Writings
In a time of artistic change and reinvention, Giotto di Bondone entered the fifteenth century mythology of the genius artist. Stories of his discovery and training perpetuated by his contemporary writers praise to his fame, his innate genius of depiction and his natural talent, treated as a divine bestowal and power, all echo in the writings of Alighieri Dante, Cennino Cennini, Lorenzo Ghiberti and Giorgio Vasari. The image of this artistic individual maintains its construction with modern art historians placing these writings as the primary sources of the study of Giotto.
Giotto started life as “the son of a poor peasant farmer” (Vasari “Life…” 45). It is now believed that Giotto received some initial training as an artist before apprenticed to Cimabue. In the writings of Vasari “Giotto is depicted as an untrained boy “drawn instinctively to the art of design” (Vasari “Life…” 45). Cimabue’s discovery of Giotto is one of the mythological aspects erected around Giotto to magnify his innate genius. Writings maintaining that the untrained Giotto was discovered by the wayside drawing by the artist Cimabue are a prime example of the legend making by society to glorify certain individuals.
The phrasing of natural talent or naturally gifted is utilized in Ghiberti’s and Vasari’s writings on Giotto. Describing Giotto as a “pupil of Nature not of man” denies the influence and training given by his master, Cimabue (Vasari The Lives… 68). The concept that talent is not based on skill, training, and practice but a divine gift allows Vasari to denote Giotto’s changes to art as a result of “God’s favor” and not to the artistic education he received (Vasari “Life…” 45). Yet in contradiction to his previous statement on natural talent Vasari describes Giotto as “extremely studious” (Vasari “Life…”47). “By [Giotto’s] work he completely restored the art of design, of which his contemporaries knew little or nothing” about (Vasari “Life…”45). Artistic experimentation is a constant evolution of process and form. The discovery of a new mannerism is unlikely to be isolated to one artist. The utilization of said advancement can be attributed to the artist who can claim the earliest dated piece. For future generations this requires that the piece in question to survive time and decay.
The greatest significance of Giotto’s art seems to be his diversion from the path of contemporary stylistics. Giotto is attributed as abandoning the “crudeness of Byzantine” art forms and “Changing the profession of painting from Greek back into Latin” (Ghiberti 77/ Cennini 2). This references Giotto’s shift from the traditional Byzantine stylistics to that of a more natural based form- that form of the ancients, Romans. Giotto was the “discoverer of much learning that had been buried some six hundred years” (Ghiberti 77). In the writings of his day, Giotto is early on described as surpassing his master Cimabue (Dante canto XI lines 94-96). Cimabue attributed as a follower of Byzantine form, his pupil “laying the foundation of the proper method of design and color” (Vasari The Lives 68). After such blatant praising of one man, Giotto’s work is that of religious iconography.
Decorating chapel walls with frescos narrating the lives of saints and that of Christ and Mary were Giotto’s primary commissions. For the Bardi Chapel, Giotto depicted a narrative on the life of Saint Francis. The figures were “fully modeled…creat[ing] a sense of volume” (Paoletti 87). Giotto’s abilities to depict emotional relationships between figures and each figure’s realism added to his prestige among fifteenth century contemporaries. His figures “were so perfect that they brought Giotto tremendous fame” (Vasari “Life…” 47). It was the attention to detail that appears to have won Giotto his place in time.
The popularity of a single individual is based upon their community. Dante references Giotto in the Divine Comedy, in that his fame had over shadowed that of his master, Cimabue (Dante canto XI lines 94-96). The “admiration of Giotto’s artistic abilities” exceeded his own life time (Vasari “Life…” 50). The placing of monumental shifts in the field of art under the influence of Giotto simply builds upon his growing fame (Vasari “Life…”49). Such statements create Giotto into some supernatural essence of colossal artistic power over society. In the introduction of Craftsman’s Handbook, Cennini places Giotto seconded, after his recognition of God and before that of his own master. He states that the book is also “in the reverence of Giotto” (Cennini 1). Though after all this the true perspective of Giotto’s greatness can be added up in a poem by Angelo Politian from which Vasari quoted: “But I am Giotto; why recite these deeds? / My name alone is worth a long-drawn ode.” (Vasari “Life…” 50).
The influence of the art pieces by Giotto can be examined in the elements of composition infiltrated into the works of his contemporaries and future artists. The fantasy of his life, embodied in mythology remains connected to Giotto by those that wrote of him. The maintenance of his legendary life could only have survived in sources that have lasted the centuries of time. Though the greater the distance between the time of Giotto and the scholar, the greater these stories grow in importance. Like his fresco a seco, the details lose their integrity and have “flaked away” (Paoletti 88).
Works Cited
Cennini, Cennino. The Craftsman’s Handbook. Dover Publications: New York, 1954
Dante, Alighieri. The Divine Comedy. tras. C.H. Sisson. Carcanet New Press: Manchester, 1980
Ghiberti, Lorenzo. “Second Commentary”. Italian Art, 1400-1500: Sources and Documents. By Creighton E. Gilbert. Prentice-Hall: Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1980
Paoletti, John T. and Gary M. Radke. Art in Renaissance Italy: third edition. Pearson Education, Inc. Pearson Prentice Hall: Upper Saddle River, N.J.:2005
Vasari, Giorgio. “Life of Giotto”. Giotto in Perspective. By Laurie Schneider. Prentice-Hall: Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1974
Vasari, Giorgio. The Lives of Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. J.M. Dent: London; E.P. Dutton: New York, 1949