Giotto di Bondone

▪ Italian painter

Introduction

born 1266–67/1276, Vespignano, near Florence [Italy]

died Jan. 8, 1337, Florence

 the most important Italian painter of the 14th century, whose works point to the innovations of the Renaissance style that developed a century later. For almost seven centuries Giotto has been revered as the father of European painting and the first of the great Italian masters. He is believed to have been a pupil of the Florentine painter Cimabue and to have decorated chapels in Assisi, Rome, Padua, Florence, and Naples with frescoes and panel paintings in tempera. Because little of his life and few of his works are documented, attributions and a stylistic chronology of his paintings remain problematic and often highly speculative.

Early life

      Much of Giotto's biography and artistic development must be deduced from the evidence of surviving works (a large portion of which cannot be attributed to him with certainty) and stories that originate for the most part from the late 14th century on. The date of Giotto's birth can be taken as either 1266/67 or 1276, and the 10 years' difference is of fundamental importance in assessing his early development and is crucial to the problem of the attribution of the frescoes in the Church of San Francesco, in Assisi, which, if indeed by Giotto, are his great early works. It is known that Giotto died on Jan. 8, 1337 (1336, Old Style); this was recorded at the time in the Villani chronicle. About 1373, a rhymed version of the Villani chronicle was produced by Antonio Pucci, town crier of Florence and amateur poet, in which it is stated that Giotto was 70 when he died. This fact would imply that he was born in 1266/67, and it is clear that there was 14th-century authority for the statement (possibly Giotto's original tombstone, now lost). But Giorgio Vasari, in his important biography (1550) of Giotto, gives 1276 as the year of Giotto's birth, and it may be that he was copying one of the two known versions of the Libro di Antonio Billi, a 16th-century collection of notes on Florentine artists. In the Codex Petrei version, a statement that Giotto was born in 1276 at Vespignano, the son of a peasant, occurs at the very end of the “Life” and may have been added much later, even, conceivably, from Vasari. In any case, whether Vasari or “Antonio Billi” first made the statement, it cannot have the same authority as that attached to Antonio Pucci, who was about 27 when Giotto died. Certainty of the date of Giotto's birth, if settled by new documents, could help to solve the problem of his work at Assisi, as well as the question of the origins of his style.

      Giotto has always been assumed to have been the pupil of Cimabue; two independent traditions, each differing on the particular circumstances, assert this, and it is probably correct. Furthermore, Cimabue's style was, in certain respects, so similar to Giotto's in intention that a connection seems inescapable. Cimabue was the most outstanding painter in Italy at the end of the 13th century; he tried, as no artist had before, to break through, with the power of reality and imaginative force, the stylized forms of medieval art. He did not fully succeed, but it seems almost certain that Giotto began his remarkable development with him, inspired by his strength of drawing and his ability to incorporate dramatic tension into his works. On the other hand, whatever Giotto may have learned from Cimabue, it is clear that, even more than the sculptor Nicola Pisano about 30 years earlier, he succeeded in an astonishing innovation that originated in his own genius—a true revival of classical ideals and an expression in art of the new humanity that St. Francis had in the early 13th century brought to religion.

      In Giotto's works human beings are the exclusive subject matter, and they act with dedicated passion their parts in the great Christian drama of sacrifice and redemption. By comparison, all his predecessors and most of his immediate successors painted a puppet show with lifeless mannequins tricked out in the rags of the splendid, hieratic, and impersonal art of Byzantium, which was to be entirely superseded by the urgent emotionalism of the Franciscan approach to Christianity.

The Assisi problem

      The central problem in Giotto studies, the attribution of the Assisi frescoes, may be summed up as the question whether Giotto ever painted at Assisi and, if so, what? There can be no reasonable doubt that he did work at Assisi, for a long literary tradition goes back to the Compilatio chronologica of Riccobaldo Ferrarese, who wrote in or before 1319, when Giotto was alive and famous. Later writers down to Vasari expanded this and made it clear that Giotto's works were in the great double church of San Francesco (St. Francis). By Vasari's time, several frescoes in both upper and lower churches were attributed to Giotto, the most important being the cycle of 28 scenes from the life of St. Francis of Assisi in the nave of the upper church and the Franciscan Virtues and some other frescoes in the lower church. (Some of the frescoes in the St. Francis cycle were damaged by earthquakes that struck Assisi on Sept. 26, 1997.)

      The majority of these scenes, mostly narrative, are revolutionary in their expression of reality and humanity. In these frescoes, the emphasis is on the dramatic moment of each situation, and, with details of dress and background at a minimum, the inner reality of human emotion is intensified through crucial gestures and glances. In the 19th century, however, it was observed that all these frescoes, though similar in style, could not be by the same hand, and the new trend toward skepticism of Vasari's statements led to the position that rejected all the Assisi frescoes and dated the St. Francis cycle to a period after Giotto's death. This extreme view has been generally abandoned, and, indeed, a dated picture of 1307 can be shown to derive from the St. Francis cycle. Nevertheless, many scholars prefer to accept the idea of an otherwise totally unknown Master of the St. Francis legend, on the grounds that the style of the cycle is irreconcilable with that of the later Arena Chapel frescoes in Padua, which are universally accepted as Giotto's. This involves the idea that the works referred to (in Giotto's lifetime) by Riccobaldo cannot be identified with anything now extant and must have perished centuries ago, so that the early 15th-century sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti, Vasari, and others mistakenly transferred the existing St. Francis cycle to Giotto. Five hundred years of tradition are thus written off.

      Still more difficult, if Giotto did not paint the St. Francis frescoes, major works of art, then they must be attributed to a painter who cannot be shown to have created anything else, whose name has disappeared without trace, although he was of the first rank, and, odder still, was formed by the combined influences of Cimabue, the Florentine sculptor Arnolfo di Cambio, and the Roman painter Pietro Cavallini—influences which coalesce at Assisi and may be taken as the influences that formed Giotto himself.

      Arising out of the fusion of Roman and Florentine influences in the Assisi frescoes, there was later a tendency to see the hand of Giotto, as a very young man, in the works of the Isaac Master, the painter of two scenes of Isaac and Esau and Jacob and Isaac in the nave above the St. Francis cycle. If this theory is accepted, it is easy to understand that Giotto, as a young man, made such a success of this commission that he was entrusted with the most important one, the official painted biography of St. Francis based on the new official biography written around 1266 by St. Bonaventura. In fact, the whole of today's mental picture of St. Francis stems largely from these frescoes. Clearly, a man born in 1276 was less likely to have received such a commission than one 10 years older, if, as was always thought, the commission was given in 1296 or soon after by Fra Giovanni di Muro, general of the Franciscans. The works in the Lower Church are generally regarded as productions of Giotto's followers (there are, indeed, resemblances to his works at Padua), and there is real disagreement only over the Legend of St. Francis. The main strength of the non-Giotto school lies in the admittedly sharp stylistic contrasts between the St. Francis cycle and the frescoes in the Arena Chapel at Padua, especially if the Assisi frescoes were painted 1296–c. 1300 and those of the Arena c. 1303–05; for the interval between the two cycles is too small to allow for major stylistic developments. This argument becomes less compelling when the validity of the dates proposed and the Roman period c. 1300 are taken into account. As already mentioned, the Assisi frescoes may have been painted before 1296 and not necessarily afterward, and the Arena frescoes are datable with certainty only in or before 1309, although probably painted c. 1305–06; clearly, a greater time lag between the two cycles can help to explain stylistic differences, as can the experiences that Giotto underwent in what was probably his second Roman period.

Roman period

      Three principal works are attributed to Giotto in Rome. They are the great mosaic of Christ Walking on the Water (the Navicella), over the entrance to St. Peter's; the altarpiece painted for Cardinal Stefaneschi (Vatican Museum); and the fresco fragment of Boniface VIII Proclaiming the Jubilee, in San Giovanni in Laterano (St. John Lateran). Giotto is also known to have painted some frescoes in the choir of old St. Peter's, but these are lost.

      These Roman works also pose problems in attribution and criticism. The attribution of the Navicella is certain; it is known that Cardinal Stefaneschi commissioned Giotto to do it. The mosaic, however, was almost entirely remade in the 17th century except for two fragmentary heads of angels, so that old copies must be used for all stylistic deductions. The fresco fragment in San Giovanni in Laterano was cleaned in the 20th century and was tentatively reattributed to Giotto on the basis of its likeness to the Assisi frescoes, but the original attribution can be traced only as far back as the 17th century. The Stefaneschi Altarpiece, with its portrait of the Cardinal himself, must be one of the works commissioned by him. The fact that he commissioned Giotto to do the Navicella might suggest that this work is by Giotto as well, but the altarpiece is so poor in quality that it cannot be by Giotto's own hand. It may be observed that several works bearing Giotto's signature, notably the St. Francis of Assisi (Louvre, Paris) and the altarpieces in Bologna and Florence (Santa Croce), are generally regarded as school pieces bearing his trademark, whereas the Ognissanti Madonna, unsigned and virtually undocumented, is so superlative in quality that it is accepted as entirely by his hand.

      During this period Giotto may also have done the Crucifix in Santa Maria Novella and the Madonna in San Giorgio e Massimiliano dello Spirito Santo (both in Florence). These works may be possibly identifiable with works mentioned in very early sources, and if so they throw light on Giotto's early style (before 1300). It is also possible that, about 1305, Giotto went to Avignon, in France, but the evidence for this is slender.

Paduan period

  There is thus no very generally agreed picture of Giotto's early development. It is some relief, therefore, to turn to the fresco cycle in the chapel in Padua known as the Arena (Arena Chapel) or Scrovegni Chapel. Its name derives from the fact that it was built on the site of a Roman amphitheatre by Enrico Scrovegni, the son of a notorious usurer mentioned by Dante. The founder is shown offering a model of the church in the huge Last Judgment, which covers the whole west wall. The rest of the small, bare church is covered with frescoes in three tiers representing scenes from the lives of Joachim and Anna, the life of the Virgin, the Annunciation (on the chancel arch), and the life and Passion of Christ, concluding with Pentecost. Below these three narrative bands is a fourth containing monochrome personifications of the Virtues and Vices. The chapel was apparently founded in 1303 and consecrated on March 25, 1305. It is known that the frescoes were completed in or before 1309, and they are generally dated c. 1305–06, but even with several assistants it must have taken at least two years to complete so large a cycle.

      The frescoes are in relatively good condition, and all that has been said of Giotto's power to render the bare essentials of a setting with a few impressive and simple figures telling the story as dramatically and yet as economically as possible is usually based on the narrative power that is the fundamental characteristic of these frescoes. These dominating figures, simple and severe, similar to those in the Assisi cycle but placed in settings of more formal abstraction and rendered with more grandeur, are the quintessence of his style, and anatomy and perspective were used—or even invented—by him as adjuncts to his narrative gifts. He never attained to the skill that so often, in fact, misled the men of the 15th and 16th centuries. In the Padua frescoes the details are always significant, whereas it is a characteristic of the Assisi cycle that there occurs from time to time a delighted dwelling on details that are not absolutely essential to the story.

Santa Croce frescoes

      Documents show that Giotto was in Florence in 1311–14 and 1320; and it was probably during these years, before going to Naples (c. 1329), that he painted frescoes in four chapels in Santa Croce belonging to the Giugni, Tosinghi-Spinelli, Bardi, and Peruzzi families. The Giugni Chapel frescoes are lost, as are all the Tosinghi-Spinelli ones, except for an Assumption over the entrance, not universally accepted as by Giotto. The Bardi and Peruzzi chapels contained cycles of St. Francis, St. John the Baptist, and St. John the Evangelist, but the frescoes were whitewashed and were not recovered until the mid-19th century, when they were damaged in the process of removing the whitewash and then heavily restored. Much the same happened to a portrait of Dante in the Bargello, also in Florence, for which there is a traditional attribution to Giotto. Writers tended to take more or less account of these additions and restorations according to the view they held of the Assisi problem, but a prolonged cleaning and re-restoration of both chapels in the mid-20th century has demonstrated that the Bardi Chapel has few but splendid figures remaining, painted in true fresco, whereas the Peruzzi Chapel figures are now largely ghosts, since they were painted in a different technique. The older view, that the two cycles were contemporary, is no longer necessarily valid, and there is no evidence for the date of either cycle, except that both are probably later than the Arena Chapel frescoes.

Naples and the last Florentine period

      In January 1330, King Robert of Naples promoted Giotto to the rank of “familiar” (member of the royal household), which implies that he had been in Naples for some while, possibly since 1329, and he remained there until 1332–33. All the works he executed there have been lost, but traces of his style may be distinguished in the local school. On April 12, 1334, he was appointed capomastro, or surveyor, of the Duomo in Florence and architect to the city. This was a tribute to his great fame as a painter and not on account of any special architectural knowledge. On July 19 of the same year he began the campanile, or bell tower, of the Duomo. It was later altered but is known, in part at least, from a drawing in Siena. He may have designed some of the reliefs carved by Andrea Pisano on the campanile; certainly the bronze doors of the baptistery by Andrea show clear traces of Giotto's frescoes in Santa Croce. Indeed the whole course of painting in Tuscany was dominated by his pupils and followers—by Taddeo Gaddi, Bernardo Daddi, Maso di Banco, Andrea Orcagna, and Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti in Siena—but none of these really understood all of his innovations.

Assessment

      Giotto achieved great personal fame in his own lifetime; in The Divine Comedy (Divine Comedy, The), Dante says of his relation to his reputed teacher, the Florentine artist Cimabue, that “Cimabue thought to hold the field in painting, but now Giotto has the cry, so that the fame of Cimabue is obscured.” The mere fact that he was mentioned in Dante, whether or not in a particularly flattering context, was sufficient to establish and maintain this fame in 14th- and 15th-century Italy, and legends soon began to crystallize around his name. When, in 1550, the artist and biographer Giorgio Vasari (Vasari, Giorgio) published Le vite de' più eccellenti pittori, scultori, ed architettori italiani… (Lives of the Most Eminent Italian Painters, Sculptors, and Architects …), he naturally began his history of Italian art with Giotto as the man who, even more than Cimabue, broke away from the Middle Ages and ushered in the “good modern manner.” It was not until the Renaissance, with Masaccio and Michelangelo, that his true successors arose.

Peter J. Murray

Additional Reading

There is a full bibliography, from the 14th century to 1937, in Roberto Salvini, Giotto bibliografia (1938). The earliest important biography is by Giorgio Vasari in his Vite, published in Florence in 1550 and 1568; the 1550 edition has not been translated, but there are many English versions of the 1568 one. Full-scale monographs are Roberto Salvini, Tutta la pittura di Giotto, 2nd ed. (1962; All the Paintings of Giotto, 1963); and Cesare Gnudi, Giotto (1958; Eng. trans. 1959); and special studies include P. Murray, “On the Date of Giotto's Birth,” in Giotto e il suo tempo (1971); Alastair Smart, The Assisi Problem and the Art of Giotto (1971); Leonetto Tintori, and Millard Meiss, The Painting of the Life of St. Francis in Assisi (1962); James Stubblebine (comp.), Giotto: The Arena Chapel Frescoes (1969); Leonetto Tintori and Eve Borsook, Giotto: The Peruzzi Chapel (1965); and Laurie Schneider, Giotto in Perspective (1974).

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