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Item No: 25338
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| Keywords: Madonna, Child, Woman, Boy, Christ, Jesus, Jesus, Christ, Virgin, Mary, Virgin, Mary, Renaissance, Italian, Figures, Mary, Jesus, Religion, Christian, Icon, Altarpiecemasters, Networking, Northwest, Feng, Shui, Itspan, Masters, Italian, Renaissance, |
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Giotto di Bondone (Ca. 1267-1337)
Giotto di Bondone, the father of modern painting and one of the greatest figures in the history of Western art, was born in a small hamlet in the valley of the Mugello, twenty miles north of Florence. According to legend, he was apprenticed to Cimabue who discovered the boy's genius accidentally on a road where he saw Giotto drawing with a sharp stone on a flat rock.
By 1312 Giotto was a member of the Florentine Guild of doctors and apothecaries to which painters belonged. Between 1329 and 1332, he worked for the King of Naples and in 1334, he was appointed chief architect for the Cathedral of Florence, which he helped design and for which he created several statues. We know that he worked at various times in Rome, Milan, Padua, Assisi, Ravenna, Rimini, and other cities in Italy and in France. He died in Florence in January 1337 and was buried in the cathedral with great civic honours and at the expense of the city.
Giotto signed his name to only three of his paintings. His most famous attributed works are the Arena Chapel frescoes (1305-10) in Padua, the Bardi and Peruzzi Chapel frescoes in Santa Croce in Florence, and the magnificent Ognissanti Madonna for the Church of All Saints. The twenty-eight frescoes based on the life of St. Francis, located in the Upper Church of the Franciscans at Assisi, are accepted as Giotto's by some art historians and denied by others. The controversy, which has now raged for a century and a half, fills volumes and has yet to be resolved.
Giotto was concerned with the problem of presenting human figures and their actions realistically on a flat surface. Before Giotto, artists had followed the flat forms of the Byzantine tradition and disregarded what they saw around them. Giotto studied both nature and the human body and he placed his human figures in free although shallow space. It is to the credit of his contemporaries, artists and laymen alike, that his genius was recognized and accepted immediately. It was not until seventy-five years later that Masaccio took the next step forward, inventing scientific perspective. |
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