A fly that a Tuscan boy named Giotto may have painted, once, set the Italian Renaissance abuzz. It was so true to life, according to the art historical legend that trails Giotto to this day, that Cimabue, the master painter he was apprenticed to, believed it was an actual pest. “Returning to his work, he tried more than once to drive it away with his hand, thinking it was real,” wrote art historian Giorgio Vasari in his influential book, Lives ofthe Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550).
The fly may have looked convincing in this charming story, but the tale itself was probably a complete fiction, along with much else that Vasari wrote about early-14th-century painter Giotto di Bondone. The artist may or may not have been born near Florence in the village of Vespignano, and he probably wasn’t discovered by painter Cimabue while tending a flock of sheep and drawing on rocks. What does hold true, though, is that Giotto helped revive naturalism in painting, bringing empathy and humanity, along with piercing observation, to his figures and illustrations of biblical stories.
Giotto is hailed as the father of the Italian Renaissance, and his name is used to brand colorful markers for emerging (child-aged) artists to this day. He was fêted even in his lifetime. Humanist writer Giovanni Boccaccio, a contemporary of Giotto, wrote in his Decameron (1353) that “so faithful did he remain to nature . . . that whatever he depicted had the appearance, not of a reproduction, but of the thing itself.” Giotto’s reputation lived on, with sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti writing around 1450 that “Giotto saw in art what others did not put into it. He brought forth naturalistic art and gracefulness.”
When Giotto died in 1337 at around the age of 70 (his year of birth is unclear), he was given a ceremonious state funeral in Florence, the first time such an honor was bestowed upon an artist. In his lengthy career he worked across media and subjects, creating large mosaics, altarpieces, painted crucifixes, portraits, and frescoes. There still isn’t scholarly consensus about what works can be firmly attributed to him, although there is widespread agreement that he painted the Arena Chapel frescoes in Padua, the Bardi Chapel frescoes in Santa Croce, and the Ognissanti Madonna.
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Arena Chapel (c. 1305)
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons. Giotto’s name will forever be synonymous with his frescoes in the Arena Chapel in Padua (also known as the Scrovegni Chapel, named for its patron Enrico Scrovegni). In 36 scenes covering nearly the entire chapel interior—one of the first and most extensive fresco cycles of the early Renaissance—Giotto painted the life of Joachim and Anna (parents of the Virgin Mary), Mary’s youth, and Christ’s life from infancy to Resurrection, translating familiar biblical episodes into relatable human stories. The artist retold these stories at their peak moments of drama, abandoning the traditional treatments long sanctioned by the Church.
In the story of the betrayal of Christ, for example, in which Judas uses a kiss on the cheek to identify Christ to the soldiers who ultimately arrest him, other artists depicted the kiss itself. Giotto chose instead to paint the moment right after the kiss, as Judas and Christ look at each other knowingly—a drama highlighted by the dark halo of helmets worn by the encircling soldiers.
Throughout his Arena Chapel frescoes, Giotto pared details down to a minimum, often using landscape and architectural settings to focus the viewer’s attention. In one of the chapel’s best-known frescoes, Lamentation, Giotto used a diagonal slope of a rock wall to draw one’s gaze to a deceased Christ and mourning Mary. Above them, John the Baptist has flung his arms behind him in devastation, and 10 angels each assume a different pose of grief.
“Pictures formed by his brush follow nature’s outlines so closely,” wrote 14th-century Florentine chronicler Filippo Villani, “that they seem to the observer to live and breathe and even to perform certain movements and gestures so realistically that they appear to speak, weep, rejoice, and do other things.” Giotto included human elements that other artists may have deemed trivial or superfluous, showing, for instance, a baby Jesus sensing stranger danger and reaching out for his mother as he’s being held by Simeon the priest in The Presentation of Christ. Another such expression of human behavior can be seen in the background of The Entry into Jerusalem, where a man climbs a tree to get a better view of Christ riding into the holy city. Giotto visualized what the stories of the Bible would look like with a cast of real characters.
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Ognissanti Madonna (1300‒05)
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons. Collection Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy. Giotto is known mostly for his frescoes, but he also produced some panel paintings, of which only around a dozen survive. Most of these are attributed to his workshop, one exception being the Ognissanti Madonna, which is universally accepted as being by Giotto’s hand.
Larger than life-size at more than 10 feet high, this painting depicts the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus surrounded by angels and saints. It was commissioned for the Ognissanti Church in Florence, a convent church of the Humiliati religious order that manufactured and sold inexpensive wool for charitable purposes. (This may explain the Virgin’s plain and undyed clothes, unlike the sumptuous blue and red garments she is normally portrayed in).
This panel is often contrasted with the Santa Trinita Madonna painted 30 years earlier by Cimabue; the Ognissanti Madonna is more three-dimensional. Before Giotto, many artists painted drapery with chrysography, a stylized use of golden lines to stand in for folds. Giotto instead used color variations to create voluminous shadowing. His revolutionary realism extended beyond the Madonna to her detailed surroundings: the floorboards beneath the Madonna’s feet contain wood knots, and there are fossilized shells in the floor under the kneeling angels.
The Ognissanti Madonna was one of Giotto’s earliest Florentine works. Like the Arena Chapel, it demonstrates that even at this stage of his career he had already abandoned the more symbolic, representative style used by his predecessors in favor of relatable humanity, even for the holiest of figures.
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Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi (c. 1300)
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons. During Giotto’s lifetime, Francis was a beloved modern-day saint, canonized just two years after his death in 1226. The foundation for Francis’s burial church in Assisi was laid in 1230, and major artists such as Cimabue, Simone Martini, and Pietro Lorenzetti were asked to create works for it.
Depicting the story of Saint Francis’s life in 28 panels, the frescoes at the Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi are at the center of a long-standing attribution debate, despite being credited to Giotto in Renaissance-era texts by Ghiberti and Vasari (among others). Mostly non-Italian scholars have questioned whether the Assisi frescoes match Giotto’s style in the Arena Chapel, but given the lack of firm documentary information, opinions remain at a deadlock. Still, many scholars believe there are solid reasons to credit frescoes in Assisi to Giotto and his workshop (it’s just tricky to determine which ones).
One notable fresco, generally attributed to Giotto, is Francis Giving His Mantle to a Poor Man, in which the slopes of two mountains converge on Francis’s head, immediately pointing to him as the protagonist. Saint Francis offers his cloak to a less fortunate stranger. The artist depicts them at a moment when they both grasp the fabric at the same time, showing men of different social classes sharing the same station, in line with Franciscan values. In another fresco, Ecstasy of St. Francis, the saint speaks with Christ, and his body is notably separate from the buildings in the background (whose windows all seem to face him, like the friars to his left). Christ is separate from the earthly realm and framed entirely by celestial blue sky. Giotto likely composed the scene and painted the architecture on the left, with the rest done by assistants.
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Navicella (1310‒13)
Image Credit: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Christ’s apostles ride a boat sailing on stormy lake waters in Navicella “(little shipwreck”), a mosaic Giotto was commissioned to create for the atrium of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Now mostly lost except for a few original fragments of angels, with a Baroque copy gracing the entrance of the new St. Peter’s, Giotto’s version was a major mosaic—an art form revived around 1300.
Giotto’s composition showed the group weathering a storm together as Christ miraculously stands on the choppy waters and reaches out to save Peter, who has been thrown overboard. Like the angels in Giotto’s Lamentation, each of the apostles has a different expression, illustrating a broad swath of human emotion.
Navicella was praised by other artists and sought out by pilgrims to Rome in Giotto’s lifetime. It is also the only modern-era (or post-classical) artwork cited in architect Leon Battista Alberti’s groundbreaking treatise on the theory of painting, Della Pittura (1435), as an example of how artists could use physical gestures to stand in for the “motions of the soul.” Alberti referred specifically to Giotto’s apostles in the Navicella, writing how they are each “displaying the sign of an agitated soul in [their] face and entire body, so that in everyone the individual motions of the passions appear.”
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Bardi and Peruzzi chapels in Santa Croce, Florence (c. 1317‒28)
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons. After working in Italy in places such as Padua and Rome, between around 1315 and 1328 Giotto was based primarily in Florence. During this time prominent Florentine families such as the Bardis and Peruzzis (who were bankers to the pope) commissioned the famous painter to decorate their funerary chapels in a major Tuscan convent, the Franciscan church of Santa Croce in Florence. Among the many frescoes and altarpieces Giotto created in his hometown, his most extensive surviving works are the Bardi and Peruzzi chapel frescoes.
Ridolfo de’ Bardi’s funerary chapel includes panels from the life of Saint Francis, their images drawing on existing iconography for the popular saint yet infused by Giotto with greater emotion. In The Renunciation of Worldly Goods, for example, we see Francis renouncing his father and his wealth by removing his clothes. The fresco illustrating this event in Assisi shows a divide between Francis and his father, Pietro, emphasized by a void in the architecture. We see Pietro’s anger as he lunges toward his son with such force that he must be held back by an onlooker. Small boys at the edge of the scene throw rocks at Francis, mirroring Pietro’s rage. Using architecture again to emphasize the drama in the story, Giotto places Francis at the corner of a building, a visual symbol that he is at a turning point in his life.
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Florence campanile (bell tower) (worked on 1334‒37)
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons. After spending an extended period in Florence, in 1328 Giotto got a tempting offer to work for Robert of Anjou, the king of Naples. He accepted and moved to Naples for several years. Wanting this famed local artist to return home, Florentine civic officials found a way to lure him back in 1334 by offering him the position of capomaestro (“head of works”) for the Commune and Cathedral of Santa Reparata. The document about the appointment, dated April 1334, reads: “There is no one in the whole world more qualified in these and many other matters than Giotto di Bondone of Florence, painter, who should be welcomed as a great master in his native land and should be held dear in the said city.”
As part of his capomaestro duties, Giotto designed the red, white, and green marble campanile, or free-standing cathedral bell tower—the only known architectural project by the artist. Giotto’s campanile project came toward the end of the Gothic era, when wealthy and aristocratic families in Florence notoriously constructed private military towers as shows of strength and prestige. In 1250, to limit this phenomenon, the Florentine republic destroyed several towers; a later law from 1324 limited the height of the remaining towers to a maximum of 50 braccia (roughly 115 feet). Giotto’s campanile, in this context, was a symbol of popular Florentine power, and the fact that it was freestanding from the cathedral made it an independent symbol of civic pride. Giotto was chosen for this project not because of his (nonexistent) architectural qualifications, but because his fame made him the right Florentine for this patriotic commission.
Sadly, Giotto died just three years after becoming capomaestro, in January 1337. The campanile project passed to his pupil, Andrea Pisano, and later to Francesco Talenti. Giotto was buried in the Florence Cathedral next to where the campanile would ultimately stand, as a sign of the great respect his fellow Florentines had for him.