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- Italian Paintings of The Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries
- Overview
- Early life
- The Assisi problem
Giotto (born 1266/67 or 1276, Vespignano, near Florence [Italy]—died January 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 t...
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 San Francesco (St. Francis Basilica) in Assisi, which, if indeed by Giotto, are his great early works. It is known that Giotto died on January 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.
The central problem in Giotto studies, the attribution of the Assisi frescoes, may be summed up as the question of 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 the 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 September 26, 1997, and were gradually restored.)
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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.
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- Peter J. Murray
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11 mar 2024 · Renaissance art, painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and literature produced during the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries in Europe under the combined influences of an increased awareness of nature, a revival of classical learning, and a more individualistic view of man.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
- What are the characteristics of Renaissance art, and how does it differ from the art of the Middle A...Renaissance art is marked by a gradual shift from the abstract forms of the medieval period to the representational forms of the 15th century. Subj...
- When and where did Renaissance art start and end?Characteristics of Renaissance art, notably naturalism, can be found in 13th-century European art but did not dominate until the 15th century. Scho...
- How did humanism and religion affect Renaissance art?Interest in humanism, a philosophy that emphasized the individual and the human capacity for fulfillment through reason, transformed the Renaissanc...
- What made Renaissance art revolutionary?The developments of the Renaissance changed the course of art in ways that continue to resonate today. Interest in humanism transformed the artist...
- What are some famous Renaissance artworks?Two of the most famous artworks in history were painted during the Renaissance: the Mona Lisa (c. 1503–19) and the Last Supper (c. 1495–98), both e...
The body of art, including painting, sculpture, architecture, music and literature identified as "Renaissance art" was primarily produced during the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries in Europe under the combined influences of an increased awareness of nature, a revival of classical learning, and a more individualistic view of man.
Pre-Renaissance paintings from fourteenth century Florence and Siena can be seen in many of the best art museums around the world. • For the meaning of important 14th century pictures, see: Famous Paintings Analyzed .
At the start of the fourteenth century, elements of the Gothic style that emerged in twelfth-century France began to appear in Italian painting: architectural motifs such as the pointed arch, a refined delicacy of detail, increased naturalism, and an emphasis on fluid form.
