Before Raphael was Michelangelo, and before Michelangelo was Leonardo, and before Leonardo was Botticelli, and before Botticelli was Giotto. Giotto di Bondone (c. 1267 – 1337) was a painter and architect from Florence during the Late Middle Ages, working before the great flourishing in the arts known as the Renaissance. The 16th century art historian, Giorgio Vasari (incidentally, the first man to use the term Renaissance in print), in his Lives of the Painters, credits Giotto with breaking tangibly away from the prevalent Byzantine style and initiating “the great art of painting as we know it today, introducing the technique of drawing accurately from life”.
His two great masterworks were the design of the campanile at Florence Cathedral, and the decoration of the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. A third may well be the famous frescoes in the Upper Basilica of Saint Francis in Assisi, though this is disputed: sadly, given the period, many features of his life are hard to substantiate.
Vasari tells some stories about Giotto that sound decidedly fanciful. According to him, Giotto was a shepherd boy, discovered by the great Florentine painter Cimabue drawing pictures of his sheep on a rock. They were so lifelike that Cimabue approached Giotto and asked if he could take him on as an apprentice. Another story recounts how Giotto drew a lifelike fly onto one of his master’s paintings and laughed when Cimabue tried several times to brush the fly off. Yet another tells how the Pope requested to see an example of his artistic skill and Giotto simply sent him a perfect circle he had drawn in freehand.
Fanciful stories aside, there’s no doubting the achievement of the Scrovegni Chapel frescoes. The subject matter is not unusual for church decoration in medieval Italy, being centred on the lives of the Virgin Mary and Christ, but the style for the day was sensational: solidly three-dimensional, with faces and gestures based on close observation, and the characters clothed in garments that hang naturally and have form and weight. The expansive use of ultramarine blue pigment is remarkably effective: when you look at the chapel as a whole, it seems awash with blue (albeit faded with time, sadly).
I’ll finish with another story that’s probably apocryphal (but who knows?). The great poet Dante visited Giotto while he was painting the Scrovegni Chapel and, seeing the artist’s children flitting around, asked (rudely) how a man who painted such beautiful pictures could have such plain children. Giotto, who, according to Vasari was always a wit, replied, “I make my pictures by day, and my babies by night”.
