EUGENE FRANCIS SAVAGE
(Covington, Indiana 1883 – 1978 Woodbury, Connecticut)

Giotto’s Frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel, Padua

Signed, lower right: Eugene F. Savage

Inscribed along the bottom:
•INTERIOR•BY•GIOTTO•MADONNA•DELL’ARENA•SCROVEGNI•PADOVA•

Formerly inscribed by the artist on the canvas backing: “Copy made in Padua 1913”

Pen and ink, watercolor and wash on paper, laid down on board
28 x 93 5/8 inches (71 x 238 cm)

Provenance: 

The Artist; thence by descent to his daughter, Dorothy Crawford (until 2017); by descent in the family until 2023

Literature:    

Jean C. Sapin, “Eugene Savage; American Muralist” unpub. M.A. thesis, California State University, Northridge, 1979, p. 18.

Eugene Savage was one of America’s most successful muralists of the twentieth century.  His allegorical compositions are known to library users at Columbia University (Butler Library) and at Yale University (Sterling Library), where he was the Leffingwell Professor of Painting and Design from 1924 until 1958.  Murals by him adorn governmental buildings in Washington, D.C., and several state capitals, as well as other institutional buildings throughout the country. Among his most celebrated commissions were those for the Elks National Memorial in Chicago, the Post Office Headquarters in Washington (now the Clinton Office Building), sculpture at Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn, and mosaics at the United States War Memorial in Epinal, France, and in the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York.

Savage’s vigorous compositions often feature muscular figures in motion reflecting both the mid-century taste for expressive figuration and the artist’s intense study of Italian paintings of the early Renaissance.  In 1912 Savage had won the Prix de Rome and then spent the next three years in Italy, based at the American Academy in Rome, but traveling throughout the country.  There he studied the work of Giotto, Masaccio, Piero della Francesca, and Michelangelo. The present work is an impressive document of his profound examination of Giotto’s masterpiece, the frescoes in the Arena Chapel in Padua, commissioned by Enrico Scrovegni and painted around the years 1305-1306.

Savage’s massive copy is composed of a series of individual watercolors of sections of the fresco project, arranged to reflect the composition of the entire scheme, as well as the overall decoration of the chapel, and its color palette.  Originally glued to a rough canvas, rolled and stored among the artist’s possessions, the drawing has recently been conserved and laid down on artist board.  While created as a kind of academic exercise, this vast record of Giotto’s work had particular resonance for Savage, serving as a personal reference work for the artist.  Writing in 1927 of the murals for the Elks National Memorial in Chicago, Royal Cortissoz wrote that Savage “had saturated himself in Giotto,” and quoted the artist as saying that after his years in Italy, “I returned to America as near as possible a fourteenth-century painter.”[i] The present work is thus not only a significant testament of the education and early career of the American muralist, but a resplendent homage to one of the greatest artists of the Italian Renaissance.

[i] Royal Cortissoz, “The Field of Art,” Scribners (July 1927), p. 124