Giotto di Bonedone Essay

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Giotto di Bonedone was born in the Mugello Valley near Florence around 1247 to a local shepherd and his wife. A popularly believed tale is that the great painter Cimabue was traveling through the fields when he spotted a young Giotto sketching sheep. Immediately, Cimabue convinced the family to allow Giotto to become his apprentice in the city of Florence. Young Giotto was growing up in a bustling city of a changing world, where convention and tradition were breaking down as a new renaissance culture developed.
Cimabue was commissioned to paint the great cathedral in the basilica of Assisi, and so he took his apprentices with him. Many of the frescoes along the lower wall are believed to have been painted by Giotto. Several of these frescoes display the characteristics of Giotto’s style which he developed and practiced for much of his life. Giotto created the illusion of a three dimensional space with the use of shading and light. Space was a strong idea for Giotto, by using architecture and landscapes in the pieces, the subjects are given a sense of existing in a real space and the viewer is given the sense that they are looking through a window. This idea of space hinted at the development of ‘perspective’ in art. In this new revolutionary style of three dimensional painting, Giotto added movement, pose, gesture, and emotion to the subjects in his paintings which created the reality of human life and drama. Giotto used his art as a storyteller uses words. For the first time since ancient Rome, we see subjects turned away from us in a scene. Authors like Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Dante took notice of Giotto’s innovative ideas. “Boccaccio … described Giotto as having brought the art of painting out of the medieval darkness into daylight.” (p.439)

Throughout his life, Giotto traveled throughout Italy and parts of France adding his unique beauty to walls and panels for people such as popes, kings, and nobleman. The best preserved of these works is the Arena Chapel in Padua, Italy. “Padua was a natural center for a humanist revival, … individual intellect, character, and talent. Giotto, more than any other artist, transformed these qualities into painting.” (p.441) The Arena Chapel is presented to the viewer as a dramatic story is told on a stage. Symbolism is quite present in Giotto’s works. For instance, in The Crucifixion Giotto places Jesus’ friends and family to His right hand side and creates a flow from the Cross to the edge of the picture so that there is no space between Jesus and them. However, to Jesus’ left there is a gap between Him and his executioners. Also in the Arena Chapel is a Last Judgement fresco.  It is positioned at the end of the chapel, so that it is the last view before you leave. Within this fresco is a self-portrait of Giotto as a member of a crowd, as well as a portrait of the Chapel owner, Enrico Scrovegni, offering the chapel to the Mother Mary perhaps as an atonement for the family’s sin of Usury, which landed his father a significant place in Dante’s seventh circle of Hell.

            From the sheep fields of Mugello Valley, to places throughout Italy and France, Giotto revolutionized art as we know it today. By adding shading, lighting, and perspective, Giotto created three dimensional paintings in which his subjects displayed real human emotions and movements. The fourteenth century would see many artists with various styles commissioned by wealthy Italian and French aristocrats, creating a new International Gothic style of painting, but despite these new innovations, Giotto’s new stylistic development continued to be used -  art depicting real life within a three dimensional space. 

Find Giotto on Wikepedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giotto