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The Life of Giotto Page 21 Julia Cartwright

The Art of Giotto Page 27 Criticisms by Vasari, Van Dyke, Colvin, Ruskin, Symonds, E. H. and E. W. Blashfield, Quilter

The Works of Giotto: Descriptions of the Plates and Page 35 a List of Paintings Giotto Bibliography Page 39

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Giotto di Bondone

BORN 1266: DIED 1337

FLORENTINE SCHOOL

JULIA CARTWRIGHT 'THE PAINTERS OF FLORENCE'

"In a village of Etruria," writes Ghiberti, the oldest historian of the Florentine Renaissance, "Painting took her rise." In other words, Giotto di Bondone was born, between 1265 and 1270, at Colle, in the Commune of Vespignano, a village of the Val Mugello fourteen miles from Florence. There the boy, who had been called Angiolo, after his grandfather, and went by the nickname of Angiolotto, or Giotto, kept his father's flocks on the grassy slopes of the Apennines, and was found one day by Cimabue, as he rode over the hills, drawing a sheep with a sharp stone upon a rock. Full of surprise at the child's talent for drawing, the great painter asked him if he would go back with him to Florence; to which both the boy and his father, a poor peasant named Bondone, gladly agreed. Thus, at ten years old, Giotto was taken straight from the sheepfolds and apprenticed to the first painter in Florence. Such is the story told by Ghiberti and confirmed by Leonardo da Vinci, who, writing half a century before Vasari, remarks that Giotto took nature for his guide, and began by drawing the sheep and goats which he herded on the rocks.

Another version of the story of Giotto's boyhood is that he was apprenticed to a wool-merchant of Florence, but that instead of going to work he spent his time in watching the artists in Cimabue's shop; upon which his father applied to the master who consented to teach the boy painting. The natural vivacity and intelligence of the young student soon made him a favorite in Cimabue's workshop, while his extraordinary aptitude for drawing became every day more apparent. The legends of his marvelous skill, the stories of the fly that Cimabue vainly tried to brush off his picture, of the round O which he drew before the pope's envoy with one sweep of his pencil, are proofs of the wonder and admiration which Giotto's attempts to follow nature more closely excited among his contemporaries. This latter story is told by Vasari as follows: "The pope sent one of his courtiers to Tuscany to ascertain what kind of man Giotto might be, and what were his works; that pontiff then proposing to have certain paintings executed in the Church of St. Peter. The messenger spoke first with many artists in Siena; then, having received designs from them, he proceeded to Florence, and repaired one morning to the workshop where Giotto was occupied with his labors. He declared the purpose of the pope, and finally requested to have a drawing that he might send it to his holiness. Giotto, who was very courteous, took a sheet of paper and a pencil dipped in a red color, then, resting his elbow on his side to form a sort of compass, with one turn of the hand he drew a circle, so perfect and exact that it was a marvel to behold. This done, he turned smiling to the courtier, saying, 'Here is your drawing.' 'Am I to have nothing more than this?' inquired the latter, conceiving himself to be jested with. 'That is enough and to spare,' returned Giotto. 'Send it with the rest, and you will see if it will not be recognized.' The messenger, unable to obtain anything more, went away very ill-satisfied and fearing that he had been fooled. Nevertheless, having despatched the other drawings to the pope with the names of those who had done them he sent that of Giotto also, relating the mode in which he had made his circle, without moving his arm and without compasses; from which the pope, and such of the courtiers as were well versed in the subject, perceived how far Giotto surpassed all the other painters of his time."

No doubt the boldness and originality of his genius soon led Giotto to abandon the purely conventional style of art then in use, and to seek after a more natural and lifelike form of expression. And early in his career he was probably influenced by the example of the sculptor Giovanni Pisano, who was actively engaged on his great works in Tuscany and Umbria at this time. The earliest examples of Giotto's style that remain to us are some small panels at Munich; but a larger and better-known work is the 'Madonna Enthroned,' in the Academy at Florence, which, although archaic in type, has a vigor and reality that are wholly wanting in Cimabue's Madonna in the same room. But it is to Assisi that we must turn for a fuller record of Giotto's training and development.

Here, in the old Umbrian city where St. Francis had lived and died, was the great double church which the alms of Christendom had raised above his burial-place. Unfortunately the records of the Franciscan convent are silent as to the painters of the frescos which cover its walls, and neither Cimabue nor Giotto is once mentioned. But Ghiberti, Vasari, and the later Franciscan historian, Rudolphus, all agree in saying that Giotto came to Assisi with his master Cimabue and there painted the lower course of frescos in the nave of the Upper Church....

In 1298 Giotto was invited to Rome by Cardinal Stefaneschi, the pope's nephew and a generous patron of art. At his bidding Giotto designed the famous mosaic of the 'Navicella,' or 'Ship of the Church,' which hangs in the vestibule of St. Peter's. Little trace of the original work now remains. More worthy of study is the altar-piece which he painted for the cardinal, and which is still preserved in the sacristy of St. Peter's.

Pope Boniface, we are told by Vasari, was deeply impressed by Giotto's merits, and loaded him with honors and rewards; but the frescos which he was employed to paint in the old basilica of St. Peter's perished long ago, and the only work of his now remaining in Rome besides the 'Navicella,' is the damaged fresco of Pope Boniface proclaiming the Jubilee, on a pillar of the Lateran Church. This last painting proves that Giotto was in Rome during the year 1300, when both his fellow-citizens Dante and the historian Giovanni Villani were present in the Eternal City. The poet was an intimate friend of the painter; and, after his return to Florence, Giotto introduced Dante's portrait in an altar-piece of 'Paradise' which he painted for the chapel of the Podest? Palace. But since this chapel was burned down in 1332, and not rebuilt until after Giotto's death, the fresco of Dante, which was discovered some years ago on the walls of the present building, must have been copied by one of his followers from the original painting.

It was probably during an interval of his journey back to Florence, or on some other visit to Assisi during the next few years, that Giotto painted his frescos in the Lower Church of St. Francis in that city. Chief among these are the four great allegories on the vaulted roof above the high altar, illustrating the meaning of the three monastic Virtues, Obedience, Chastity, and Poverty, whom, according to the legend, the saint met walking on the road to Siena in the form of three fair maidens, and whom he held up to his followers as the sum of evangelical perfection.

These allegories are not the only works which Giotto executed in the Lower Church of Assisi. Ghiberti's statement that he painted almost the whole of the Lower Church is confirmed by Rudolphus, who mentions the series of frescos of the childhood of Christ and the 'Crucifixion' in the right transept as being by his hand. In their present ruined condition it is not easy to distinguish between the work of the master and that of his assistants; but the whole series bears the stamp of Giotto's invention.

The next important works which he painted were the frescos in the Arena Chapel at Padua, built in 1303, by Enrico Scrovegno, who two years later invited Giotto to decorate the interior with frescos. When Dante visited Padua, in 1306, he found his friend Giotto living there with his wife, Madonna Ciut?, and his young family, and was honorably entertained by the painter in his own house. The poet often watched Giotto at work, with his children, who were "as ill-favored as himself," playing around, and wondered how it was that the creations of his brain were so much fairer than his own offspring. Giotto's small stature and insignificant appearance seem to have been constantly the subject of his friends' good-humored jests; and Petrarch and Boccaccio both speak of him as an instance of rare genius concealed under a plain and ungainly exterior. But this unattractive appearance was redeemed by a kindly and joyous nature, a keen sense of humor, and unfailing cheerfulness, which made him the gayest and most pleasant companion....

The fame which Giotto already enjoyed beyond the walls of Florence was greatly increased by his works in Padua, and before he left there he received and executed many commissions. From Padua, Vasari tells us, he went on to the neighboring city of Verona, where he painted the portrait of Dante's friend and protector, Can Grande della Scala, as well as other works in the Franciscan church, and then proceeded to Ferrara and Ravenna at the invitation of the Este and Polenta princes. All his works in the cities of North Italy, however, have perished, and it is to Florence that we must turn for the third and last remaining cycle of his frescos.

The great Franciscan church of Santa Croce had been erected in the last years of the thirteenth century, and the proudest Florentine families hastened to build chapels at their own expense as a mark of their devotion to the popular saint. Four of these chapels were decorated with frescos by Giotto's hand, but were all whitewashed in 1714, when Santa Croce underwent a thorough restoration. The frescos which he painted in the Guigni and Spinelli chapels have been entirely destroyed; but within the last fifty years the whitewash has been successfully removed from the walls of the Bardi and Peruzzi chapels, and the finest of Giotto's works that remain to us have been brought to light. Here his unrivaled powers as a great epic painter are revealed, and we realize his intimate knowledge of human nature and his profound sympathy with every form of life.

The exact date of these frescos remains uncertain, but they were probably painted soon after 1320. Recent research has as yet thrown little light upon the chronology of Giotto's life, and all we can discover is an occasional notice of the works which he executed, or of the property which he owned in Florence. Vasari's statement, that he succeeded to Cimabue's house and shop in the Via del Cocomero, Florence, is borne out by the will of the Florentine citizen Rinuccio, who, dying in 1312, describes "the excellent painter Giotto di Bondone" as a parishioner of Santa Maria Novella, and bequeathes a sum of "five pounds of small florins" to keep a lamp burning night and day before a crucifix painted by the said master in the Dominican church.

Of Giotto's eight children, the eldest, Francesco, became a painter, and when his father was absent from Florence managed the small property which Giotto had inherited at his old home of Vespignano. The painter's family lived chiefly at this country home, of which Giotto himself was very fond; and contemporary writers give us pleasant glimpses of the great master's excursions to Val Mugello. Boccaccio tells us how one day, as Giotto and the learned advocate Messer Forese, who, like himself, was short and insignificant in appearance, were riding out to Vespignano, they were caught in a shower of rain and forced to borrow cloaks and hats from the peasants. "Well, Giotto," said the lawyer, as they trotted back to Florence clad in these old clothes and bespattered with mud from head to foot, "if a stranger were to meet you now would he ever suppose that you were the first painter in Florence?" "Certainly he would," was Giotto's prompt reply, "if beholding your worship he could imagine for a moment that you had learned your A B C!" And the novelist Sacchetti relates how the great master rode out to San Gallo one Sunday afternoon with a party of friends, and how they fell in with a herd of swine, one of which ran between Giotto's legs and threw him down. "After all, the pigs are quite right," said the painter as he scrambled to his feet and shook the dust from his clothes, "when I think how many thousands of crowns I have earned with their bristles without ever giving them even a bowl of soup!"

A more serious instance of Giotto's power of satire is to be found in his song against Voluntary Poverty, in which he not only denounces the vice and hypocrisy often working beneath the cloak of monastic perfection, but honestly expresses his own aversion to poverty as a thing miscalled a virtue. The whole poem is of great interest, coming as it does from the pen of the chosen painter of the Franciscan Order, and as showing the independence of Giotto's character.

The extraordinary industry of the man is seen by the long list of panel-pictures as well as wall-paintings which are mentioned by early writers. These have fared even worse than his frescos. The picture of 'The Commune' in the great hall of the Podest? Palace, which Vasari describes as of very beautiful and ingenious invention, the small tempera painting of the 'Death of the Virgin,' on which Michelangelo loved to gaze, in the Church of Ognissanti, Florence, the 'Madonna' which was sent to Petrarch at Avignon, and which he left as his most precious possession to his friend Francesco di Carrara, have all perished. One panel, however, described by Vasari, is still in existence--an altar-piece originally painted for a church in Pisa, and now in the Louvre.

In 1330 Giotto was invited to Naples by King Robert, who received him with the highest honor, and issued a decree granting this chosen and faithful servant all the privileges enjoyed by members of the royal household. Ghiberti tells us that Giotto painted the hall of King Robert's palace, and Petrarch alludes in one of his epistles to the frescos with which he adorned the royal chapel of the Castello dell' Uovo. "Do not fail," he writes, "to visit the royal chapel, where my contemporary, Giotto, the greatest painter of his age, has left such splendid monuments of his pencil and genius." All these works have been destroyed, and another series of frescos, which he executed in the Franciscan church of Santa Chiara, were whitewashed in the last century by order of a Spanish governor, who complained that they made the church too dark!

King Robert appreciated the painter's company as much as his talent, and enjoyed the frankness of his speech and ready jest. "Well, Giotto," he said, as he watched the artist at work one summer day, "if I were you I would leave off painting while the weather is so hot." "So would I were I King Robert," was Giotto's prompt reply. Another time the king asked him to introduce a symbol of his kingdom in a hall containing portraits of illustrious men, upon which Giotto, without a word, painted a donkey wearing a saddle embroidered with the royal crown and scepter, pawing and sniffing at another saddle lying on the ground bearing the same device. "Such are your subjects," explained the artist, with a sly allusion to the fickle temper of the Neapolitans. "Every day they seek a new master."

In 1333 Giotto was still in Naples, and King Robert, it is said, promised to make him the first man in the realm if he would remain at his court; but early in the following year he was summoned back to Florence by the Signory, and, on the twelfth of April, 1334, was appointed Chief Architect of the State and Master of the Cathedral Works. Since the death of its architect, Arnolfo, in 1310, the progress of the cathedral had languished; but now the magistrates declared their intention of erecting a bell-tower which in height and beauty should surpass all that the Greeks and Romans had accomplished in the days of their greatest pride. "For this purpose," the decree runs, "we have chosen Giotto di Bondone, painter, our great and dear master, since neither in the city nor in the whole world is there any other to be found so well fitted for this and similar tasks." Giotto lost no time in preparing designs for the beautiful Campanile which bears his name; and on the eighth of July the foundations of the new tower were laid with great solemnity. Villani describes the imposing processions that were held and the immense multitudes which attended the ceremony, and adds that the Superintendent of Works was Maestro Giotto, "our own citizen, the most sovereign master of painting in his time, and the one who drew figures and represented action in the most lifelike manner." Giotto received a salary of one hundred golden florins from the state "for his excellence and goodness," and was strictly enjoined not to leave Florence again without the permission of the Signory. In 1335, however, we hear of him in Milan, whither he had gone by order of the Signory at the urgent request of their ally Azzo Visconti, Lord of Milan. Here, in the old ducal palace, Giotto painted a series of frescos of which no trace now remains, and then hurried back to Florence to resume his work on the Campanile.

More than a hundred years later, when Florence had reached the height of splendor and prosperity under the rule of the Medici, Lorenzo the Magnificent placed a marble bust on Giotto's tomb, and employed Angelo Poliziano to compose the Latin epitaph which gave proud utterance to the veneration in which the great master was held alike by his contemporaries and by posterity:

"Lo, I am he by whom dead Painting was restored to life; to whose right hand all was possible; by whom Art became one with Nature. None ever painted more or better. Do you wonder at yon fair tower which holds the sacred bells? Know that it was I who bade her rise towards the stars. For I am Giotto--what need is there to tell of my work? Long as verse lives, my name shall endure!"

The Art of Giotto

GIORGIO VASARI 'LIVES OF THE PAINTERS'

The gratitude which the masters in painting owe to nature is due, in my judgment, to the Florentine painter Giotto, seeing that he alone--although born amidst incapable artists and at a time when all good methods in art had long been entombed beneath the ruins of war--yet, by the favor of Heaven, he, I say, alone succeeded in resuscitating Art, and restoring her to a path that may be called the true one.

JOHN C. VAN DYKE 'HISTORY OF PAINTING'

It would seem that nothing but self-destruction could come to the struggling, praying, throat-cutting population that terrorized Italy during the medieval period. The people were ignorant, the rulers treacherous, the passions strong; and yet out of the Dark Ages came light. In the thirteenth century the light grew brighter. The spirit of learning showed itself in the founding of schools and universities. Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, reflecting respectively religion, classic learning, and the inclination toward nature, lived and gave indication of the trend of thought. Finally the arts--architecture, sculpture, painting--began to stir and take upon themselves new appearances.

In painting, though there were some portraits and allegorical scenes produced during the Gothic period, the chief theme was Bible story. The Church was the patron, and art was only the servant, as it had been from the beginning. It had not entirely escaped from symbolism. It was still the portrayal of things for what they meant rather than for what they looked. There was no such thing then as art for art's sake. It was art for religion's sake.

The demand for painting increased, and its subjects multiplied with the establishment at this time of the two powerful orders of Dominican and Franciscan monks. The first exacted from the painters more learned and instructive work; the second wished for the crucifixions, the martyrdoms, the dramatic deaths wherewith to move people by emotional appeal. In consequence painting produced many themes, but, as yet, only after the Byzantine style. The painter was more of a workman than an artist. The Church had more use for his fingers than for his creative ability. It was his business to transcribe what had gone before. This he did, but not without signs here and there of uneasiness and discontent with the pattern. There was an inclination toward something truer to nature, but as yet no great realization of it. The study of nature came in very slowly.

The advance of Italian art in the Gothic age was an advance through the development of the imposed Byzantine pattern. When people began to stir intellectually the artists found that the old Byzantine model did not look like nature. They began not by rejecting it but by improving it, giving it slight movements here and there, turning the head, throwing out a hand, or shifting the folds of drapery. The Eastern type was still seen in the long pathetic face, oblique eyes, green flesh-tints, stiff robes, thin fingers, and absence of feet; but the painters now began to modify and enliven it. More realistic Italian faces were introduced; architectural and landscape backgrounds encroached upon the Byzantine gold grounds; even portraiture was taken up. The painters were taking notes of natural appearances. No one painter began this movement. The whole artistic region of Italy was at that time ready for the advance.

Cimabue seems the most notable instance in early times of a Byzantine-educated painter who improved upon the traditions. He has been called the father of Italian painting; but Italian painting had no father. Cimabue was simply a man of more originality and ability than his contemporaries, and departed further from the art teachings of the time without decidedly opposing them. He retained the Byzantine pattern, but loosened the lines of drapery somewhat, turned the head to one side, and infused the figure with a little appearance of life.

Cimabue's pupil, Giotto, was a great improver on all his predecessors because he was a man of extraordinary genius. He would have been great in any time, and yet he was not great enough to throw off wholly the Byzantine traditions. He tried to do it. He studied nature in a general way, changed the type of face somewhat, and gave it expression and nobility. To the figure he gave more motion, dramatic gesture, life. The drapery was cast in broader, simpler masses with some regard for line, and the form and movement of the body were somewhat emphasized through it. In methods Giotto was more knowing, but not essentially different from his contemporaries; his subjects were from the common stock of religious story, but his imaginative force and invention were his own. Bound by the conventionalities of his time, he could still create a work of nobility and power. He came too early for the highest achievement. He had genius, feeling, fancy--almost everything except accurate knowledge of the laws of nature and of art. His art was the best of its time, but it was still lacking, nor did that of his immediate followers go much beyond it technically.

SYDNEY COLVIN 'ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA'

Giotto, relatively to his age one of the greatest and most complete of artists, fills in the history of Italian painting a place analogous to that which seems to have been filled in the history of Greek painting by Polygnotus. That is to say, he lived at a time when the resources of his art were still in their infancy, but considering the limits of those resources his achievements were the highest possible. At the close of the Middle Age he laid the foundations upon which all the progress of the Renaissance was afterwards securely based. In the days of Giotto the knowledge possessed by painters of the human frame and its structure rested only upon general observation and not upon any minute, prolonged, or scientific study; while to facts other than those of humanity their observation had never been closely directed. Of linear perspective they possessed few ideas, and these elementary and empirical, and scarcely any ideas at all of a?rial perspective or of the conduct of light and shade.

As far as painting could ever be carried under these conditions, so far it was carried by Giotto. In its choice of subjects his art is entirely subservient to the religious spirit of his age. Even in its mode of conceiving and arranging those subjects, it is in part still trammeled by the rules and consecrated traditions of the past. Thus it is as far from being a perfectly free as from being a perfectly accomplished form of art. Many of those truths of nature to which the painters of succeeding generations learned to give accurate and complete expression, Giotto was only able to express by way of imperfect symbol and suggestion. But in spite of these limitations and shortcomings, and although he had often to be content with expressing truths of space and form conventionally or inadequately, and truths of structure and action approximately, and truths of light and shadow not at all, yet among the elements over which he had control he maintained so just a balance that his work produces in the spectator less sense of imperfection than that of many later and more accomplished masters. He is one of the least one-sided of artists, and his art, it has been justly said, resumes and concentrates all the attainments of his time not less truly than all the attainments of the crowning age of Italian art are resumed and concentrated in Raphael.

In some particulars the painting of Giotto was never surpassed,--in the judicious division of the field and massing and scattering of groups, in the union of dignity in the types with appropriateness in the occupations of the personages, in strength and directness of intellectual grasp and dramatic motive, in the combination of perfect gravity with perfect frankness in conception, and of a noble severity in design with a great charm of harmony and purity in color. The earlier Byzantine and Roman workers in mosaic had bequeathed to him the high abstract qualities of their practice--their balance, their impressiveness, their grand instinct of decoration; but while they had compassed these qualities at an entire sacrifice of life and animation, it is the glory of Giotto to have been the first among his countrymen to breathe life into art, and to have quickened its stately rigidity with the fire of natural incident and emotion.

It was this conquest, this touch of the magician, this striking of the sympathetic notes of life and reality, that chiefly gave Giotto his immense reputation among his contemporaries, and made him the fit exponent of the vivid, penetrating, and practical genius of emancipated Florence. His is one of the few names in history which, having become great while its bearer lived, has sustained no loss of greatness through subsequent generations.

JOHN RUSKIN 'GIOTTO AND HIS WORKS IN PADUA'

In the one principle of close imitation of nature lay Giotto's great strength and the entire secret of the revolution he effected. It was not by greater learning, nor by the discovery of new theories of art; not by greater taste, nor by "ideal" principles of selection that he became the head of the progressive schools of Italy. It was simply by being interested in what was going on around him, by substituting the gestures of living men for conventional attitudes, and portraits of living men for conventional faces, and incidents of every-day life for conventional circumstances, that he became great, and the master of the great.

JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 'RENAISSANCE IN ITALY'

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