To spread an absolutely positive view of himself in the collective imagination, the rich Paduan banker Enrico Scrovegni in 1300 bought the area of the Roman Arena, to build his palace and a chapel dedicated to the Blessed Virgin in suffrage of his soul and of his father Reginaldo, the usurer mentioned by Dante in Canto XVII of the Inferno. The small church with simple and clean shapes externally presents a single room inside, ending at the bottom with a presbytery in which is the sarcophagus of Enrico Scrovegni, the work of Andriolo de Santi and on the altar a Madonna with child, the work of the sculptor fourteenth century Giovanni Pisano. The chapel consists of a single room of 20.5 x 8.5 m. and 18.5 m. in height with barrel cover. The entire decoration is considered one of the greatest masterpieces of art of all time. After seeing Giotto and his school at work in the Basilica of Sant'Antonio, Scrovegni commissioned him to decorate the chapel (1303 to 1305). For this noble commission, the well-known painter had the walls of a church of small and asymmetrical proportions available, due to the six windows that open only on the right wall. To make possible the implementation of the vast iconographic program, the painter took the space between the two windows as a point of reference, calculating to insert two stories, one above the other.

Giotto wishes to condense the New Testament into the thirty-nine painted scenes: starting from the events of the parents of Mary, Joachim and Anna, to continue with the Stories of the Virgin and Jesus, and close in the counter-façade with the Last Judgment narrated in the Apocalypse. In addition, fourteen monochrome allegories of the Vices and Virtues are made in the high perimeter plinth.