Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 6.djvu/642

 GIOTTO

566

GIOTTO

peculiarities of topography, people, dress, and archi- tecture. This principle of actuahty and reaUty under- lay the artistic revolution initiated by Giotto. Since the days of the catacombs nothing so important had occurred in the history of painting.

The germ of all this was to be found in the very earliest portrait of St. Francis, e. g. that of the " Sagro Speco" at Subiaco and in those of the lower church at Assisi and the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, where the figure of the saint is inset between two rows of small panel-pictures descriptive of events in his life. To enlarge these vignettes into frescoes and thereby tell the story of Francis in heroic outlines was equivalent to equating the power of artistic expression and the new vastness of the pictorial framework; this prompted, in consequence, a background over- flowing, so to spo.ak, with contemporary life. This much tiiotto undertook to do, and his success was

famous mosaic that adorns the vestibule of St. Peter's, was done in collaboration with Cavallini; moreover, the original has long since disappeared beneath suc- cessive restorations. \ fourteenth-century copy may be seen in the Spanish Chapel at Florence.

The frescoes from the life of Christ, which Giotto executed for St. Peter's, were destroyed in the time of Nicholas V, when the choir of old St. Peter's was being remodelled. His Roman masterpieces, however, were the three frescoes ordered by Boniface VIII for the log- gia or balcony of the Lateran to commemorate the famous jubileee of 1300. They represented the bap- tism of Constantine, the erection of the Lateran Basil- ica, and the proclamation of the jubilee. The first and second have perished, and only a fragment of the third remains, inset in the eighteenth century in one of the great pillars of the basilica, where it is yet vis- iljle. The pope stands between two acolytes, in the

Boniface VIII Giotto, St. John Lateran, Rome

Giotto Camp.\nii.e of Giotto

Ancient painting, Santa Croce, Florence Florence

marvellous. One is astounded at the multitude of act of giving his blessing. The loss of this fresco la things he suddenly brings within the domain of somewhat compensated for by a seventeenth-century painting. Such an invasion of realism is not met sketch (in the Ambrosian Library at Milan) which with again till the seventeenth century, when Rubens restores the ensemble of the original scene. It was a gives us its counterpart in his life of Marie de' Medici, magnificent representation of an actual spectacle, a AH Italy is there; cities and their environs, the walls vast historical panorama of which the painter must of Arezzo, the temple of Minerva and the church of have been an eyewitness, an immense portrait gallery San Damiano at ,\ssisi, the facade of the Lateran, the showing the pope, the cardinals, the army, and the graceful interior of the Greccio church, the landscapes Roman people; all this on the occasion of a momen- of Alvernia and Subasio, rural scenes like St. Francis's tous event in the history of Christendom, sermon to the birds, domestic interiors as in the From Rome Giotto returned to Florence, perhaps in " Death of the Lord of C'elano", scenes from ecclesias- 1301, and painted the " Last Judgment" in the chapel tical life, e. g. chapter meetings and choir services, of the Podesta. This fresco is in a way a political Every type of existence is laid under tribute: monks, manifesto, being a kind of idealizeil grouping of all peasants, townfolk, burghers, popes, bishops, singers classes of Florentine society, somewhat after the man- by the roadside, men at drink, at feasts, and funerals, ner of Dante's great poem. Therein can be recognized No peculiarity of place, condition, costume, or person, Dante himself, Brunetto Latini, Corso Donati, Car- escapes the far-sweeping eye of the painter. He has dinal d'Acquasparta, and Charles of Valois. The put into his paintings every phase of life, and it isall " Life of Mary Magdalen ", which completed the chapel so genuine and accurate, so true to reality that in his decorations, is now so faded and discoloured as to be work, after five centuries, the Italian trecento still beyond recognition. In 1306, Giotto was called to lives for us, despite the deplorable state of the frescoes, Padua to paint the Capella dell' Arena, built by En- the defects of liis perspective, and the childlike archa- rico Scrovegni in expiation of the crimes of his father, ism of certain technical formulae. No painter has ever the famous usurer Reginaldo. On the lateral walls surpassed Giotto in this power of gathering details the artist treated in thirty-six frescoes scenes from from real life, and of surrounding the commonplace (he life of Christ and of the Blcssetl Virgin. Beneath with an artistic halo. Herein also lies the power of these scenes he placed fourteen small cameo figures, all literary creators of life, from Dante in his " Divina allegories of the vices and virtues; on the end wall Commedia" to Balzac in the "Com^die Humaine". above the scene of the Annunciation, he painted a The genius of Giotto was brought into further prom- "Last Judgment". With this work a new epoch opens inence by the works he executed at Rome, whither he in the career of Giotto. It is the first of those vast was called in 12i)S by Cardinal Stefancschi. It may complete series, or great decorative poems, conceived be noted at once that the "Navicella", i. e. the by him with systematic thoroughness, and meant to