The Eremitani is the large Augustinian church beside the Scrovegni Chapel, founded in 1276 and a major centre of medieval Padua. Its most important art was the Ovetari Chapel, frescoed in the 1450s by the young Andrea Mantegna with scenes from the lives of Saints James and Christopher — a cycle that single-handedly worked out a new spatial perspective in northern Italian painting.
Most of it was destroyed by Allied bombing in 1944. What you see now is a partial reconstruction, with painstakingly reassembled fragments mounted on the original walls and the lost areas left blank or printed in monochrome. The combined ticket with the Scrovegni Chapel also covers the Musei Civici agli Eremitani in the adjoining cloister, where Giotto's original wooden crucifix from the chapel — too fragile to be reinstalled — is on display.