Giotto

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Giotto di Bondone died on the 8th of January, 1337, and left behind a question that scholars have never fully resolved: who exactly was he? His banker contemporary Giovanni Villani called him "the most sovereign master of painting in his time" and praised his ability to draw figures "according to nature." Giorgio Vasari, writing later, went further, crediting Giotto with making a decisive break from the Byzantine style and initiating "the great art of painting as we know it today." Yet almost every fact about his life, from his birth date and birthplace to his apprenticeship and the order of his works, remains contested. The one thing no one disputes is the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, completed around 1305. That fresco cycle alone is regarded as one of the supreme masterpieces of the Early Renaissance. The painter who made it was chosen by Florence itself, in 1334, to design the city's new bell tower. How a man of such disputed origins became the defining figure of a new visual language is the story this documentary sets out to tell.

• 2. Origins and the Cimabue Legend

  ›

  Recent documentary research places Giotto's birth in Florence, the son of a blacksmith named Bondone, though a tower house in Colle Vespignano has carried a commemorative plaque claiming the honor since 1850. His given name may have been an abbreviation of Ambrogio or Angelo, shortened to Giotto in everyday use.

  Vasari's Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects supplies the most vivid account of his early years, though scholars are skeptical of almost every detail. In that telling, the great Florentine painter Cimabue discovered the boy drawing pictures of his sheep on a rock, so lifelike that Cimabue approached him and asked to take him as an apprentice. Cimabue was one of the two most renowned painters in Tuscany at the time; the other was Duccio, who worked mainly in Siena.

  Vasari adds a famous workshop prank: while Cimabue was absent, the young Giotto painted a fly so convincingly on a face in one of Cimabue's paintings that the master tried repeatedly to brush it away on returning. Many scholars note that this story is likely borrowed from Pliny the Elder's ancient tale about the painter Zeuxis, whose grapes deceived birds. Whether or not the apprenticeship itself was real, earlier sources suggest Giotto may never have been Cimabue's pupil at all.

  Another story Vasari preserves has Pope Benedict XI sending a messenger to Giotto, requesting a drawing to demonstrate his skill. Giotto drew a single red circle, freehand, so perfect it appeared made with compasses, and sent it back. The messenger left unimpressed, certain he had been mocked. When the Pope's courtiers learned the circle was drawn without moving the arm and without instruments, they were astonished. The story stuck because it captured something true about how Giotto was perceived: as a man whose control of line seemed to exceed what was humanly possible.

• 3. The Assisi Controversy

  ›

  Cimabue traveled to Assisi to paint large frescoes at the new Basilica of Saint Francis, and it is possible, though not certain, that Giotto went with him. What followed became one of the most disputed attribution questions in art history.

  The documents of the Franciscan Friars that might have settled the question of who painted what in the Upper Church were destroyed when Napoleon's troops stabled horses there, leaving scholars to argue on stylistic grounds alone. For a long time it was simply convenient to assign every fresco in the Upper Church not obviously by Cimabue to the more famous Giotto, including works 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 that some contained white lead, the same medium used in Cimabue's badly deteriorated Crucifixion of around 1283. No known authenticated works by Giotto use white lead. Technical examinations and comparisons of workshop painting processes at Assisi and Padua, carried out in 2002, provided strong evidence that Giotto did not paint the St. Francis Cycle. It is now generally accepted that four different hands are identifiable in those frescoes and that they came from Rome.

  A biographical source, Riccobaldo of Ferrara, does mention that Giotto painted at Assisi but does not specify the St. Francis Cycle, naming instead Franciscan churches at Assisi, Rimini, and Padua. A German art historian raised doubts about Giotto's authorship of the Upper Church frescoes as early as 1912. The irony, if the Roman painters rather than Giotto made the St. Francis Cycle, is that those same Roman painters' naturalism may have been an influence on Giotto's later work at Padua.

• 4. The Scrovegni Chapel

  ›

  Around 1305, Enrico degli Scrovegni commissioned Giotto to decorate the interior of a chapel in Padua, intended to serve as family worship, a burial space, and a backdrop for an annually performed mystery play. In 2021, the frescoes were declared a UNESCO World Heritage site, together with other fourteenth-century fresco cycles in buildings across the city center.

  The chapel is dedicated to the Annunciation and to the Virgin of Charity, and the organizing theme of the decoration is Salvation. The west wall, following common medieval practice, is dominated by the Last Judgement. On either side of the chancel, complementary paintings depict the angel Gabriel and the Virgin Mary in the Annunciation scene. Giotto drew on The Golden Legend by Jacobus de Voragine for the Life of the Virgin cycle, and on the Meditations on the Life of Christ as well as the Bible for the Life of Christ.

  The cycle is divided into 37 scenes arranged in three tiers on the lateral walls. The story of Joachim and Anne, the Virgin's parents, begins in the upper register and proceeds through her early life. Two registers cover the life of Jesus, with the Passion occupying the bottom tier on both sides. Christ is depicted mainly in profile, his eyes consistently pointing to the right, perhaps to guide the viewer through the episodes from left to right. The kiss of Judas near the end of the sequence signals the close of this procession.

  Below the narrative scenes, Giotto painted allegorical figures of the seven virtues and their counterparts in monochrome grey, rendered to look like marble statues. The central allegories of Justice and Injustice contrast two types of government: peace leading to a festival of love, and tyranny resulting in wartime rape. Quatrefoil paintings of Old Testament scenes, including Jonah and the Whale, are placed between the narrative panels to allegorically correspond to events in the life of Christ.

  Much of the ultramarine blue has worn away over time. Because the cost of that pigment required it to be applied after the plaster had dried, a secco rather than into wet plaster, it did not bond with the wall and has disintegrated faster than the other colors. The decay is most visible on the robe of the Virgin in the Nativity fresco. One of the most famous individual scenes is the Adoration of the Magi, in which a comet-like star streaks across the sky; Giotto is thought to have been inspired by the appearance of Halley's Comet in 1301, an observation that later led to the 1986 space probe being named after him.

• 5. A Revolutionary Visual Language

  ›

  Giotto's figures owe a debt to the solid, classicizing sculpture of Arnolfo di Cambio, and that sculptural quality sets them apart from everything that preceded them. Unlike the work of Cimabue and Duccio, Giotto's figures do not follow Byzantine models. They are solidly three-dimensional, clothed in garments that hang with natural weight rather than swirling in formalized patterns, and they carry faces and gestures rooted in close observation of actual people.

  He also pushed into compositional territory that earlier painters had avoided: foreshortened figures, characters who turn their backs to the viewer, and settings arranged with forced perspective so they resemble stage sets. The viewer is given a specific implied position in many scenes, even a sense of participation. In the Mocking of Christ, the composition invites the viewer to become one of the mockers. In the Lamentation, the same compositional logic draws the viewer in as a mourner.

  The emotional specificity of individual figures is particularly striking. When the disgraced Joachim returns sadly to the hillside, two young shepherds glance sideways at each other. The soldier who drags a baby from its screaming mother in the Massacre of the Innocents hunches his head into his shoulders, showing shame. The people on the road to Egypt gossip about Mary and Joseph as they travel. The nineteenth-century critic John Ruskin captured something essential when he wrote that Giotto "painted the Madonna and St. Joseph and the Christ, yes, by all means... but essentially Mamma, Papa and Baby."

  Giotto's influence on later painters was direct and traceable. Numerous painters from northern Italy, including Guariento, Giusto de' Menabuoi, Jacopo Avanzi, and Altichiero, were shaped by his work in Padua. At Santa Croce in Florence, his Peruzzi Chapel compositions influenced Masaccio's frescoes at the Brancacci Chapel, and Michelangelo is known to have studied them.

• 6. Rome, Naples, and Later Commissions

  ›

  Around 1310, Giotto produced the design for the Navicella mosaic for the courtyard of Old St. Peter's Basilica, commissioned by Cardinal Giacomo Stefaneschi. The original is lost to the Renaissance church except for fragments and a Baroque reconstruction. The cardinal also commissioned the Stefaneschi Triptych, a double-sided altarpiece of around 1320 now in the Vatican Pinacoteca, showing St. Peter enthroned with saints on the front and Christ enthroned with scenes of the martyrdom of Saints Peter and Paul on the reverse. It is one of the few Giotto commissions supported by firm documentary evidence, though the style has led some scholars to think the design may have been executed by an ad hoc workshop of Romans rather than Giotto and his usual Florentine assistants.

  In Florence, documents from 1314 to 1327 track Giotto's financial activities. The Ognissanti Madonna, now in the Uffizi, where it hangs beside Cimabue's Santa Trinita Madonna and Duccio's Rucellai Madonna, is the only panel painting by Giotto accepted universally by scholars despite lacking documentation. It measures 325 by 204 centimeters and was made for the Church of Ognissanti, built by a minor religious order known as the Humiliati.

  In 1329, King Robert of Anjou called Giotto to Naples, where he remained with a group of pupils until 1333. Few Neapolitan works have survived: a fragment portraying the Lamentation of Christ in the church of Santa Chiara, and the Illustrious Men painted on windows of the Santa Barbara Chapel of Castel Nuovo, generally attributed to his pupils. In 1332, King Robert named Giotto his first court painter and granted him a yearly pension.

  After Naples, Giotto painted a polyptych for the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli in Bologna. He then returned to Florence, where in 1334 the Commune appointed him chief architect to the Cathedral. He designed the bell tower, known as Giotto's Campanile, which was begun on the 18th of July, 1334. Giotto died three years later, before the tower was finished; Andrea Pisano and then Francesco Talenti completed it in 1359, not entirely to his original design.

• 7. The Search for His Bones

  ›

  Vasari wrote that Giotto was buried in the Cathedral of Florence, to the left of the entrance, beneath a white marble plaque. Other sources placed the grave in the Church of Santa Reparata. The contradiction resolves when one recalls that the remains of Santa Reparata lie directly beneath the Cathedral, and the older church continued in use while the Cathedral was being built in the early fourteenth century.

  During excavations in the 1970s, bones were found beneath the paving of Santa Reparata near the location Vasari described. In 2000, anthropologist Francesco Mallegni and a team of specialists conducted a forensic examination. The bones had absorbed arsenic and lead, both commonly found in paint, suggesting the man had worked closely with pigments for a long time. He stood a little over four feet tall and may have suffered from a form of congenital dwarfism. The front teeth showed wear consistent with frequently holding a brush between the teeth. The neck bones indicated a person who spent long periods with his head tilted backwards, as a fresco painter looking up at a ceiling would. He was around 70 at death.

  The findings appeared to support a tradition at Santa Croce that a dwarf depicted in one of the frescoes was a self-portrait of Giotto. Against this, a man in a white hat appearing in the Last Judgement at Padua is also identified by some as a portrait of Giotto, and his stature in that image conflicts with the short figure in Santa Croce. The Italian researchers were convinced enough that the bones were reburied with honor near the grave of Filippo Brunelleschi. Franklin Toker, a professor of art history at the University of Pittsburgh who was present at the 1970 excavation, offered his own verdict: they are probably, he said, "the bones of some fat butcher."