GIOTTO DI BONDONE . Florentine painter, was born about 1266[1].According to one the many stories about him reported by
Giorgio Vasari and his predecessors, he was discovered by Giovanni Cimbaue drawing a sheep on a rock while he was still a boy, and was enlisted by Cimbaue as an apprentice. Of his early training and work nothing is known, but his ultimate and complete break with the Tuscan Byzantine style of painting is obvious.
The earliest document mention of Giotto is in 1298, when there is a record of payment received for his work on the now completely transformed Navicella mosaic done for old St. Peter´s in Rome. It is probable that Giotto´s earliest work is to be found in some of the scenes from the life of St. Francis in the Upper Church at Assisi, perhaps finished in time for the jubilee year of 1300; tough badly repainted, and reject as the work of Giotto by many recent stylistic critics, these scenes are not easily explained away as the work of later unknown painters. Giotto´s mature style is first evident in the decoration of the Arena chapel of Padua (1305-1306). This remarkable treasure house of “trecento” painting ha a simple barrel-vaulted interior, decorated with a last judgment on the end wall and with scenes from the lives of Christ and the virgin set in tiers on the sides. The measured treatment of the human theme in these paintings, combined with the total effect of self-contained aesthetic unity that they convey, give them a unique importance in the history of fresco decoration.
Among Giotto´s many other recorder and not improbable works in fresco, the only ones surviving are most of the scenes in the Magdalen Chapel
in the Lower Church of St. Francis in Assisi, and decoration of the Bardi and Peruzzi chapel in Santa Croce works, rediscovered during the last century beneath a coat of plaster and badly restored, present scenes from the life of St. Francis, with compositions derived and improved from their counterparts at Assisi, and scenes from the lives of the Baptist and St. John the Evangelist, done, if one may judge from what remains, in the more static and perfunctory style of Giotto´s final period. Of his tempera altarpieces, the only one surviving intact is the impressive “Madonna Enthroned with Angels” in the Uffizi. Here, as in many of Giotto´s other works, the fragile Gothic bric-a-brac contrast somewhat strangely with the serenely ponderous central figures.
According to current anecdotes and apparent fact, Giotto was a practical man of the world with six children and a sense of humor. In his later years he enjoyed many honors; in 1330 he was made a member of the royal household of King Robert of Naples, and in 1334, not long before his death, he receive a final testimony to his contemporary preeminence in his appointment as architect of the Duomo in Florence. The foundation for the campanile of the cathedral, popularly known as Giotto´s Tower, was laid in that year; but so far as we can now tell, his designs for the ultimate structure were rudimentary. Giotto died in Florence on Jan., 1337.
In the history of Florentine painting, and of much European painter after him, Giotto once for all emphasized the importance of impressive and nobly humanized forms well arranged in sufficient space. Evolving under the influences of the Roman Schools and Giovanni Pisano, he set the theme which the more naturalistic painters of the quattrocento were to elaborate and for a century had a predominant influence on Italian art.[2]
Watch:
GIOTTO, THE EPIPHANY ,
GIOTTO,THE CRUCIFIXION (RIMINI) ,
Giotto – Ognissanti Madonna (Madonna in Maestà) ,
GIOTTO, SAINT STEPHEN,
Giotto,Stigmatization of St Francis
[1] Probably in Colle di Vespignano, near the Mugello Valley.
[2] NICHOLSON Alfred. Collier´s Encyclopedia. U.S.A. 1963.
