Giotto di Bondone (; – January 8, 1337),"Giotto's date of birth differs widely in the sources, but modern art historians consider 1267 to be the most plausible, although the years up to 1275 cannot be entirely discounted." Wolf, Norbert (2006). Giotto di Bondone, 1267–1337: The Renewal of Painting. Cologne: Taschen. p. 92. . known mononymously as Giotto, was an Italian painter and architect from Florence during the Late Middle Ages. He worked during the Gothic and Proto-Renaissance period. Giotto's contemporary, the banker and chronicler Giovanni Villani, wrote that Giotto was "the most sovereign master of painting in his time, who drew all his figures and their postures according to nature" and of his publicly recognized "talent and excellence".Bartlett, Kenneth R. (1992). The Civilization of the Italian Renaissance. Toronto: D.C. Heath and Company. (Paperback). p. 37. Giorgio Vasari described Giotto as making a decisive break from the prevalent Byzantine style and as initiating "the great art of painting as we know it today, introducing the technique of drawing accurately from life, which had been neglected for more than two hundred years".Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Artists, trans. George Bull, Penguin Classics (1965), pp. 15–36.
Giotto's masterwork is the decoration of the Scrovegni Chapel, in Padua, also known as the Arena Chapel, which was completed around 1305. The fresco cycle depicts the Life of the Virgin and the Life of Christ. It is regarded as one of the supreme masterpieces of the Early Renaissance.
The fact that Giotto painted the Arena Chapel and that he was chosen by the Commune of Florence in 1334 to design the new campanile (bell tower) of the Florence Cathedral are among the few certainties about his life. Almost every other aspect of it is subject to controversy: his birth date, his birthplace, his appearance, his apprenticeship, the order in which he created his works, whether he painted the famous frescoes in the Upper Basilica of Saint Francis in Assisi, and his burial place.
Early life and career
Tradition says that Giotto was born in a farmhouse, perhaps at Colle di Romagnano or Romignano.Sa1rel Eimerl, see below, cites Colbzs le di Romagnano. However, the spelling is perhaps wrong, and the location referred to may be the site of the present Trattoria di Romignano, in a hamlet of farmhouses in the Mugello region. Since 1850, a tower house in nearby Colle Vespignano has borne a plaque claiming the honor of his birthplace, an assertion that is commercially publicized. However, recent research has presented documentary evidence that he was born in Florence, the son of a blacksmith.Michael Viktor Schwarz and Pia Theis, "Giotto's Father: Old Stories and New Documents", Burlington Magazine, 141 (1999), 676–677, and idem, Giottus Pictor. Band 1: Giottos Leben, Vienna, 2004. His father's name was Bondone. Most authors accept that Giotto was his real name, but may have been an abbreviation of Ambrogio (Ambrogiotto) or Angelo (Angelotto).Sarel Eimerl, The World of Giotto, Time-Life Books.
In his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects Vasari states that Giotto was a shepherd boy, a merry and intelligent child who was loved by all who knew him. The great Florentine painter Cimabue discovered Giotto drawing pictures of his sheep on a rock. They were so lifelike that Cimabue approached Giotto and asked if he could take him on as an apprentice. Cimabue was one of the two most highly renowned painters of Tuscany, the other being Duccio, who worked mainly in Siena. Vasari recounts a number of such stories about Giotto's skill as a young artist. He tells of one occasion when Cimabue was absent from the workshop, and Giotto painted a remarkably lifelike fly on a face in a painting of Cimabue. When Cimabue returned, he tried several times to brush the fly off. Many scholars today are uncertain about Giotto's training and consider Vasari's account that he was Cimabue's pupil a legend; they cite earlier sources that suggest that Giotto was not Cimabue's pupil.Maginnis, Hayden B.J., "In Search of an Artist", in Anne Derbes and Mark Sandona, The Cambridge Companion to Giotto, Cambridge, 2004, 12–13. The story about the fly is also suspect because it parallels Pliny the Elder's anecdote about Zeuxis painting grapes so lifelike that birds tried to peck at them.
Vasari also relates that when Pope Benedict XI sent a messenger to Giotto, asking him to send a drawing to demonstrate his skill, Giotto drew a red circle so perfect that it seemed as though it was drawn using a pair of compasses and instructed the messenger to send it to the Pope. The messenger departed ill-pleased, believing that he had been made a fool of. The messenger brought other artists' drawings back to the Pope in addition to Giotto's. When the messenger related how he had made the circle without moving his arm and without the aid of compasses the Pope and his courtiers were amazed at how Giotto's skill greatly surpassed all of his contemporaries.
Career Around 1290 Giotto married Ricevuta di Lapo del Pela (known as 'Ciuta'), the daughter of Lapo del Pela of Florence. The marriage produced four daughters and four sons, one of whom, Francesco, became a painter.Giotto, and Edi Baccheschi (1969). The complete paintings of Giotto. New York: H. N. Abrams. p. 83. Giotto worked in Rome in 1297–1300, but few traces of his presence there remain today. By 1301, Giotto owned a house in Florence, and when he was not traveling, he would return there and live in comfort with his family. By the early 1300s, he had multiple painting commissions in Florence. The Archbasilica of St. John Lateran houses a small portion of a fresco cycle, painted for the Jubilee of 1300 called by Boniface VIII. He also designed the Navicella, a mosaic that decorated the facade of Old St Peter's Basilica. In this period Giotto also painted the Badia Polyptych, now in the Uffizi, Florence.
Cimabue went to Assisi to paint several large frescoes at the new Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi, and it is possible, but not certain, that Giotto went with him. The attribution of the fresco cycle of the Life of St. Francis in the Upper Church has been one of the most disputed in art history. The documents of the Franciscan Friars that relate to artistic commissions during this period were destroyed by Napoleon's troops, who stabled horses in the Upper Church of the Basilica, so scholars have debated the attribution to Giotto. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, it was convenient to attribute every fresco in the Upper Church not obviously by Cimabue to the better-known Giotto, including those frescoes now attributed to the Master of Isaac. In the 1960s, art experts Millard Meiss and Leonetto Tintori examined all of the Assisi frescoes, and found some of the paint contained white lead—also used in Cimabue's badly deteriorated Crucifixion (c. 1283). No known works by Giotto contain this medium. However, Giotto's panel painting of the Stigmatization of St. Francis (c. 1297) includes a motif of the saint holding up the collapsing church, previously included in the Assisi frescoes.
The authorship of a large number of panel paintings ascribed to Giotto by Vasari, among others, is as broadly disputed as the Assisi frescoes.Maginnis, "In Search of an Artist", 23–28. According to Vasari, Giotto's earliest works were for the Dominicans at Santa Maria Novella. They include a fresco of The Annunciation and an enormous suspended Crucifix, which is about high. It has been dated to about 1290 and is thought to be contemporary with the Assisi frescoes.In 1312, the will of Ricuccio Pucci leaves funds to keep a lamp burning before the crucifix "by the illustrious painter Giotto". Ghiberti also cites it as a work by Giotto. Earlier attributed works are the San Giorgio alla Costa Madonna and Child, now in the Diocesan Museum of Santo Stefano al Ponte, Florence, and the signed panel of the Stigmatization of St. Francis housed in the Louvre.
An early biographical source, Riccobaldo of Ferrara, mentions that Giotto painted at Assisi but does not specify the St Francis Cycle: "What kind of art [Giotto] made is testified to by works done by him in the Franciscan churches at Assisi, Rimini, Padua ...".Sarel. A. Teresa Hankey, "Riccobaldo of Ferraro and Giotto: An Update", Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 54 (1991), 244. Since the idea was put forward by the German art historian in 1912,Rintelen, Friedrich, Giotto und die Giotto-apokryphen (1912). many scholars have expressed doubt that Giotto was the author of the Upper Church frescoes. Without documentation, arguments on the attribution have relied upon connoisseurship, a notoriously unreliable "science",See, for example, Richard Offner's famous article of 1939, "Giotto, non-Giotto", conveniently collected in James Stubblebine, Giotto: The Arena Chapel Frescoes, New York, 1969 (reissued 1996), 135–155, which argues against Giotto's authorship of the frescoes. In contrast, Luciano Bellosi, La pecora di Giotto, Turin, 1985, calls each of Offner's points into question. but technical examinations and comparisons of the workshop painting processes at Assisi and Padua in 2002 have provided strong evidence that Giotto did not paint the St. Francis Cycle.Zanardi, Bruno, Giotto e Pietro Cavallini: La questione di Assisi e il cantiere medievale della pittura a fresco, Milan, 2002; Zanardi provides an English synopsis of his study in Anne Derbes and Mark Sandona, The Cambridge Companion to Giotto, New York, 2004, 32–62. There are many differences between it and the Arena Chapel frescoes that are difficult to account for within the stylistic development of an individual artist. It is now generally accepted that four different hands are identifiable in the Assisi St. Francis frescoes and that they came from Rome. If this is the case, Giotto's frescoes at Padua owe much to the naturalism of the painters.
Giotto's fame as a painter spread. He was called to work in Padua and also in Rimini, where there remains only a Crucifix painted before 1309 and conserved in the Church of St. Francis. It influenced the rise of the Riminese school of Giovanni and Pietro da Rimini. According to documents of 1301 and 1304, Giotto by this time possessed large estates in Florence, and it is probable that he was already leading a large workshop and receiving commissions from throughout Italy.
Scrovegni Chapel
Around 1305, Giotto executed his most influential work, the interior frescoes of the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. Enrico degli Scrovegni commissioned the chapel to serve as family worship, burial spaceSee the complaint of the Eremitani monks in James Stubblebine, Giotto: The Arena Chapel Frescoes, New York, 1969, 106–107 and an analysis of the commission by Benjamin G. Kohl, "Giotto and his Lay Patrons", in Anne Derbes and Mark Sandona, The Cambridge Companion to Giotto, Cambridge, 2004, 176–193. and as a backdrop for an annually performed mystery play.Schwarz, Michael Viktor, "Padua, its Arena, and the Arena Chapel: a liturgical ensemble", in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 73, 2010, 39–64.