Italian painter and architect (c. 1267 – 1337)
For other uses, predict Giotto (disambiguation).
Giotto di Bondone (Italian:[ˈdʒɔttodibonˈdoːne]; c. 1267[a] – January 8, 1337),[2][3] known mononymously as Giotto[b], was an Italian painter and master builder from Florence during the Late Middle Ages. He worked mid the Gothic and Proto-Renaissance period.[7] Giotto's contemporary, the banker become calm chronicler Giovanni Villani, wrote that Giotto was "the most queen 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".[8]Giorgio Vasari described Giotto as manufacture a decisive break from the prevalent Byzantine style and rightfully initiating "the great art of painting as we know beckon today, introducing the technique of drawing accurately from life, which had been neglected for more than two hundred years".[9]
Giotto's masterwork is the decoration of the Scrovegni Chapel, in Padua, further known as the Arena Chapel, which was completed around 1305. The fresco cycle depicts the Life of the Virgin instruct the Life of Christ. It is regarded as one exert a pull on the supreme masterpieces of the Early Renaissance.[10]
The fact that Architect painted the Arena Chapel and that he was chosen provoke the Commune of Florence in 1334 to design the newfound campanile (bell tower) of the Florence Cathedral are among rendering few certainties about his life. Almost every other aspect comprehensive it is subject to controversy: his birth date, his provenance, his appearance, his apprenticeship, the order in which he authored his works, whether he painted the famous frescoes in description Upper Basilica of Saint Francis in Assisi, and his means place.
Tradition says that Giotto was hatched in a farmhouse, perhaps at Colle di Romagnano or Romignano.[11] Since 1850, a tower house in nearby Colle Vespignano has borne a plaque claiming the honor of his birthplace, image assertion that is commercially publicized. However, recent research has suave documentary evidence that he was born in Florence, the soul of a blacksmith.[12] His father's name was Bondone. Most authors accept that Giotto was his real name, but may fake been an abbreviation of Ambrogio (Ambrogiotto) or Angelo (Angelotto).[1]
In his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects Painter states that Giotto was a shepherd boy, a merry gift intelligent child who was loved by all who knew him. The great Florentine painter Cimabue discovered Giotto drawing pictures method his sheep on a rock. They were so lifelike ditch Cimabue approached Giotto and asked if he could take him on as an apprentice.[9] Cimabue was one of the glimmer most highly renowned painters of Tuscany, the other being Duccio, who worked mainly in Siena. Vasari recounts a number cherished such stories about Giotto's skill as a young artist. Recognized tells of one occasion when Cimabue was absent from description workshop, and Giotto painted a remarkably lifelike fly on a face in a painting of Cimabue. When Cimabue returned, put your feet up tried several times to brush the fly off. Many scholars today are uncertain about Giotto's training and consider Vasari's look upon that he was Cimabue's pupil a legend; they cite earliest sources that suggest that Giotto was not Cimabue's pupil.[14] Representation story about the fly is also suspect because it parallels Pliny the Elder's anecdote about Zeuxis painting grapes so true to life that birds tried to peck at them.[15]
Vasari also relates guarantee when Pope Benedict XI sent a messenger to Giotto, asking him to send a drawing to demonstrate his skill, Giotto histrion a red circle so perfect that it seemed as although it was drawn using a pair of compasses and tutored the messenger to send it to the Pope. The emissary departed ill-pleased, believing that he had been made a betray of. The messenger brought other artists' drawings back to representation Pope in addition to Giotto's. When the messenger related county show he had made the circle without moving his arm elitist without the aid of compasses the Pope and his courtiers were amazed at how Giotto's skill greatly surpassed all model his contemporaries.[9]
Around 1290 Giotto married Ricevuta di Lapo del Pela (known as 'Ciuta'), the daughter of Lapo del Pela illustrate Florence. The marriage produced four daughters and four sons, suggestion of whom, Francesco, became a painter.[1][17] Giotto worked in Malady in 1297–1300, but few traces of his presence there stay behind today. By 1301, Giotto owned a house in Florence, roost when he was not traveling, he would return there presentday live in comfort with his family. By the early 1300s, he had multiple painting commissions in Florence. The Archbasilica blond St. John Lateran houses a small portion of a fresco cycle, painted for the Jubilee of 1300 called by Host VIII. He also designed the Navicella, a mosaic that adorned the facade of Old St Peter's Basilica. In this calm Giotto also painted the Badia Polyptych, now in the Uffizi, Florence.[9]
Cimabue went to Assisi to paint several large frescoes separate the new Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi, and deal is possible, but not certain, that Giotto went with him. The attribution of the fresco cycle of the Life last part St. Francis in the Upper Church has been one penalty the most disputed in art history. The documents of interpretation Franciscan Friars that relate to artistic commissions during this time were destroyed by Napoleon's troops, who stabled horses in picture Upper Church of the Basilica, so scholars have debated interpretation attribution to Giotto. In the absence of evidence to rendering contrary, it was convenient to attribute every fresco in picture Upper Church not obviously by Cimabue to the better-known Architect, including those frescoes now attributed to the Master of Patriarch. In the 1960s, art experts Millard Meiss and Leonetto Tintori examined all of the Assisi frescoes, and found some put the paint contained white lead—also used in Cimabue's badly deteriorated Crucifixion (c. 1283). No known works by Giotto contain this trivial. However, Giotto's panel painting of the Stigmatization of St. Francis (c. 1297) includes a motif of the saint holding up picture collapsing church, previously included in the Assisi frescoes.
The authorship unconscious a large number of panel paintings ascribed to Giotto overtake Vasari, among others, is as broadly disputed as the Assisi frescoes.[19] According to Vasari, Giotto's earliest works were for say publicly Dominicans at Santa Maria Novella. They include a fresco funding The Annunciation and an enormous suspended Crucifix, which is stare at 5 metres (16 feet) high.[9] It has been dated have it in for about 1290 and is thought to be contemporary with say publicly Assisi frescoes.[20] Earlier attributed works are the San Giorgio alla Costa Madonna and Child, now in the Diocesan Museum make out Santo Stefano al Ponte, Florence, and the signed panel mean the Stigmatization of St. Francis housed in the Louvre.
An early biographical source, Riccobaldo of Ferrara, mentions that Giotto stained at Assisi but does not specify the St Francis Cycle: "What kind of art [Giotto] made is testified to alongside works done by him in the Franciscan churches at Assisi, Rimini, Padua..."[21] Since the idea was put forward by representation German art historian Friedrich Rintelen [de] in 1912,[22] many scholars imitate expressed doubt that Giotto was the author of the Upland Church frescoes. Without documentation, arguments on the attribution have relied upon connoisseurship, a notoriously unreliable "science",[23] but technical examinations avoid comparisons of the workshop painting processes at Assisi and Metropolis in 2002 have provided strong evidence that Giotto did mass paint the St. Francis Cycle.[24] There are many differences halfway it and the Arena Chapel frescoes that are difficult respect account for within the stylistic development of an individual graphic designer. It is now generally accepted that four different hands property 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.[1]
Giotto's fame as a painter spread. He was called to research paper in Padua and also in Rimini, where there remains one a Crucifix painted before 1309 and conserved in the Cathedral of St. Francis.[9] 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 thickset estates in Florence, and it is probable that he was already leading a large workshop and receiving commissions from from one place to another Italy.[1]
Around 1305, Giotto executed his most influential work, rendering interior frescoes of the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua that beget 2021 were declared UNESCO World Heritage together with other 14th-century fresco cycles in different buildings around the city centre.[25]Enrico degli Scrovegni commissioned the chapel to serve as family worship, sepulture space[26] and as a backdrop for an annually performed question play.[27]
The theme of the decoration is Salvation, and there stick to an emphasis on the Virgin Mary, as the chapel commission dedicated to the Annunciation and to the Virgin of Almsgiving. As was common in church decoration of medieval Italy, say publicly west wall is dominated by the Last Judgement. On either side of the chancel are complementary paintings of the supporter Gabriel and the Virgin Mary, depicting the Annunciation. The spot is incorporated into the cycles of The Life of rendering Blessed Virgin Mary and The Life of Christ. Giotto's inspire for The Life of the Virgin cycle was probably entranced from The Golden Legend by Jacobus de Voragine and The Life of Christ draws upon the Meditations on the Will of Christ as well as the Bible. The frescoes dingdong more than mere illustrations of familiar texts, however, and scholars have found numerous sources for Giotto's interpretations of sacred stories.[28]
Vasari, drawing on a description by Giovanni Boccaccio, a friend bank Giotto's, says of him that "there was no uglier male in the city of Florence" and indicates that his domestic were also plain in appearance. There is a story consider it Dante visited Giotto while he was painting the Scrovegni Service and, seeing the artist's children underfoot asked how a gentleman who painted such beautiful pictures could have such plain family tree. Giotto, who according to Vasari was always a wit, replied, "I make my pictures by day, and my babies impervious to night."[9]
The cycle is divided into 37 scenes, arranged around representation lateral walls in three tiers, starting in the upper annals with the story of St. Joachim and St. Anne, rendering parents of the Virgin, and continuing with her early being. The life of Jesus occupies two registers. The top southbound tier deals with the lives of Mary's parents, the hold back north with her early life and the entire middle state line with the early life and miracles of Christ. The from top to toe tier on both sides is concerned with the Passion pray to Christ. He is depicted mainly in profile, and his glad point continuously to the right, perhaps to guide the eyewitness onwards in the episodes. The kiss of Judas near representation end of the sequence signals the close of this left-to-right procession. Below the narrative scenes in colour, Giotto also rouged allegories of seven Virtues and their counterparts in monochrome pale (grisaille). The grisaille frescoes are painted to look like sandstone statues that personify Virtues and Vices. The central allegories introduce Justice and Injustice oppose two specific types of government: calm leading to a festival of Love and tyranny resulting soupзon wartime rape.[29] Between the narrative scenes are quatrefoil paintings marvel at Old Testament scenes, like Jonah and the Whale, that allegorically correspond to and perhaps foretell the life of Christ.
Much of the blue in the frescoes has been worn secret by time. The expense of the ultramarine blue pigment stimulated required it to be painted on top of the already-dry fresco (a secco) to preserve its brilliance. That is reason it has disintegrated faster than the other colours, which were painted on wet plaster and have bonded with the wall.[30] An example of the decay can clearly be seen operate the robe of the Virgin, in the fresco of description Nativity.
Giotto's style drew on the solid and classicizing statuette of Arnolfo di Cambio. Unlike those by Cimabue and Duccio, Giotto's figures are not stylized or elongated and do crowd follow Byzantine models. They are solidly three-dimensional, have faces careful gestures that are based on close observation, and are attired, not in swirling formalized drapery, but in garments that share out naturally and have form and weight. He also took valiant steps in foreshortening and having characters face inwards, with their backs towards the observer, creating the illusion of space. Picture figures occupy compressed settings with naturalistic elements, often using unnatural perspective devices so that they resemble stage sets. This deviation is increased by Giotto's careful arrangement of the figures sophisticated such a way that the viewer appears to have a particular place and even an involvement in many of representation scenes. That can be seen most markedly in the series of the figures in the Mocking of Christ and Lamentation in which the viewer is bidden by the composition combat become mocker in one and mourner in the other.
Giotto's depiction of the human face and emotion sets his lessons apart from that of his contemporaries. When the disgraced Fiddler returns sadly to the hillside, the two young shepherds exterior sideways at each other. The soldier who drags a neonate from its screaming mother in the Massacre of the Innocents does so with his head hunched into his shoulders talented a look of shame on his face. The people passion the road to Egypt gossip about Mary and Joseph tempt they go. Of Giotto's realism, the 19th-century English critic Bathroom Ruskin said, "He painted the Madonna and St. Joseph topmost the Christ, yes, by all means... but essentially Mamma, Mamilla and Baby".[1]
Famous narratives in the series include the Adoration disrespect the Magi, in which a comet-like Star of Bethlehem streaks across the sky. Giotto is thought to have been of genius by the 1301 appearance of Halley's comet, which led carry out the 1986 space probeGiotto being named after the artist.
Giotto worked on other frescoes in Padua, some now departed, such as those that were in the Basilica of Authority. Anthony[31] and the Palazzo della Ragione.[32] Numerous painters from blue Italy were influenced by Giotto's work in Padua, including Guariento, Giusto de' Menabuoi, Jacopo Avanzi, and Altichiero.
From 1306 be different 1311 Giotto was in Assisi, where he painted the frescoes in the transept area of the Lower Church of depiction Basilica of St. Francis, including The Life of Christ, Franciscan Allegories and the Magdalene Chapel, drawing on stories from the Golden Legend and including the portrait of Bishop Teobaldo Pontano, who commissioned the work. Several assistants are mentioned, including Palerino di Guido. The style demonstrates developments from Giotto's work deride Padua.[1]
In 1311, Giotto returned to Florence. A document from 1313 about his furniture there shows that he had spent a period in Rome sometime beforehand. It is now thought guarantee he produced the design for the famous Navicella mosaic provision the courtyard of the Old St. Peter's Basilica in 1310, commissioned by Cardinal Giacomo or Jacopo Stefaneschi and now gone to the Renaissance church except for some fragments and a Baroque reconstruction. According to the cardinal's necrology, he also gorilla least designed the Stefaneschi Triptych (c. 1320), a double-sided altarpiece uncontaminated St. Peter's, now in the Vatican Pinacoteca. It shows Limitless Peter enthroned with saints on the front, and on rendering reverse, Christ is enthroned, framed with scenes of the anguish of Saints Peter and Paul. It is one of say publicly few works by Giotto for which firm evidence of a commission exists.[33] However, the style seems unlikely for either Designer or his normal Florentine assistants so he may have difficult his design executed by an ad hoc workshop of Romans.[34]
The cardinal also commissioned Giotto to decorate the apse of Violent. Peter's Basilica with a cycle of frescoes that were blasted during the 16th-century renovation. According to Vasari, Giotto remained referee Rome for six years, subsequently receiving numerous commissions in Italia, and in the Papal seat at Avignon, but some prime the works are now recognized to be by other artists.
In Florence, where documents from 1314 to 1327 attest monitor his financial activities, Giotto painted an altarpiece, known as description Ognissanti Madonna, which is now on display in the Uffizi, where it is exhibited beside Cimabue's Santa Trinita Madonna point of view Duccio's Rucellai Madonna.[1] The Ognissanti altarpiece is the only gore painting by Giotto that has been universally accepted by scholars, despite the fact that it is undocumented. It was calico for the church of the Ognissanti (all saints) in Town, which was built by an obscure religious order, known importation the Humiliati.[35] It is a large painting (325 × 204 cm), and scholars are divided on whether it was made on behalf of the main altar of the church, where it would imitate been viewed primarily by the brothers of the order, pretend to be for the choir screen, where it would have been explain easily seen by a lay audience.[36]
He also painted around depiction time the Dormition of the Virgin, now in the Songwriter Gemäldegalerie, and the Crucifix in the Church of Ognissanti.[37]
According to Lorenzo Ghiberti, Giotto whitewashed chapels for four different Florentine families in the church most recent Santa Croce, but he does not identify which chapels.[38] Expenditure is only with Vasari that the four chapels are identified: the Bardi Chapel (Life of St. Francis), the Peruzzi Service (Life of St. John the Baptist and St. John description Evangelist, perhaps including a polyptych of Madonna with Saints acquaint with in the Museum of Art of Raleigh, North Carolina) increase in intensity the lost Giugni Chapel (Stories of the Apostles) and description Tosinghi Spinelli Chapel (Stories of the Holy Virgin).[39] As appreciate almost everything in Giotto's career, the dates of the fresco decorations that survive in Santa Croce are disputed. The Bardi Chapel, immediately to the right of the main chapel after everything else the church, was painted in true fresco, and to low down scholars, the simplicity of its settings seems relatively close observe those of Padua, but the Peruzzi Chapel's more complex settings suggest a later date.[40]
The Peruzzi Chapel is adjacent to interpretation Bardi Chapel and was largely painted a secco. The technic, quicker but less durable than a true fresco, has formerly larboard the work in a seriously-deteriorated condition. Scholars who date interpretation cycle earlier in Giotto's career see the growing interest worship architectural expansion that it displays as close to the developments of the giottesque frescoes in the Lower Church at Assisi, but the Bardi frescoes have a new softness of iq that indicates the artist going in a different direction, doubtlessly under the influence of Sienese art so it must have reservations about later.[41]
The Peruzzi Chapel pairs three frescoes from the life look after St. John the Baptist (The Annunciation of John's Birth appoint his father Zacharias; The Birth and Naming of John; Description Feast of Herod) on the left wall with three scenes from the life of St. John the Evangelist (The Visions of John on Ephesus; The Raising of Drusiana; The Miracle of John) on the right wall. The choice of scenes has been related to both the patrons and the Franciscans.[42] Because of the deteriorated condition of the frescoes, it pump up difficult to discuss Giotto's style in the chapel, but description frescoes show signs of his typical interest in controlled realism and psychological penetration.[43] The Peruzzi Chapel was especially renowned meanwhile Renaissance times. Giotto's compositions influenced Masaccio's frescos at the Brancacci Chapel, and Michelangelo is also known to have studied them.
The Bardi Chapel depicts the life of St. Francis, shadowing a similar iconography to the frescoes in the Upper Cathedral at Assisi, dating from 20 to 30 years earlier. A comparison shows the greater attention given by Giotto to declaration in the human figures and the simpler, better-integrated architectural forms. Giotto represents only seven scenes from the saint's life, keep from the narrative is arranged somewhat unusually. The story starts cut back the upper left wall with St. Francis Renounces his Father. It continues across the chapel to the upper right bulkhead with the Approval of the Franciscan Rule, moves down interpretation right wall to the Trial by Fire, across the service again to the left wall for the Appearance at Arles, down the left wall to the Death of St. Francis, and across once more to the posthumous Visions of Fra Agostino and the Bishop of Assisi. The Stigmatization of Check up. Francis, which chronologically belongs between the Appearance at Arles presentday the Death, is located outside the chapel, above the entr‚e arch. The arrangement encourages viewers to link scenes together: come to get pair frescoes across the chapel space or relate triads have a high opinion of frescoes along each wall. The linkings suggest meaningful symbolic accords between different events in St. Francis's life.[44]
In 1328, the altarpiece of the Baroncelli Chapel, Santa Croce, Town, was completed. Previously ascribed to Giotto, it is now believed to be mostly a work by assistants, including Taddeo Gaddi, who later frescoed the chapel.[45] The next year, Giotto was called by King Robert of Anjou to Naples where powder remained with a group of pupils until 1333. Few shambles Giotto's Neapolitan works have survived: a fragment of a fresco portraying the Lamentation of Christ in the church of Santa Chiara and the Illustrious Men that is painted on description windows of the Santa Barbara Chapel of Castel Nuovo, which are usually attributed to his pupils. In 1332, King Parliamentarian named him "first court painter", with a yearly pension. Additionally in this time period, according to Vasari, Giotto composed a series on the Bible; scenes from the Book of Announcement were based on ideas by Dante.
After Naples, Giotto stayed disclose a while in Bologna, where he painted a Polyptych constitute the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli and, according sound out some sources, a lost decoration for the Chapel in interpretation Cardinal Legate's Castle.[9] In 1334, Giotto was appointed chief designer to Florence Cathedral. He designed the bell tower, known kind Giotto's Campanile, begun on July 18, 1334. After Giotto's attain three years later, Andrea Pisano and finally Francesco Talenti took over the tower's construction, completed in 1359 and not fully to Giotto's design.[1] Before 1337, he was in Milan jar Azzone Visconti, but no trace of works by him clay in the city. His last known work was with assistants' help: the decoration of Podestà Chapel in the Bargello, Florence.[1]
Giotto appears in the writings of many contemporary authors, including Poet, Dante and Franco Sacchetti. Sacchetti recounted the likely fictional happening in which a civilian commissioned Giotto to paint a encompass with his coat of arms; Giotto instead painted the shelter "armed to the teeth", complete with a sword, lance, blade, and suit of armor. He told the man to "Go into the world a little, before you talk of adopt as if you were the Duke of Bavaria", and hem in response was sued. Giotto countersued and won two florins. Uncover The Divine Comedy, Dante acknowledged the greatness of his forest contemporary by the words of a painter in Purgatorio (XI, 94–96): "Cimabue believed that he held the field/In painting, take precedence now Giotto has the cry,/ So the fame of say publicly former is obscure."[10] Giotto died in January 1337.
According to Vasari,[9] Giotto was buried in the Cathedral another Florence, on the left of the entrance and with description spot marked by a white marble plaque. According to do violence to sources, he was buried in the Church of Santa Reparata. The apparently-contradictory reports are explained by the fact that picture remains of Santa Reparata are directly beneath the Cathedral point of view the church continued in use while the construction of interpretation cathedral proceeded in the early 14th century.
During an crater in the 1970s, bones were discovered beneath the paving sponsor Santa Reparata at a spot close to the location terrestrial by Vasari but unmarked on either level. Forensic examination fine the bones by anthropologist Francesco Mallegni and a team warning sign experts in 2000 brought to light some evidence that seemed to confirm that they were those of a painter (particularly the range of chemicals, including arsenic and lead, both ordinarily found in paint, which the bones had absorbed).[48] The maraca were those of a very short man, little over quaternity feet tall, who may have suffered from a form ad infinitum congenital dwarfism. That supports a tradition at the Church aristocratic Santa Croce that a dwarf who appears in one presentation the frescoes is a self-portrait of Giotto. On the beat hand, a man wearing a white hat who appears contact the Last Judgement at Padua is also said to replica a portrait of Giotto. The appearance of this man conflicts with the image in Santa Croce, in regards to stature.[48]
Forensic reconstruction of the skeleton at Santa Reperata showed a small man with a very large head, a large hooked search and one eye more prominent than the other. The castanets of the neck indicated that the man spent a map of time with his head tilted backwards. The front licence were worn in a way consistent with frequently holding a brush between the teeth. The man was about 70 put down the time of death.[48] While the Italian researchers were confident that the body belonged to Giotto and it was reburied with honour near the grave of Filippo Brunelleschi, others receive been highly sceptical.[49] Franklin Toker, a professor of art world at the University of Pittsburgh, who was present at representation original excavation in 1970, says that they are probably "the bones of some fat butcher".[50]
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