contribution Giotto made to Christian art: He has shown the event in its fullness and immediacy. The persons in it are participating in the grace of God. He has shown it as something that happened to them. What’s in it for us?

The grace of God is grace as a free gift, one not demanded or forced by anything we do. We cannot decide when or where or in what the grace of God is made manifest. What we can do is prepare ourselves, train ourselves to receive it if it should come to us. This is a function of the liturgy, of the devotional life, of the hard intellectual work of study, of the disciplines of service. And of the experience of art when it serves its appropriate function.

Giotto had mastered his craft. He had done the hard work of thought by carefully thinking about the subject he was portraying, using his craft as an instrument of interpretation, finding the forms that would set forth that interpretation. He did more.

The narrative is set forth with the greatest possible intensity and concentration. The gestures of the bodies are constrained; Giotto rarely shows extravagant gestures. Rather he shows full and weighty bodies departing slightly from their initial position, bending from the vertical, turning, pointing, etc. Every action, every gesture is part of the story, a part of, a response to, the event. The whole is presented to the worshipper (properly the worshipper, not the spectator) in the fullness of its meaning. The whole is enacted immediately in front of us, set a little apart on the restricted stage, but there to control our response.

The proper response to Giotto's image is not curiosity and interest, or even sympathy, but empathy. Sympathy is a feeling, necessary to the religious life. Empathy is more nearly a physical response. If I see a porter with a heavy load on his back, I might feel sympathetic, sorry for his pain. If my back hurts, that is empathy, a kind of identification.

The proper response to Giotto’s painting is empathy. His gestures and postural movements are so grave, so weighty and forceful that our bodies can, if we will, feel the weight and force in ourselves. Since Giotto has made these gestures and postures so much a part of the event that he enables us to participate in the event and not just see it from the outside as illustration. The Gospel story is not just then but now. As the worshippers (not the spectators or the critics or the historians) proceed around the room from one painting to the next, responding as they are instructed by the paintings to respond, their bodies empathetically absorb the movements and thereby the action of the narrative. By participating in that action, they participate in the meaning of the event, thereby training souls to the Christian interpretation of the world.
We should not leave the account with just one of the many paintings in the chapel. Part of the use and significance of Giotto is his range as well as depth, the adaptability of his instruments to the particular situation.

Take the first of the series, the Expulsion of Joachim from the Temple. Joachim, soon to be the father of Mary, is expelled from the temple because he and Anna are childless, therefore clearly out of favor with God. Following his usual compositional procedure, Giotto has established a rhythm of strong verticals across the surface, fitting the stable, massive figures into the pattern of those verticals.

Consequentially, the inclination of the priest’s upper body has great propulsive force as he disdainfully thrusts Joachim away from the temple, intensified by the differing positions of his hands. Enclosed protectively within the choir walls, a young man receives the blessing of another priest. The priest is pushing Joachim into the loneliness of the empty space at the side, perhaps the most dramatic emptiness in western painting. In Giotto’s characteristic fashion, the story has been reduced to its absolute essentials and represented with dramatic precision.

Even so Giotto adds an element that lifts the story even more into narrative. Joachim looks back resentfully while turning his body as though to protect the lamb that he holds tenderly as he would the baby they don’t yet have; this is the lamb of God, sacrificed for the sins of the world. Nothing in the legend hints at such an interpretation but Giotto’s creativity saw deeply into the story and turned it into part of the narrative of redemption.

But that is not all; several places demonstrate close observation, even gratuitous wit, with no such relation to the ultimate truths. Take the panel with the Marriage at Cana, the changing of water into wine. The steward tastes the newly made wine. His rotund belly is the exact shape of his wine bottle.

Even fun can be part of the economy of grace.

In the Presentation in the Temple, the aged Simeon holds the Christ child. While it is no necessary part of the story, Giotto represents Mary reaching for her baby in the time-honored fashion of young mothers who cannot trust anyone but herself to hold her baby. We can almost see the eager gesture of her fingers. The baby, mistrusting this hairy creature, pulls away from him and reaches for his mother. At the same time, he is bravely curious; his eyes look back toward the old man. But for Giotto it is a necessary part of the story. The Incarnation, that sublime event, happens in the midst of ordinary human life.

That is not all. Simeon and the child are clearly in front of the upright support of the baldichino over the altar. But shift attention to the child and it appears that he is underneath the baldichino as though Simeon is about to lay him on the altar. This is the child to be sacrificed for the sins of the world. The motif is not original with Giotto but Giotto’s distinctive interpretation is to place this profoundly theological motif in the context of the most ordinary human responses.

This earth and human life on it are good, a fit setting for divine revelation. This can be said verbally, but how much more powerful it is when shown in the eyes of the baby turning in his head!

Giotto belongs to us as well as to the people of the fourteenth century. Under his guidance, we can learn much of what he had learned; the rightful criticism of Christian art makes available to us many insights that can transform our understanding.

The Christian criticism of art requires us to do something further: to learn from him and from others how it was done in their time, with their intellectual and moral equipment, their form of craft. So taught we can work as best we can toward making the Christ present, toward making art worthy of being one of the sacramentals.

"The Way itself has come to us." Giotto has made a painting that is among the sacramentals. His painting requires the work of thought in grasping, interpreting, the event as he has done, which means having the ability to grasp and interpret the painting. The painting also requires that we participate in the event.

This is the true work of the mission of the Church – not merely to instruct the faithful about a Jesus who lived only in the past, but to make possible the presence of Jesus among us.