Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 6.djvu/643

 GIOTTO

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GIOTTO

develop fully a single great idea. It is truly a living organism, at once pictorial and theological, such as is met with later in the Spanish Chapel, on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and in the Camera della Segnatura. This introduction of allegory, on an elevated and magnificent scale, is his new master-concept. His work is henceforth dominated by an attempt to bring out the moral meaning and by unity of purpose. The historical clement, of course, still held the place of honour; it had not varied for centuries, had been the same since the mosaics of Sant' Apollinare Nuovo at Ravenna and Santa Maria Maggiore at Rome. Giotto, indeed, continued to use the earlier concep- tions, but could not fail to imbue with his own wonderful realism the traditional treatment of these sacred scenes. There is, perhaps, no pictorial type more striking than Giotto's Judas in the scene of the kiss. Circumstances here forced the art- ist's genius into a new path. Since his imagination had not in these sacred scenes the freest play, he turned to the perfection of artistic style; conse- quently the Padua frescoes are a new phase in his real- ization of the beautiful. In the mind of Giotto life now appears as conditioned by art. This preoccupa- tion with the artistic presentation of things is striking at Padua from the earlier scenes, those depicting the story of St. Joachim and the marriage of the Blessed Virgin, where there are charming pastorals rarely equalled, such as "Joachim among the shepherds", the "Meeting at the Golden Gate". One scene in jiarticular, the marriage cortege of the Blessed Virgin, is introduced merely that the artist may develop a beautiful plastic theme, a frieze of white-veiled girls, quite like the procession of Greek maidens in the Panathena;an festivals. Ghiberti mentions other paintings made by Giotto for the Friars Minor at Padua. However, the most perfect examples of the master's maturer skill are his frescoes at Assisi, be- tween 11510 and 1320, in the lower church of the famous liasilica of St. Francis. He began in the right transept with the addition of two miracles of the saint as a kind of appendix or supplement to the "Life" wiiich he had painted twenty years earlier in the upper church. Facing these he painted nine frescoes of the Holy Childhood, a replica of the Padua frescoes but superior for delicacy and charm. In his quality of historian Giotto never rose above this work, the most exquisite of all his narrative frescoes. His crowning work, however, in this period, was the decoration of the roof-groining over the high altar. In it he sets forth the "Triumph of St. Francis", together with the triumphs of the virtues which were the foundation of the order: poverty, chastity, obedience. This is the earliest example of those trionfi which from the Carapo Santo at Pisa to Mantegna and Titian are a favourite theme of Italian art. It is moreover the earliest masterpiece of monumental art. The earlier " Psychomachia " of the poet Prudentius, so often treated by French sculptors and outlined by Giotto himself in the aforesaid tiny allegories of the Capella deir Arena, takes on here a larger development. We seem to hear, as it were, an orchestration of incom- parably greater variety and significance. The inti- mate meaning of life and thought, the power of plastic art, and the genius of beautiful symbols; the majesty of harmonious order, the beauty of the types, personi- fications, and per-sons; the wondrous blending of fact and fancy; the perfect preservation of the original colours, all combine to make this magnificently planned ensemble one of the immortal works of paint- ing. It seems to breathe the puissant moral ideas of the Middle Ages, while one of its lovely figures, the well-known Lady Poverty, suggests from afar all the mystic and quaintly modern poetry of Botticelli's "Prima vera".

The closing years of Giotto's life (1320-27) were spent at Florence. His work at this period in the

church of Santa Maria del Carmine and the palace of the Podesta, where he painted an allegory of Good Government (a theme of Ambrogio Lorenzetti at Siena in 1337), has almost entirely perished. Of all his work in the Bardi and Peruzzi chapels in the Fran- ciscan church of Santa Croce there survive but some remnants. The Bardi chapel contains in six scenes a new life of St. Francis, besides four figures of the greater Franciscan saints: St. Clare, St. Elizabeth, St. Louis IX, King of France, and St. Louis of Tou- louse. (St. Louis of Toulouse was canonized in 1317; the decoration of the chapel must, therefore, be of later date.) The Peruzzi chapel contains six scenes from the lives of St. Paul and St. John the Evangelist. These frescoes were whitewashed over in the eight- eenth century, were discovered in 1S40, and have suf- fered much in the course of restoration. In this final evolution of his art, Giotto, now a master and sure of his own powers, seems to lean towards the abstract in the treatment of his subjects. He appears to subordi- nate all to the rhythm of the composition. An almost excessive desire for balance and symmetry gives to these later works an aspect of stiffness, somewhat the impression of bas-reliefs. They seem somewhat cold and academic. And yet they reveal incomparable beauty and figures of genuine sculpturesque perfec- tion. In the " Resurrection of St. Paul " the group of the Disciples leaning over the empty sepulchre, though two centuries earlier than Raphael, is almost the same as the group of young geometricians in the latter's "School of .\thens".

There is no evidence that Giotto ever visited Fer- rara, Ravenna, or any of the other places where fres- coes are attributed to him. King Robert of Anjou induced him to visit Naples in 1330, and he remained there three years, but left no trace of his influence on the local school. As for the pretended journey to Avignon and his death there, it is well known to be a fiction. Siraone di Martino is the true author of the admirable frescoes in the papal palace at Avignon. In his later years Giotto, recognized as chief among Italian artists, was more or less capomaestro or Master of the Works for all public constructions in Florence. We are told that he aided in designing the Porta San Gio- vanni of the Baptistery, the work of Andrea Pisano (1330). It is certain that he drew the plans for the Campanile in 1334. Perhaps the designs for the fifty- eight bas-reliefs by Andrea are partly his, recalling as they do in more than one particular the " Virtues and Vices" at Padua. There are very few of Giotto's panels, properly so-called. One large "Madonna di Maesta" in the Accademia at Florence is interesting when compared with that of Duccio. A triptych of the "Life of St. Peter" painted in 1298 for Cardinal Stefaneschi is preserved in the sacristy of the canons at St. Peter's. Finally, his "St. Francis receiving the Stigmata", at the Louvre, is a youthful r^sum^ of the noble frescoes at Assisi.

No painter ever made such an impression on his age as Giotto. All fourteenth-century art betrays his in- fluence. No school was ever so nmnerous nor so homogeneous as the Gioiteschi. Taddeo and Agnolo Gaddi, Orcagna, Spinello, and others, it is true, are weak enough imitators of their master. Indeed, out- side of Florence there is no originality save at Siena where Simone di Martino and the Lorenzetti worked, and later at Padua in the days of Jacopo Avanzo and Altichieri. The triumph of Giotto, and the thorough manner in which his successors imitated him, proved how fully he embodied the national genius. In paint- ing he invented that dolce stil nuovo, that vulgnre elo- qii-ium which Dante created in the realm of poetry. He is truly the founder of the art of painting in Italy.

He was not handsome, says Petrarch, who was his friend, as was also Dante, whose portrait he so often painted. Nor must it be imagined that this great painter of St. Francis was either a mystic or an ascetic.