Giotto di Bondone, whom art historians designate the first painter of the Italian Renaissance, was apparently discovered while sketching sheep. A well-known Florentine artist looked over the boy's shoulder and was impressed by what he saw -- so impressed that he...
[more]Giotto di Bondone, whom art historians designate the first painter of the Italian Renaissance, was apparently discovered while sketching sheep. A well-known Florentine artist looked over the boy's shoulder and was impressed by what he saw -- so impressed that he persuaded Giotto's father to let the lad become his pupil. Soon the man Boccaccio labeled "the best painter in the world" was receiving commissions from princes and high churchmen, from Florence to Rome to Naples. During his lifetime numerous palaces and estates proudly hung his work; his frescos still adorn churches in northern Italy.
Giotto brought the third dimension back into painting, infusing the flat, hieratic designs of Byzantine art with a softer, more modelled look that eschewed icons and emphasized the human figure. Though he lacked the technical skills developed by the artists of the High Renaissance, Giotto demonstrated a profound feel for human emotion, physicality, and space. These assets gave his paintings new ways to approach narrative.
Human figures often dominate the foreground. Their expressions vary from grief to shock, their clothing reveals the individual shape of their bodies, fingers curve around the objects they hold, and eyes focus on various points of interest, expressing individual thought and feeling. Giotto's sense of perspective was unprecedented. For the first time, clothing emphasized the flesh, and believable distance extended between sky and dirt, the attending crowd and the Virgin.
"Ognissanti Madonna," one of several panel paintings by Giotto, takes on a typical subject of Medieval art: the Virgin and child enthroned among saints and angels. Unlike the standard thirteenth-century Madonna, however, Giotto's is neither expressionless nor remote; instead, she's a woman with almost smiling lips and a thoughtful, directed gaze. Her body, draped in rich, vibrantly colored clothing, presents a solid support for her infant son. The Madonna is a strong figure here, her lap reassuringly maternal amidst the heavenly tumult.
Giotto's large-scale works reveal his mastery of visual storytelling. The St. Francis fresco cycle at Assisi, from the last years of the thirteenth century, allows viewers to follow the saint's progress from wealth to self-inflicted poverty and revelation. But Giotto's best-preserved frescos are in the Arena Chapel in Padua. Created circa 1305, three tiers of images narrate the life of Christ, concluding with the Last Judgement at the west end of the chapel. Poetic transitions bind one scene to the next; the mural is not a collection of static, isolated images but instead a fluid, impassioned story. Humble in color and architectural detail, the cycle uses human figures to awaken space. Giotto represents his figures from more than the traditional front and side angles; one sees the back of a head, a body hunched over, and figures embracing.
A master of simplicity, Giotto used bare observation to breathe new life into traditional narration. With him, the spirit of realism begins to suffuse art, where previously, fossilized symbols had ruled the day.
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