Elucidating Opposites

A religious diptych provided medieval people with opportunities to access the transcendental and to engage in meditation on spiritual routes to salvation. The binary format of the diptych lent itself to pairings of images that could include oppositions or iconographic contradictions. By manipulating these pairings, artists and patrons could enhance the complexity of the theological messages as well as of the relationship between art and user. Like many Gothic diptychs from Italy, an early-fourteenth-century example by Giotto is comprised of a Crucifixion and a vision of Mary’s heavenly court. The celestial group around the Virgin and child includes seven prominent personifications of the virtues. By properly identifying these moral qualities through comparisons with Giotto’s other works and by examining the oppositions they possibly addressed, we can elucidate some of the spiritual concerns of the original patron(s) who paid for and engaged with this diptych.