GIOTTO di BONDONE. - Painter and architect, b. at Colle di Vespignano in Mugello, in all probability in 1267, d. at Florence in 1337.
An artist among the greatest of every age, generally considered the founder of the Italian figurative language, by the same title for which Dante is acknowledged as "the glory of the language."
A disciple, according to an ancient and, despite the doubts of some moderns, still valid tradition, of Cimabue, from whom he learned, in order to exalt it, the harsh force of chiaroscuro and, in order to make it a bank against the powerful volumes, the biting effectiveness of the contour line, he also looked to the Roman painting of the late thirteenth century (to the great Master of Isaac rather than to Cavallini, on whom he instead exerted an influence), to the Pisan sculpture of the late thirteenth century and especially to Arnolfo and, beyond this, to Romanesque sculpture and perhaps also to ancient sculpture.
G.'s beginnings are to be seen, in the last decade of the thirteenth century, in some of the frescoes still preserved in the upper zone of the upper church of Assisi: not, however, in the two stories of Isaac, most beautiful but breathing, in the perfectly rhythmic accord between space and volumes, an aura of arcane detachment, which is foreign to G.'s dramatic spirit, but rather in certain passages of the now extremely fragmentary Stories of the Two Testaments, and especially in the Lamentation over Christ, where the composition along lines converging toward the compact group in the foreground, the transverse cut of the rock, the arrested flight of the angels, certain crossings of glances and an eloquent sobriety of gestures propose in an auroral form, but already intense with most measured pathos, the motifs of the Lamentation of Padua.
Close to these frescoes are the documented Crucifix of S. Maria Novella and the Madonna of S. Giorgio alla Costa in Florence.
Probably in the years between 1296 and 1300, G. painted, with extensive collaboration of assistants, the 28 frescoes of the Legend of St. Francis in the same upper basilica of Assisi.
The arguments adduced by a whole series of German scholars to deny G. the authorship of the cycle do not stand up to criticism. In contrast to the by then traditional Franciscan iconography of the thirteenth-century panels, G. gives a profoundly new formulation of the legend through the spirit of simplification and order that dominates it. Far from any complacency in the episode, the artist seeks for each event the most direct and essential pictorial formulation, and finds it in a synthesis of plastic order that is concretized in the absolute and coherent reduction of every phenomenal appearance to an architecture of volumes. Space itself proves intimately connatural to the plastic substance of things, in a vision very different from that based on the harmonious relationship of container and contained proper to the Master of Isaac and the Roman school, and which instead finds a counterpart in the spatiality of Arnolfo. Even in the most complex compositions (Nativity at Greccio,
Preaching before Honorius III, Apparition at the Chapter of Arles, Confirmation of the Rule), where the use of elementary means of perspective is more overt, and in those that have landscape backgrounds (Preaching to the Birds, Miracle of the Spring, Gift of the Cloak), space arises primarily from a scaling of volumes, from a concatenated relationship of masses. The poetic reason of such compositions lies precisely in the conscious reduction of visible things to the pure, elementary plastic fact, and in the isolation, accordingly, in every narrative occasion, of the dominant note of dramatic emotion. All the more so since a biting line banks the volumes and springs and tenses precisely at the focal point of dramatic tension, precisely there where the decisive gesture is born (Renunciation of Worldly Goods, Knight of Celano, Lament of the Poor Clares). Thus the volumes, seen at first in their elementary absoluteness, emerge from their isolation and place themselves in a reciprocal living relationship: from this arises that Giottesque compositional dynamic by which the volumes draw together into a tightly knit chain through the mediation of the plane. And the various types of composition could be enumerated like the tonalities of a scale, from the simplicity of an ancient bas-relief of scenes composed with few figures on a single plane, in gentle rhythm, to those that receive in transverse or semicircular groups a great number of bystanders, mute and solemn, of an impenetrable calm but saturated with dramatic content, to those that shift the fulcrum of the action to the convergence of several compositional lines, now with the grave motion of a ceremony, now in the agitation of a hurried rhythm.
Color too, lively and intense, underlines with a sense of contrast the articulations, somewhat discontinuous, plastic and compositional, and everything suggests in short the feeling of a world of first and unexpected revelation. The astonished contemplation of creation and the wonder of the miracle are thus the nucleus of the lyricism of the Legend of St. Francis. And one may, discreetly, discern in it a consonance with the candid but also robust poetry of the Fioretti: but everything is recreated in a more solemn and choral tone, where there is already the presentiment, which would become law at Padua, of a supreme necessity of events.
In the jubilee year of 1300 G. executed in mosaic the Navicella in the atrium of old St. Peter's, later entirely redone (two heads of angels remain from it, one at Boville Ernica, ancient Bauco, the other in the Museo Petriano).
On 25 March 1305 (or, according to others, 1306) G. completed the pictorial decoration of the chapel of the Arena, built by the will of Enrico Scrovegni on the site of the Roman amphitheater of Padua. It must have begun, despite the different opinion of some critics, with the Stories of the Virgin in the highest band, characterized by an extreme rarefaction of space, by an abstract, almost metaphysical setting. The more fused chiaroscuro, a new amity of colors, the tendency of volumes to spread out on the plane up to the bank of a thickened contour, summarizing plastic and spatial suggestions, generate a richness of impasto, in the musical sense of the term, that distinguishes the plasticity of Padua from that of Assisi. The result is a most limpid poetry, yet pregnant as no other, if not that of Dante, with moral meaning. A slow play of tensions and distensions, almost a pulsating of forms, gives a tone of profound and detached life to the stories, which unfold in an atmosphere of hermetic solitude and ancient solemnity, tempered only by a human breath of sorrow. They are compositions conceived in the manner of a plastic frieze, where the volumes are placed in tenacious relationship with a continuous background plane, whether this assumes, as in the scenes of the Expulsion of Joachim, the corporeal presence of a rocky ridge, or whether instead (Nativity of the Virgin, Annunciation to St. Anne) it is elliptically indicated by the continuous void of a space behind the plane of the figures. The first Stories of Christ, up to the Flight into Egypt, continue with a more tightly knit concatenation the composition in relief. But already in the Massacre of the Innocents and in the Baptism new transverse compositional lines take shape, even amid the predominance of the horizontal rhythm. To this more animated composing corresponds the swelling of the dramatic wave. Yet one does not find there that unexpected opposing of masses, that rhythm, those sudden breaks, those abrupt sides that at Assisi denoted the impetuous temperament of a still-young artist. Here a more placid spirit dominates, finding its pictorial measure in a more fused plastic continuity. In the Resurrection of Lazarus, the convergence upon Christ of the rocky backs and the long steep slope of the rock shifts the focal point toward one of the edges, generating a most enduring and unresolved tension. This more dramatic vein of G.'s inspiration culminates, after other scenes in which a pregnant sense of the foreboding gravity of the action is entrusted to the absolute plastic continuity with which the slow rotation of the volumes identifies itself with space, in the fresco of the Lamentation, the dominant summit of his art. The compositional conception of the most convergent lines is mysteriously allied with the vision of rotating volumes to create the most absolute identity of plasticism and space. And the breathless concentration of all the lines, summed up by the interminable duration of that descent of rock, is as if blocked by the reduction of all the appearances of the sensible world to squared forms of the most elementary and absolute plasticity: a most lofty expression of grief petrified in an absolute cosmic fraternity.
The decoration of the Chapel is completed by the Last Judgment on the entrance wall (largely by pupils), the Virtues and Vices in the grisaille socle, and a Crucifix on panel.
A few years later are to be placed the Badia Polyptych in the Museo di S. Croce, only partly autograph and much deteriorated, and the Ognissanti Madonna in the Uffizi, a composition of supreme balance, but tense and tightly knit.
The frescoes of the Peruzzi Chapel (Stories of St. John the Evangelist) and Bardi Chapel (Stories of St. Francis) in S. Croce in Florence, heavily repainted in the last century, are distinguished from the Padua cycle by a less tightly knit composing, by a more relaxed rhythm and by a broader "tempo." In the Peruzzi Chapel, which probably precedes the other, there is nonetheless a heroic tone, which passes into the loftiest calm in the Bardi Chapel (after 1317), where G. reaches his own summit of classicism.
The last phase of G.'s activity is obscure, to which only the St. Stephen of the Museo Horne in Florence and the Evangelist of Châalis can reasonably be assigned, parts of one and the same polyptych together with other pieces executed by pupils: works of a plasticity so modulated and substantiated with color as to suggest a further development of his style even beyond the results achieved in the Bardi Chapel. Many panels, some bearing his name, are attributed to him, but they are all workshop works. In 1334 G., appointed architect of the Cathedral and of the commune, laid the foundations of the bell tower and was able to carry its construction through the entire first socle, also providing the designs for the series of reliefs, executed by Andrea Pisano and his circle. - See plates XXXVIII-XXXIX.
Bibliography10 works
Roberto Salvini