The chapel rises on land Enrico degli Scrovegni purchased in February 1300 from Manfredo Dalesmanini — the elliptical footprint of the Roman arena of Padua, which gave the building its alternative name of Arena Chapel. Adjacent to a new family palace (demolished in 1827), the small church was conceived as a private oratory and as the funerary monument of the Scrovegni. The bishop of Padua authorised the building before 1302; first consecration followed on 25 March 1303, the feast of the Annunciation, and the definitive consecration on 25 March 1305. The project carried a personal weight: Enrico’s father, Reginaldo degli Scrovegni, had been placed by Dante among the usurers of the seventh circle of the Inferno, and the chapel is read by much of the scholarship as an act of expiation as much as of private devotion.

Giotto, then about thirty-six years old and already working in Padua for the Basilica of Saint Anthony, frescoed the entire interior with a workshop of around forty collaborators across an estimated 625 working days. The iconographic programme — devised, according to Giuliano Pisani’s reading, by the Augustinian theologian Friar Alberto da Padova — runs in three narrative tiers around the nave: the lives of Joachim and Anna, then the life of the Virgin Mary, then the life of Christ, for a total of thirty-eight episodes. Below the narrative scenes a lower band carries fourteen allegories of the Virtues and Vices in grisaille. The barrel vault is painted as a deep lapis-lazuli sky scattered with gold stars and medallions of Christ, the Virgin and the prophets. The western counter-façade is entirely occupied by a vast Last Judgment, at the foot of which Enrico Scrovegni is portrayed kneeling, offering a model of the chapel to three Marian intercessors.

Stylistically the cycle marks the visual passage from the Byzantine manner toward the early Renaissance: Giotto articulates three-dimensional space, gives weight and anatomy to his figures, and stages emotionally legible narrative compositions such as the Lamentation and the Kiss of Judas. After two decades of preparatory study, the Istituto Centrale per il Restauro carried out the definitive cleaning campaign of the frescoes between June 2001 and March 2002 under the direction of Giuseppe Basile; the same intervention installed the Corpo Tecnologico Attrezzato, a climate-controlled vestibule in which visitors wait fifteen minutes for body humidity and airborne particulate to be filtered out before entering the chapel for a further fifteen-minute viewing slot. In 2021 UNESCO inscribed the chapel as part of ‘Padua’s fourteenth-century fresco cycles’, a serial World Heritage Site of eight buildings — among them the Baptistery of the Cathedral, the Palazzo della Ragione, the Oratory of San Michele and the Oratory of San Giorgio — promoted under the name Padova Urbs Picta.