The Art of Giotto

GIORGIO VASARI — 'LIVES OF THE PAINTERS'

The gratitude which the masters in painting owe to nature is due, in my judgment, to the Florentine painter Giotto, seeing that he alone—although born amidst incapable artists and at a time when all good methods in art had long been entombed beneath the ruins of war—yet, by the favor of Heaven, he, I say, alone succeeded in resuscitating Art, and restoring her to a path that may be called the true one.

JOHN C. VAN DYKE — 'HISTORY OF PAINTING'

It would seem that nothing but self-destruction could come to the struggling, praying, throat-cutting population that terrorized Italy during the medieval period. The people were ignorant, the rulers treacherous, the passions strong; and yet out of the Dark Ages came light. In the thirteenth century the light grew brighter. The spirit of learning showed itself in the founding of schools and universities. Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, reflecting respectively religion, classic learning, and the inclination toward nature, lived and gave indication of the trend of thought. Finally the arts—architecture, sculpture, painting—began to stir and take upon themselves new appearances.

In painting, though there were some portraits and allegorical scenes produced during the Gothic period, the chief theme was Bible story. The Church was the patron, and art was only the servant, as it had been from the beginning. It had not entirely escaped from symbolism. It was still the portrayal of things for what they meant rather than for what they looked. There was no such thing then as art for art's sake. It was art for religion's sake.

The demand for painting increased, and its subjects multiplied with the establishment at this time of the two powerful orders of Dominican and Franciscan monks. The first exacted from the painters more learned and instructive work; the second wished for the crucifixions, the martyrdoms, the dramatic deaths wherewith to move people by emotional appeal. In consequence painting produced many themes, but, as yet, only after the Byzantine style. The painter was more of a workman than an artist. The Church had more use for his fingers than for his creative ability. It was his business to transcribe what had gone before. This he did, but not without signs here and there of uneasiness and discontent with the pattern. There was an inclination toward something truer to nature, but as yet no great realization of it. The study of nature came in very slowly.

The advance of Italian art in the Gothic age was an advance through the development of the imposed Byzantine pattern. When people began to stir intellectually the artists found that the old Byzantine model did not look like nature. They began not by rejecting it but by improving it, giving it slight movements here and there, turning the head, throwing out a hand, or shifting the folds of drapery. The Eastern type was still seen in the long pathetic face, oblique eyes, green flesh-tints, stiff robes, thin fingers, and absence of feet; but the painters now began to modify and enliven it. More realistic Italian faces were introduced; architectural and landscape backgrounds encroached upon the Byzantine gold grounds; even portraiture was taken up. The painters were taking notes of natural appearances. No one painter began this movement. The whole artistic region of Italy was at that time ready for the advance.

Cimabue seems the most notable instance in early times of a Byzantine-educated painter who improved upon the traditions. He has been called the father of Italian painting; but Italian painting had no father. Cimabue was simply a man of more originality and ability than his contemporaries, and departed further from the art teachings of the time without decidedly opposing them. He retained the Byzantine pattern, but loosened the lines of drapery somewhat, turned the head to one side, and infused the figure with a little appearance of life.

Cimabue's pupil, Giotto, was a great improver on all his predecessors because he was a man of extraordinary genius. He would have been great in any time, and yet he was not great enough to throw off wholly the Byzantine traditions. He tried to do it. He studied nature in a general way, changed the type of face somewhat, and gave it expression and nobility. To the figure he gave more motion, dramatic gesture, life. The drapery was cast in broader, simpler masses with some regard for line, and the form and movement of the body were somewhat emphasized through it. In methods Giotto was more knowing, but not essentially different from his contemporaries; his subjects were from the common stock of religious story, but his imaginative force and invention were his own. Bound by the conventionalities of his time, he could still create a work of nobility and power. He came too early for the highest achievement. He had genius, feeling, fancy—almost everything except accurate knowledge of the laws of nature and of art. His art was the best of its time, but it was still lacking, nor did that of his immediate followers go much beyond it technically.

SYDNEY COLVIN — 'ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA'

Giotto, relatively to his age one of the greatest and most complete of artists, fills in the history of Italian painting a place analogous to that which seems to have been filled in the history of Greek painting by Polygnotus. That is to say, he lived at a time when the resources of his art were still in their infancy, but considering the limits of those resources his achievements were the highest possible. At the close of the Middle Age he laid the foundations upon which all the progress of the Renaissance was afterwards securely based. In the days of Giotto the knowledge possessed by painters of the human frame and its structure rested only upon general observation and not upon any minute, prolonged, or scientific study; while to facts other than those of humanity their observation had never been closely directed. Of linear perspective they possessed few ideas, and these elementary and empirical, and scarcely any ideas at all of aërial perspective or of the conduct of light and shade.

As far as painting could ever be carried under these conditions, so far it was carried by Giotto. In its choice of subjects his art is entirely subservient to the religious spirit of his age. Even in its mode of conceiving and arranging those subjects, it is in part still trammeled by the rules and consecrated traditions of the past. Thus it is as far from being a perfectly free as from being a perfectly accomplished form of art. Many of those truths of nature to which the painters of succeeding generations learned to give accurate and complete expression, Giotto was only able to express by way of imperfect symbol and suggestion. But in spite of these limitations and shortcomings, and although he had often to be content with expressing truths of space and form conventionally or inadequately, and truths of structure and action approximately, and truths of light and shadow not at all, yet among the elements over which he had control he maintained so just a balance that his work produces in the spectator less sense of imperfection than that of many later and more accomplished masters. He is one of the least one-sided of artists, and his art, it has been justly said, resumes and concentrates all the attainments of his time not less truly than all the attainments of the crowning age of Italian art are resumed and concentrated in Raphael.

In some particulars the painting of Giotto was never surpassed,—in the judicious division of the field and massing and scattering of groups, in the union of dignity in the types with appropriateness in the occupations of the personages, in strength and directness of intellectual grasp and dramatic motive, in the combination of perfect gravity with perfect frankness in conception, and of a noble severity in design with a great charm of harmony and purity in color. The earlier Byzantine and Roman workers in mosaic had bequeathed to him the high abstract qualities of their practice—their balance, their impressiveness, their grand instinct of decoration; but while they had compassed these qualities at an entire sacrifice of life and animation, it is the glory of Giotto to have been the first among his countrymen to breathe life into art, and to have quickened its stately rigidity with the fire of natural incident and emotion.

It was this conquest, this touch of the magician, this striking of the sympathetic notes of life and reality, that chiefly gave Giotto his immense reputation among his contemporaries, and made him the fit exponent of the vivid, penetrating, and practical genius of emancipated Florence. His is one of the few names in history which, having become great while its bearer lived, has sustained no loss of greatness through subsequent generations.

JOHN RUSKIN — 'GIOTTO AND HIS WORKS IN PADUA'

In the one principle of close imitation of nature lay Giotto's great strength and the entire secret of the revolution he effected. It was not by greater learning, nor by the discovery of new theories of art; not by greater taste, nor by "ideal" principles of selection that he became the head of the progressive schools of Italy. It was simply by being interested in what was going on around him, by substituting the gestures of living men for conventional attitudes, and portraits of living men for conventional faces, and incidents of every-day life for conventional circumstances, that he became great, and the master of the great.

JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS — 'RENAISSANCE IN ITALY'

The tale told about Giotto's first essay in drawing might be chosen as a parable: he was not found beneath a church roof tracing a mosaic, but on the open mountain, trying to draw the portrait of the living thing committed to his care. What, therefore, Giotto gave to art was, before all things else, vitality. His Madonnas are no longer symbols of a certain phase of pious awe, but pictures of maternal love. The Bride of God suckles her divine infant with a smile, watches him playing with a bird, or stretches out her arms to take him when he turns crying from the hands of the circumcising priest. By choosing incidents like these from real home life, Giotto, through his painting, humanized the mysteries of faith, and brought them close to common feeling. Nor was the change less in his method than his motives. Before his day painting had been without composition, without charm of color, without suggestion of movement or the play of living energy. He first knew how to distribute figures in the given space with perfect balance, and how to mass them together in animated groups agreeable to the eye. He caught varied and transient shades of emotion, and expressed them by the posture of the body and the play of feature. The hues of morning and of evening served him. Of all painters he was most successful in preserving the clearness and the light of pure, well-tempered colors. His power of telling a story by gesture and action is unique in its peculiar simplicity. There are no ornaments or accessories in his pictures. The whole force of the artist has been concentrated on rendering the image of the life conceived by him. Relying on his knowledge of human nature, and seeking only to make his subject intelligible, no painter is more unaffectedly pathetic, more unconsciously majestic. While under the influence of his genius we are sincerely glad that the requisite science for clever imitation of landscape and architectural backgrounds was not forthcoming in his age. Art had to go through a toilsome period of geometrical and anatomical pedantry before it could venture, in the frescos of Michelangelo and Raphael, to return with greater wealth of knowledge on a higher level to the divine simplicity of its childhood in Giotto.

In the drawing of the figure Giotto was surpassed by many meaner artists of the fifteenth century. Nor had he that quality of genius which selects a high type of beauty and is scrupulous to shun the commonplace. The faces of even his most sacred personages are often almost vulgar. In his choice of models for saints and apostles we already trace the Florentine instinct for contemporary portraiture. Yet, though his knowledge of anatomy was defective and his taste was realistic, Giotto solved the great problem of figurative art far better than more learned and fastidious painters. He never failed to make it manifest that what he meant to represent was living. Even to the non-existent he gave the semblance of reality. We cannot help believing in his angels leaning waist-deep from the blue sky, wringing their hands in agony above the Cross, pacing like deacons behind Christ when he washes the feet of his disciples, or sitting watchful and serene upon the empty sepulcher. He was, moreover, essentially a fresco-painter, working with rapid decision on a large scale, aiming at broad effects, and willing to sacrifice subtlety to clearness of expression.

The health of Giotto's whole nature and his robust good sense are every-where apparent in his solid, concrete, human work of art. There is no trace of mysticism, no ecstatic piety, nothing morbid or hysterical in his imagination. Imbuing whatever he handled with the force and freshness of actual existence, he approached the deep things of the Christian faith and the legend of St. Francis in the spirit of a man bent simply on realizing the objects of his belief as facts. His allegories of 'Poverty,' 'Chastity,' and 'Obedience,' at Assisi, are as beautiful and powerfully felt as they are carefully constructed. Yet they conceal no abstruse spiritual meaning, but are plainly painted "for the poor laity of love to read." The artist-poet who colored the virginal form of Poverty, with the briars beneath her feet and the roses blooming round her forehead, proved by his well-known canzone that he was free from monastic Quixotism and took a practical view of the value of worldly wealth. His homely humor saved him from the exaltation and the childishness that formed the weakness of the Franciscan revival. Giotto in truth possessed a share of that power which belonged to the Greek sculptors. He embodied myths in physical forms adequate to their intellectual meaning.

E. H. AND E. W. BLASHFIELD — 'ITALIAN CITIES'

When we ask, where did Giotto get the wonderful power of expression that he shows in his work? we reply, a little from masters and a great deal from himself; but if we are asked, how did he learn to make a wall effective by color and patterns? we must answer that he worked upon traditional lines, that some of his immediate forerunners were nearly as effective as he, and that some of his remote forerunners were more effective.

When we say enthusiastically of Giotto, "There was a decorator for you! There was a muralist far more purely decorative than some later and even greater men!" we are thinking, not of the superiority of his drawing and composition, but of the simple flatness of his masses, free from any elaborate modeling, the lightness and purity of his color, the excellence of his silhouette and his pattern. But the essentially decorative qualities did not belong especially to Giotto; they belonged to the history and development of mural painting, to the Greeks, the Romans, the Byzantines, who had learned—centuries before St. Francis, centuries even before the Master whom Francis served, came into the world—had learned, we say, that dimly lighted interiors require flat, pure colors with little modeling.

Now nearly all the interiors of the ancient world were dimly lighted; the medieval Italian churches with their narrow lancet windows of low toned jewel-like glass were as dark as any of the antique buildings, so that the use of flat masses of pure color, the planning of an agreeable disposition of spots and of a handsome silhouette to these spots, became the canons of medieval painting. These early artists had mastered thoroughly the great controlling principle of decoration, the principle of the harmony of the painting with the surrounding architecture. Because the fourteenth century had not gone beyond this fortunate simplicity to the complexity of the fifteenth, and because it had attained to a science of draughtsmanship unknown to the thirteenth century and earlier times, we call the fourteenth century the golden age of the mural painter. The layman not infrequently supposes that this condition of things obtained because Giotto deliberately eschewed elaborate modeling, and said to mural painting, "Thus far and no farther shalt thou go!" In eight cases out of ten this misconception comes because the layman has been reading Ruskin; in the other two cases, because he has been reading Rio or Lord Lindsay. In reality, Giotto said nothing of the sort; he was a great artist, he saw and felt with simplicity and dignity; doubtless he would, under any circumstances, have modeled with restraint, but if he had known how to do so he would have put more modeling in his figures than he did.

Fifty years ago John Ruskin made Giotto the fashion. The connoisseurs of the seventeenth century, the men whose fathers had perhaps seen Raphael, had surely seen the Urbinate's great rival, made small account of the earlier painters; to them the Giotteschi were barbarous, rubbish. With Ruskin, however, the great son of Bondone took his place upon a throne. He sat there rightfully by virtue of the greatest talent which was given to any painter between Masaccio and the last great Greek or Roman artist of imperial days; but his ministrant swung the censer before him with such misplaced enthusiasm that the face of the great Tuscan was clouded for half a century, until modern criticism dared to say nay to the poet of the 'Stones of Venice' and the 'Modern Painters.' Ruskin never admired anything that was unworthy, though he often fiercely contemned the worthy. He saw and praised Giotto's simplicity of treatment, but how strangely he praised, how utterly he misunderstood the artist's aim and insisted upon bringing back to the marksman game that was no spoil of his! Ruskin mistook timidity for reverence, and ascribed to the painter as a deliberate choice that which was in reality forced upon him by inexperience.

The reasoning which Ruskin, Rio, and others of their school followed is peculiar. We will take as an example a fresco in which heavily draped figures stand before a city gate upon greensward. In the said greensward every little blade and leaf is made out; there is no effect; you and I with our modern ideas would not like it at all. The critic, on the contrary, is enraptured. He cries, "Only see, Giotto has painted every leaf; he felt that everything that God made should be lovingly and carefully studied!" The draperies, on the contrary, are rather broadly and simply handled, and the author implies that it is because the artist knew that the stuffs, which were only artificial, not natural, were unworthy the careful study he had given the leaves. Such criticism as this utterly misled a portion of the English reading world for at least thirty years. The right treatment by the painter was wrongly praised by the writer. Giotto was lauded especially for leaving out that which he was incapable of putting in; his figures are but little modeled, and this slight modeling happens to be admirably suited to the kind of decoration which he was doing, but it was slight because he did not know how to carry it further. When he painted a Madonna on a panel to be seen and examined at close quarters that which was a virtue in his decoration became a fault in his easel-picture. Take the grass and draperies just mentioned; Giotto had not yet learned to paint drapery realistically, but he had the sentiment of noble composition, and he arranged his folds simply and grandly and painted them as well as he knew how, pushing them as far as he could. When he came to the grass, he found it much easier to draw a lot of little hard blades and leaves than to generalize them into an effect. He did not know how to generalize complicated detail. The drapery was one piece, and he could arrange it in a few folds, but the blades of grass were all there, and he thought he must draw every one. Ruskin, and Rio, and Lord Lindsay, all regard this incapacity as a special virtue based upon a spiritual interpretation of the relative importance of things in nature and art. They account as truth in Giotto what was really the reverse of truth. In looking at such a scene as that represented in the fresco no human being could see every blade of grass separately defined. A general effect of mass would be truth, and Giotto would have grasped it if he could have done so, but he was not yet a master of generalization.

A whole class of writers upon Christian art is like the prior in Browning's poem, who says to Fra Lippo Lippi:—

"Your business is to paint the souls of men. "Give us no more of body than shows soul;"

but these writers, while appreciating the effect of certain qualities in Giotto and his followers, wholly misunderstood their intention. He did not leave his figures half modeled for the praise of God or for the sake of expressing soul. We might just as well say that it was for the sake of spiritual aspiration that his foreshortened feet stood on the points of their toes, or that his snub profiles were intended to suggest meekness....

It is an important fact in painting, especially in decorative painting, that in measure as an artist refines his work he may with advantage suppress one detail after another of its modeling. But this knowing what to leave out is one of the most subtle, one of the last kinds of knowledge that come to the painter. This system of elimination argues upon his part the possession of a high degree of technical accomplishment. When he can draw and paint every detail of his subject, then, and not till then, he can suppress judiciously. Great painters have thus instinctively commenced by making minutely detailed studies. Now, Giotto never made one such in his life; he did not know how. He was a beginner possessing magnificent natural gifts, still a beginner, a breaker of new paths. He drew and painted the human body exactly as well as he knew how to, leaving out elaborate modeling simply because he was unable to accomplish it. One lifetime would not have sufficed this pioneer of art for the achievement of all that he did and for the compassing of a skilful technique as well....

If we pass on to those qualities of a painter which were particular to Giotto, not merely as a muralist but as an individual man, we find that like other masters of his time he cannot yet subtly differentiate expression, but that, unlike others, his expression is more intense, more forceful, more varied. His heads have long narrow eyes, short snub noses, firm mouths, square jaws, and powerful chins; he divides them, not individually, but typically, into adolescent, adult, and aged heads. His feet are unsteady; his hands not yet understood; his draperies are for their time wonderful—simply, even grandly arranged, and if they do not express the body, at least they suggest it and echo its movements.

His animals, too small and often faulty enough, are sometimes excellent; and, like every other medieval artist, if he wanted to put in a sheep or a horse or a camel, he put it in without any misgivings as to knowledge of the subject. Neither did this architect entertain any scruples regarding architecture when he chose to paint it, and, like his fellows, he set Greek temple of Assisi, Romanesque convent, and Gothic church, all upon the same jackstraw-like legs,—that is to say, columns which made toys of all buildings, big or little. First and last and best, we see him as a miracle of compositional and dramatic capacity, and with this last quality he took his world by storm.

Men before him had tried to tell stories, but had told them hesitatingly, even uncouthly; Giotto spoke clearly and to the point. This shepherd boy, whose mountain pastures could be seen from her Campanile, taught grammar to the halting art of Florence. He taught the muse of the fourteenth century to wear the buskin, so that his followers, however confused their composition might be, were at least clear in the telling of their story. Indeed he was such a dramaturgist that men for a full hundred years forgot, in the fascination of the story told, to ask that the puppets should be any more shapely, that they should look one whit more like men and women.

HARRY QUILTER — 'GIOTTO'

The main characteristics of Giotto's style are, first, a lighter, purer tone of color than had been in use before the time of Cimabue, and a greater variety and purity of tint than had been attained by that master; second, the introduction into his compositions of a certain amount of natural detail which had been before totally neglected, and the substitution of the portraits of actual men and women for the imaginary beings that had formerly filled up the backgrounds of the Byzantine pictures; third, the power of illustrating the real meaning of his subject, not merely suggesting it as had formerly been the case; and fourth, his unrivaled dramatic power.

This dramatic power shows itself in almost every work that Giotto has left us, and even survives in the achievements of his pupils. His pictures are not scenes alone, they are situations. Besides their appropriateness of gesture and oneness of feeling, they possess the great characteristic of dramatic art in making the scene live before you, subduing its various incidents into one strain of meaning, yet keeping each incident complete and individual, as well as making it help the main purpose. A minor point in which the same quality shows is in the amount of emotion which this painter is capable of expressing by a single gesture—an amount so great that it occasionally runs some danger of lapsing into caricature, as is especially plain in such pictures as 'The Entombment' in the Arena Chapel. But in all his scenes Giotto has succeeded, not only in choosing the most appropriate figures for illustrating his meaning, but in seizing the very moment which is most significant.

But, after all, the main characteristic of Giotto's style is so intangible that it can only be felt, not described. This characteristic is the simple faith in which each of these compositions abounds; the feeling conveyed to the spectator that thus, and not otherwise, did the occurrence take place, and that the painter has not altered it a jot or tittle for his own purpose.