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Giotto – Life and Works – Biography

Giotto di Bondone has been revered for almost seven centuries as the father of European painting, the inventor of the third dimension in painting, and one of the first great Italian masters. A pupil of the other great Florentine painter of the time, Cimabue left frescoes and panel paintings in places such as Assisi, Rome, Padua, Florence, and Naples which today form part not only of the history of art but also of the imagination of each of us. Giotto was the protagonist and managed to change the entire artistic language of the West fundamentally.

Around the year 1300, Florence, and together with it all of Tuscany, experienced the effects of a significant economic and cultural flowering: the ancient municipality, whose severe and simple customs were regretted by the exile Dante through the mouth of his ancestor Cacciaguida, gives way to an entrepreneurial, wealthy city, strong in a solid mercantile and financial bourgeoisie.

Giotto di Bondone in Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori) (1767)

On the threshold of the fourteenth century, urban expansion had become incessant in many Italian cities: the bishop, religious orders, wealthy families, bankers, and merchants vied with each other in promoting the construction of new buildings. Hand in hand with the economic and social development of the city, intense artistic activity was also born, which prompted the search for new forms of representation. Giotto fits positively into this situation: an artist was born in 1267 in Vespignano near Florence. After his apprenticeship in Cimabue’s workshop between 1280 and 1290, he established himself as the greatest artist of the time.

His successful career is testified by the long series of prestigious assignments that led him to work for Popes, kings, and monastic orders. Stay in numerous cities in Italy, including Assisi (where he frescoed the Upper Basilica of San Francesco), Rome, Naples, and Milan, profoundly influencing local art. Between 1304 and 1306, he moved to Padua, where, at the request of the banker Enrico Scrovegni, he painted the famous Scrovegni Chapel. In 1334, he was appointed director of the works of the Duomo of Florence; he provided the project for Giotto’s bell tower of the same name. He died at seventy on January 8, 1337, and was buried in the Florentine Cathedral with great honors.

A dazzling career

Of humble origins, the son of the farmer Bondone finds his dimension as a man and artist in city life, aware of the acquired social role and of the success of the works left in various Italian centers during long journeys. His painting will be the image of this moral and material security, of the satisfaction of knowing and interpreting one’s time and environment. Giotto marked a turning point in medieval art, moving away from Byzantine painting. His figures have volumes, act in space, and express an intense humanity. His painted characters are undoubtedly real men and women: with their anxieties and hopes, amazement, and feeling, and on the other hand, with the solid volume of their bodies, they occupy a social, tangible role in the daily scenario of the city or the countryside.

Full awareness of the active presence of the individual in history and the world is the greatest conquest of Italian culture on the threshold of the fourteenth century: in this period, the intellectual movement takes its first steps, which, the following century, will lead to the natural season of humanism. A new language takes shape, the “vulgar” of Dante and Boccaccio, whose clear and sonorous beliefs fully correspond to the unraveling of the scenes and characters in Giotto’s paintings. At the same time, even sculpture, with Arnolfo di Cambio and Giovanni Pisano, reaches the full extension of the expressive range, from vibrant animation to calm solemnity.

Legend of St Francis: 01. Homage of a Simple Man (1300) from Giotto’s St. Francis Cycle; Giotto

According to contemporaries, Giotto changed the language of art “from Greek to Latin,”: yet, his apprenticeship takes place in a symbolic culture still influenced by Byzantine art. According to the dictates of this tradition inspired by the imperial court of Byzantium and firmly rooted throughout Eastern Europe, the images created by Byzantine art must follow the rules of a very precise code of representation: one does not try to produce the impression of reality, but to give visible expression, with aristocratic symbolism, to otherworldly events and characters. Thus, the individual scenes of sacred history follow an iconographic trend that remains unchanged over time, repeated with diligent observance. Giotto’s teacher, Cimabue, and the great contemporary Duccio da Boninsegna, albeit with different results, are still in part linked to this elegant, precious, calligraphic way of understanding painting: Giotto, right from his first known works, is moved by a different desire and realizes one of the most decisive turning points of Western art.

A more than probable trip to Rome, made at a young age, suggests to Giotto a clear and personal interpretation of antiquity, seen as a model of sobriety and composure and, at the same time, of a subtle and acute investigation of nature and human feelings. The Roman artists of the late thirteenth century (such as Pietro Cavallini, Jacopo Torriti, and Filippo Rusuti) had already set out along a similar path: but only with Giotto did this path become a grandiose conquest, soon distributed by the artist himself throughout Italy, from Assisi in Rome, from Rimini to Padua, from Naples to Milan, stages marked by cycles of frescoes and works of extraordinary importance, some of which have been lost, but which played a decisive role in the formation of local schools inspired by Giotto. Within a few decades, schools of more or less original “Giotteschi” sprang up everywhere: but above all, Florence was the city that welcomed the lesson of its illustrious son in a lasting way, to the point that the symbolic civilization of the Renaissance, which blossomed at the beginning of the 15th century thanks to Brunelleschi, Donatello, and Masaccio, has always recognized in Giotto a firm, unshakable root. It seems paradoxical, but in reality, by being and feeling like a man of his time, Giotto, like Dante, has been a modern man for seven hundred years.

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Reality and legends of youth, up to the revelation of the frescoes of Assisi

Only scant information about Giotto’s youth and training has come to us. We are still determining if his name is complete or diminutive of Biagio or Agnolo. The date of birth is not attested by the documents but derived from the fact that the painter died in January 1337 at the age of seventy: 1267 is, however, a very plausible date, closely coinciding with the birth of Dante, which falls, as it is known, in 1265.

Born into a peasant family in Colle di Vespignano, near Florence, his father, Bondone, is a “land worker and natural person.” Giotto is described by the most ancient commentators (in particular by Lorenzo Ghiberti, followed later by Vasari) as a child prodigy. The encounter between the shepherd boy scratching the sheep on the stones of the Mugello and the great master Cimabue on the road to Bologna is one of the most typical and repeated examples of “natural talent” in the entire history of art. Beyond the authenticity of the ancient legend (recently, however, proposed by Luciano Bellosi as true), he ascertains the existence of a very direct relationship between Cimabue and Giotto, so much so that it is possible that the master and pupil worked together on some works, such as the Madonna della Prepositura of Castelfiorentino.

Cimabue’s style represents the extreme evolution of Byzantine art in Italy:

The poses of the figures
The lack of interest in the representation of space
The gestures and features
The response to the rules dictated by the oriental tradition

On the other hand, Cimabue has a glorious and dramatic vision of sacred history and a sense of conflict between good and evil, translating into new plastic energy in his paintings, resulting in a strong emotional, “expressionistic” impact. At Cimabue, another episode marks the artistic training of the young Giotto: a trip to Rome. Before joining the grandiose construction site of the Basilica of San Francesco in Assisi, the young painter visited the “eternal city” for the first time. Once there, he encounters a particular situation: a center of 30,000 inhabitants, about half the size of Florence, where mountains of ancient monuments emerge in ruins. Among the ruins of ancient Rome, the splendid constructions of Christian basilicas stand out, many of which were decorated with mosaics and frescoes during the 13th century. At that time, an important Roman school of painting developed, whose main representatives were Pietro Cavallini, Jacopo Torriti, and Filippo Rusuti.

Giotto Painting the Portrait of Dante (1852) by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Without completely denying the Byzantine iconography, the Roman painters and mosaicists recover the tranquil monumentality of classical art: in the city of the Pope, an imperial art seems to be reborn, in which the Tuscan sculptor-architect Arnolfo di Cambio also participates, author Rome of significant ornamental complexes. Although they have not so far been identified as certain works by Giotto before the frescoes of Assisi (someone suggests looking for traces of Giotto’s youth among the mosaics of the Florence Baptistery), critics agree in underlining the decisive importance of his stay in Rome to the point that it is debated whether Giotto arrived at the building site of San Francesco in Assisi following Cimabue or among the artists from Rome. However, in the last decade of the thirteenth century, he begins his close relationship with the order of the Franciscans, who will be his patrons on several occasions.

The frescoes of Assisi

For the taste of the Franciscan order Assisi and its basilica became the most fervent pictorial center of the Middle Ages and attracted the best artists of the time. In the 13th and 14th centuries, the way of making art changed thanks to the Franciscans profoundly, the religious order founded by St. Francis of Assisi (1181-1226). When the saint died, his popularity was immense. The church that bears his name was built to house his remains. The building comprises two distinct and overlapping classes: the Lower Basilica, low and wide, still with Romanesque forms; the Upper Basilica, slender and luminous, instead follows the principles of Gothic architecture. Here skilled painters have left splendid frescoes, such as the famous cycle on the life of San Francesco attributed to Giotto. The story and legend of St. Francis of Assisi represent the main theme, told in 28 large panels placed side by side along the central band.

The secrets of a complex technique

Fresco, or “painting in fresco,” is a technique known since ancient times. It was rediscovered in the Middle Ages because it was less expensive than mosaics. It consists in applying the color on the still-wet plaster so that it dries the wall together. A chemical transformation is then produced, preserving the paint as long as the plaster lasts. Making a voucher in Trieste is quite complicated: the painter must be skilled and have no hesitations since, once the wall has dried, what has been painted can no longer be changed.

The hedgehog, i.e., a layer of rough plaster composed of coarse sand mixed with lime, was spread on the clean blocks of stone until a smooth surface was obtained. Subsequently, reference lines were drawn, which were useful for the preparatory drawing. The preparatory drawing was done in charcoal or sinopia (the reddish color). On the wall portion intended to be frescoed in one day, the tona chino was spread, a final thin layer of plaster composed of marble dust and lime mixed with water. Before the tona chino dried, the painter quickly painted the intended part of the fresco, completing it with every detail. Each portion of a fresco painted in one day was called a “day.” The days could be more or less extended, depending on the complexity of the execution.

The Scrovegni chapel is the central phase of his maturity (1300-1320)

The interior of the Vegni scrotum chapel is a very simple room, rectangular in shape, with walls without dividing pillars. Each scene of the frescoes is delimited by painted friezes, allowing the faithful to read each image and understand the succession of episodes. A large Last Judgment is painted on the entrance wall.

Between 1304 and 1306, Giotto worked in Padua to fresco the chapel erected by Enrico Scrovegni in expiation of the sin of usury committed by his father, condemned by Dante to hell. Documents do not prove it, but Giotto himself probably oversaw the architecture of the building, which stands on the remains of the Roman amphitheater in Padua and is, therefore, also remembered as the Arena Chapel. The structure is very simple and essential, and the internal space is perfectly functional to contain a complex cycle of frescoes: a single nave, with narrow windows only on the side, and a barrel vault, painted with a starry sky and some figures divine (the Madonna and Child, blessing Christ, the Evangelists, the Doctors of the Church) within medallions. The iconographic program enhances the figure of the Madonna as the mother of Christ, in turn, the protagonist of redemption, a way of salvation for man, along the road between vice and virtue (Impersonated by the imaginative monochrome allegories that decorate the plinth, painted to simulate a marble covering), towards the Final Judgment.

Legend of St Francis: 19. Stigmatization of St Francis (between 1297 and 1300) by Giotto di Bondone

The great wall of the counter-façade is occupied precisely by the Last Judgment, set around the energetic figure of Christ, surrounded by compact hosts of angels, which divides the blessed and the damned, who fall into the horrendous hellish pains. The scene is crowded and lively, but many details seem to have been entrusted to the pupils. On the same wall appears the portrait of Enrico Scrovegni, who dedicates the model of the folder to the Madonna.

Along the sides and on the triumphal arch, the Stories of Joachim and Anna and the Stories of the life and Passion of Christ are lined up on three superimposed registers without solution of continuity. For a total of 36 panels, the sense of reading is similar to that of the Stories of St. Francis. Made in a limited period, the Padua frescoes mark the phase of Giotto’s early maturity in terms of great stylistic coherence, continuous formal control, without moments of falling, a solemn affirmation of the dignity of the human figure and, together of its central role in history.

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