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Hall of Renaissance Masters
Giotto di Bondone
Proto-Renaissance painter; Scrovegni Chapel
- c. 1267 – 1337
- Renaissance Masters · 3 of 10
Hall of Renaissance Masters
Proto-Renaissance painter; Scrovegni Chapel
Fetching the article from Wikipedia…
Giotto di Bondone (Italian: [ˈdʒɔtto di bonˈdoːne]; c. 1267 – January 8, 1337), known mononymously as Giotto, was an Italian painter and architect from Florence during the Late Middle Ages. He worked during the Gothic and Proto-Renaissance period. Giotto's contemporary, the banker and chronicler Giovanni Villani, wrote that Giotto was "the most sovereign master of painting in his time, who drew all his figures and their postures according to nature" and of his publicly recognized "talent and excellence". Giorgio Vasari described Giotto as making a decisive break from the prevalent Byzantine style and as initiating "the great art of painting as we know it today, introducing the technique of drawing accurately from life, which had been neglected for more than two hundred years".
Giotto's masterwork is the decoration of the Scrovegni Chapel, in Padua, also known as the Arena Chapel, which was completed around 1305. The fresco cycle depicts the Life of the Virgin and the Life of Christ. It is regarded as one of the supreme masterpieces of the Early Renaissance.
The fact that Giotto painted the Arena Chapel and that he was chosen by the Commune of Florence in 1334 to design the new campanile (bell tower) of the Florence Cathedral are among the few certainties about his life. Almost every other aspect of it is subject to controversy: his birth date, his birthplace, his appearance, his apprenticeship, the order in which he created his works, whether he painted the famous frescoes in the Upper Basilica of Saint Francis in Assisi, and his burial place.
Tradition says that Giotto was born in a farmhouse, perhaps at Colle di Romagnano or Romignano. Since 1850, a tower house in nearby Colle Vespignano has borne a plaque claiming the honor of his birthplace, an assertion that is commercially publicized. However, recent research has presented documentary evidence that he was born in Florence, the son of a blacksmith. His father's name was Bondone. Most authors accept that Giotto was his real name, but may have been an abbreviation of Ambrogio (Ambrogiotto) or Angelo (Angelotto).
In his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects Vasari states that Giotto was a shepherd boy, a merry and intelligent child who was loved by all who knew him. The great Florentine painter Cimabue discovered Giotto drawing pictures of his sheep on a rock. They were so lifelike that Cimabue approached Giotto and asked if he could take him on as an apprentice. Cimabue was one of the two most highly renowned painters of Tuscany, the other being Duccio, who worked mainly in Siena. Vasari recounts a number of such stories about Giotto's skill as a young artist. He tells of one occasion when Cimabue was absent from the workshop, and Giotto painted a remarkably lifelike fly on a face in a painting of Cimabue. When Cimabue returned, he tried several times to brush the fly off. Many scholars today are uncertain about Giotto's training and consider Vasari's account that he was Cimabue's pupil a legend; they cite earlier sources that suggest that Giotto was not Cimabue's pupil. The story about the fly is also suspect because it parallels Pliny the Elder's anecdote about Zeuxis painting grapes so lifelike that birds tried to peck at them.
Vasari also relates that when Pope Benedict XI sent a messenger to Giotto, asking him to send a drawing to demonstrate his skill, Giotto drew a red circle so perfect that it seemed as though it was drawn using a pair of compasses and instructed the messenger to send it to the Pope. The messenger departed ill-pleased, believing that he had been made a fool of. The messenger brought other artists' drawings back to the Pope in addition to Giotto's. When the messenger related how he had made the circle without moving his arm and without the aid of compasses the Pope and his courtiers were amazed at how Giotto's skill greatly surpassed all of his contemporaries.
Around 1290 Giotto married Ricevuta di Lapo del Pela (known as 'Ciuta'), the daughter of Lapo del Pela of Florence. The marriage produced four daughters and four sons, one of whom, Francesco, became a painter. Giotto worked in Rome in 1297–1300, but few traces of his presence there remain today. By 1301, Giotto owned a house in Florence, and when he was not traveling, he would return there and live in comfort with his family. By the early 1300s, he had multiple painting commissions in Florence. The Archbasilica of St. John Lateran houses a small portion of a fresco cycle, painted for the Jubilee of 1300 called by Boniface VIII. He also designed the Navicella, a mosaic that decorated the facade of Old St Peter's Basilica. In this period Giotto also painted the Badia Polyptych, now in the Uffizi, Florence.
Cimabue went to Assisi to paint several large frescoes at the new Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi, and it is possible, but not certain, that Giotto went with him. The attribution of the fresco cycle of the Life of St. Francis in the Upper Church has been one of the most disputed in art history. The documents of the Franciscan Friars that relate to artistic commissions during this period were destroyed by Napoleon's troops, who stabled horses in the Upper Church of the Basilica, so scholars have debated the attribution to Giotto. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, it was convenient to attribute every fresco in the Upper Church not obviously by Cimabue to the better-known Giotto, including those frescoes now attributed to the Master of Isaac. In the 1960s, art experts Millard Meiss and Leonetto Tintori examined all of the Assisi frescoes, and found some of the paint contained white lead—also used in Cimabue's badly deteriorated Crucifixion (c. 1283). No known works by Giotto contain this medium. However, Giotto's panel painting of the Stigmatization of St. Francis (c. 1297) includes a motif of the saint holding up the collapsing church, previously included in the Assisi frescoes.
The authorship of a large number of panel paintings ascribed to Giotto by Vasari, among others, is as broadly disputed as the Assisi frescoes. According to Vasari, Giotto's earliest works were for the Dominicans at Santa Maria Novella. They include a fresco of The Annunciation and an enormous suspended Crucifix, which is about 5 metres (16 feet) high. It has been dated to about 1290 and is thought to be contemporary with the Assisi frescoes. Earlier attributed works are the San Giorgio alla Costa Madonna and Child, now in the Diocesan Museum of Santo Stefano al Ponte, Florence, and the signed panel of the Stigmatization of St. Francis housed in the Louvre.
An early biographical source, Riccobaldo of Ferrara, mentions that Giotto painted at Assisi but does not specify the St Francis Cycle: "What kind of art [Giotto] made is testified to by works done by him in the Franciscan churches at Assisi, Rimini, Padua ...". Since the idea was put forward by the German art historian Friedrich Rintelen in 1912, many scholars have expressed doubt that Giotto was the author of the Upper Church frescoes. Without documentation, arguments on the attribution have relied upon connoisseurship, a notoriously unreliable "science", but technical examinations and comparisons of the workshop painting processes at Assisi and Padua in 2002 have provided strong evidence that Giotto did not paint the St. Francis Cycle. There are many differences between it and the Arena Chapel frescoes that are difficult to account for within the stylistic development of an individual artist. It is now generally accepted that four different hands are identifiable in the Assisi St. Francis frescoes and that they came from Rome. If this is the case, Giotto's frescoes at Padua owe much to the naturalism of the painters.
Giotto's fame as a painter spread. He was called to work in Padua and also in Rimini, where there remains only a Crucifix painted before 1309 and conserved in the Church of St. Francis. It influenced the rise of the Riminese school of Giovanni and Pietro da Rimini. According to documents of 1301 and 1304, Giotto by this time possessed large estates in Florence, and it is probable that he was already leading a large workshop and receiving commissions from throughout Italy.
Around 1305, Giotto executed his most influential work, the interior frescoes of the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. Enrico degli Scrovegni commissioned the chapel to serve as family worship, burial space and as a backdrop for an annually performed mystery play.
The theme of the decoration is Salvation, and there is an emphasis on the Virgin Mary, as the chapel is dedicated to the Annunciation and to the Virgin of Charity. As was common in church decoration of medieval Italy, the west wall is dominated by the Last Judgement. On either side of the chancel are complementary paintings of the angel Gabriel and the Virgin Mary, depicting the Annunciation. The scene is incorporated into the cycles of The Life of the Blessed Virgin Mary and The Life of Christ. Giotto's inspiration for The Life of the Virgin cycle was probably taken from The Golden Legend by Jacobus de Voragine and The Life of Christ draws upon the Meditations on the Life of Christ as well as the Bible. The frescoes are more than mere illustrations of familiar texts, however, and scholars have found numerous sources for Giotto's interpretations of sacred stories.
Vasari, drawing on a description by Giovanni Boccaccio, a friend of Giotto's, says of him that "there was no uglier man in the city of Florence" and indicates that his children were also plain in appearance. There is a story that Dante visited Giotto while he was painting the Scrovegni Chapel and, seeing the artist's children underfoot asked how a man who painted such beautiful pictures could have such plain children. Giotto, who according to Vasari was always a wit, replied, "I make my pictures by day, and my babies by night."
The cycle is divided into 37 scenes, arranged around the lateral walls in three tiers, starting in the upper register with the story of St. Joachim and St. Anne, the parents of the Virgin, and continuing with her early life. The life of Jesus occupies two registers. The top south tier deals with the lives of Mary's parents, the top north with her early life and the entire middle tier with the early life and miracles of Christ. The bottom tier on both sides is concerned with the Passion of Christ. He is depicted mainly in profile, and his eyes point continuously to the right, perhaps to guide the viewer onwards in the episodes. The kiss of Judas near the end of the sequence signals the close of this left-to-right procession. Below the narrative scenes in colour, Giotto also painted allegorical figures of the seven virtues and their counterparts in monochrome grey (grisaille) to look like marble statues. The central allegories of Justice and Injustice oppose two specific types of government: peace leading to a festival of love and tyranny resulting in wartime rape. Between the narrative scenes are quatrefoil paintings of Old Testament scenes, like Jonah and the Whale, that allegorically correspond to and perhaps foretell the life of Christ.
Much of the blue in the frescoes has been worn away by time. The expense of the ultramarine blue pigment used required it to be painted on top of the already-dry fresco (a secco) to preserve its brilliance. That is why it has disintegrated faster than the other colours, which were painted on wet plaster and have bonded with the wall. An example of the decay can clearly be seen on the robe of the Virgin, in the fresco of the Nativity.
Giotto's style drew on the solid and classicizing sculpture of Arnolfo di Cambio. Unlike those by Cimabue and Duccio, Giotto's figures are not stylized or elongated and do not follow Byzantine models. They are solidly three-dimensional, have faces and gestures that are based on close observation, and are clothed, not in swirling formalized drapery, but in garments that hang naturally and have form and weight. He also took bold steps in foreshortening and having characters face inwards, with their backs towards the observer, creating the illusion of space. The figures occupy compressed settings with naturalistic elements, often using forced perspective devices so that they resemble stage sets. This similarity is increased by Giotto's careful arrangement of the figures in such a way that the viewer appears to have a particular place and even an involvement in many of the scenes. That can be seen most markedly in the arrangement of the figures in the Mocking of Christ and Lamentation in which the viewer is bidden by the composition to become mocker in one and mourner in the other.
Giotto's depiction of the human face and emotion sets his work apart from that of his contemporaries. When the disgraced Joachim returns sadly to the hillside, the two young shepherds look sideways at each other. The soldier who drags a baby from its screaming mother in the Massacre of the Innocents does so with his head hunched into his shoulders and a look of shame on his face. The people on the road to Egypt gossip about Mary and Joseph as they go. Of Giotto's realism, the 19th-century English critic John Ruskin said, "He painted the Madonna and St. Joseph and the Christ, yes, by all means... but essentially Mamma, Papa and Baby".
Text from the Wikipedia article “Giotto”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.