Dear Giotto,

Thanks for the chance to see your work. After all the winking and blinking and shouting and “investigating the social construct of” this or that in the national pavilions and the Arsenale of this year’s Venice Biennale, my husband and I took the train over to Padova to see the installation you did back in 1305 in the Scrovegni Chapel. You were famous back then—probably more famous than anyone in the contemporary art world that I inhabit. You did work for the Pope, and people were in awe of the way your paintings captured nature—especially the expressions on faces, and the folds of cloth, and the way buildings and trees and rocks occupy 3-dimensional space.

We’d seen your chapel once before—almost twenty years ago, when visiting it was no big deal. Back then, visitors simply bought tickets at the door and strolled on in. You could stay as long as you wanted. My husband and I had stayed a long time back then, sitting on the built-in wooden benches that line the chapel, wondering silently at the astounding manner in which you painted the story of the Virgin and Christ, the Last Judgment and the prophets. You managed to get it all in, without a sense of crowding. We had leaned our heads way back in order to see the panels at the top, and the blue, star-studded ceiling. They say it took you two years to complete the project? Two? Only two? How did you do that?

This time around, we had to make reservations ahead of time—for a specific 15-minute chunk of time. My husband and I are both painters, and we decided to purchase two successive chunks so we could have 30 minutes to be with your chapel.

I suspect you’d be shocked to learn that your chapel is no longer a place to worship God, but rather a place where people go to see art for its own sake. By the way, today’s visitors have to sit in an air-conditioned room for 15 minutes before being permitted entry into the chapel. Our bodies have to cool down so our breath does less damage to your frescoes. During the cool-down, we watched a short film explaining, among other things, that your patron Enrico Scrovegni was a rich nobleman who hired you to do this work because he was afraid for the soul of his father Reginaldo, whom Dante mentioned as a usurer in the 17th canto of his Inferno.

This visit, I felt an initial sense of shame upon entering your chapel. What we artists do now looks so chaotic, overproduced, pretentious and utterly materialistic compared to what you showed us. The gap between people in your time and ours is terribly large. You believed deeply in what you were doing—the Virgin, Christ, heaven and hell formed a circle of God around all your perceptions and artistic actions. Still, you were an artist who had work to do, a craft to develop, and while you worked you surely had to concentrate hard to get the right effects—especially in that difficult medium of fresco, where one has so little time to get things right.

My awe at your work made me cry. I especially loved the tender donkey on which the Virgin rides with the Christ child, the odd camel at the manger that you made up out of what you probably heard they looked like, and the weeping women around the body of Christ. The photograph, you know, has ruined all that for us—we know what everything on Earth looks like, and for many human beings today, nothing is left to the imagination. If artists nowadays tried to do what you did, their work would end up sentimental and corny.

Some might say that we contemporary artists ought to go ahead and just do what you did again. But you, of all artists, must know that we can’t do that. We can’t spin belief in what art can do in a time that doesn’t believe what you believed in. All we’d end up with is an imitation of the look of believing in your kind of art. We’d get something your century never even heard of: kitsch.

I could feel what it must have been like for a believer to have his faith confirmed and even intensified by your frescoes. But I do not believe that God offers salvation to wicked human beings simply if they believe in him. And when we are bad—which is most of the time—even the profound story embedded in your clear and convincing frescoes fails to change us. . Giotto, I must ask this. Do you believe in collective guilt? Do you blame those of us who live today, as a whole, for the failure of our art to be informed by the kind of deep beliefs that drove yours? Our art isn’t like yours, but I suspect not for the reasons you think. We’re doing the best we can with what our century has dealt us. You try getting a commission to do a chapel today. There are few chapels to be built, and when there are, those in power would never hire the likes even of you.

Even you, the great Giotto, faced the problem of fashion in art. Your art made Cimabue look out of date, and once new artists figured out the laws of linear perspective, you ended up looking old-fashioned.

And you had to please your patron, Scrovegni. Nowadways, the patrons are more diffuse, but we still have to please them. Take the example of Guggenheim and MacArthur, whose support of the arts is a kind of secular salvation for having built their fortunes on uranium and insurance. But they don’t make esthetic decisions themselves. Instead, they hire outside panels of experts.

If I had a chance to take you through the Biennale I just saw, I’d stop to show you Fiona Tan (from the Netherlands) and Bruce Nauman (from the United States). I’d try to explain to you that even though their art isn’t beautiful in the simple, pure and compelling way yours is, it speaks to our times in a surprisingly living and forceful way. We don’t have your faith; we live with endless Doubt, with a capital D, and the best artists express that Doubt the way you expressed your faith.

By the way, I like your chapel and ceiling better than Mike’s in Rome. Yours is so much more beautifully connected to nature, and not so much about strutting your ability to do millions of muscles. You’re not nearly the show-off Mike was, perhaps because you were willing to submit your form to your content, and you weren’t quite so cocky. Your content was pure, clear and straightforward—some say innocent. Would that we could find that again.

Thank you so much for everything.

Yours truly,

Laurie Fendrich