Giotto Di Bondones Style and Technique

Giotto Di Bondones Style and TechniqueBriefly lineation the characteristics of Giottos style and analyse the impact of his works on 14th-century Italian ArtGiotto was a Florentine catamount and architect who was recognized as an artistic genius and protagonist during the Italian Renaissance. For artist Giorgio Vasari the great biographer of Italian Renaissance artists the refreshing art had its birth with Giotto1. Giotto lived and worked at a judgment of conviction when society was exploring and testing the boundaries of medieval traditions and institutions. This is reflected in his religious subjects where the earthly, full-blooded cypher for which he was so famous was to spark the beginnings of artistic naturalism and humanism.For Vasari, Giottos work represents a period when painting woke from its long subjection to the Greeks. As Hale saysthe stiffness of the Byzantine style gave way to something like grace, figures began to sanctify shadows and to be foreshortened, their drapery revealed movement and their faces reflected feeling, fear, hope, anger or love. 2These characteristics be reflected in one of Giottos earliest works, bloody shame and child, where the child, although now lost, is affectionately clasping the Madonnas hand, with its other hand let outstretched to her face. The Madonnas eyeball meet those of the viewer with an elongated stare. Both of these qualities reflect Giottos impulse to put forward human sentiment and his interest in the communicating of feeling. Giotto withal experiments with form so that the straight alignment of the Madonnas features are juxtaposed against the shape of her gown which flows down and away from her face.Giotto is famous for his frescoes at Assisi where he perpetuated a new use of space and colour. For example, The Doctors of the Church sets portraits indoors areas framed by extravagantly decorative geometric, figurative, and floral motifs.3 In The Scenes from the feel of St. Francis the strong p ortrayal of animals, plants, flowers, pottery and rocks are integrated into the human scenarios so that the deuce become integral to one another. In St. Francis Giving his spread out to a Poor Knight the red of the knights apparel is seen on the back of the mule and in the buildings and landscapes of the background. This is suggestive of Giottos inclination to unify different elements of his paintings a theme which was to continue into the trends of the fourteenth century. then in his frescoes at Padua (1302-5) where he painted the lives of deliveryman and the Virgin in the private chapel of Enrico Scrovegni, Paduas richest citizen, his fusion between figures and space and his existence of them as a undivided coherent unit4 is taken to a new extreme. A section of The Last Judgement shows Enrico Scrovegni offering a model of the chapel to Mary, who stands beside a saint and an angel. The gift symbolises Enrico seeking regret for his fathers sin of usury.5 This arrangement re flects mans communication with God, and in turn the unification of the material and the unearthly. In The Last Judgement, where Christ sits surrounded by an aura, Giotto places figures at the centre of their world representing mankinds place at the centre of history and his unique individuality, which was to become a fundamental of the humanist vision during the fourteenth century.Fourteenth century Italian art was intrinsically linked to the political developments occurring during the time. Giotto was certainly one of the prototypic to assert a style based on observations of nature quite than the upholding of medieval traditions, and during a time when city states were becoming more than individual, and democracies were governed by guilds associations of merchants, bankers, artisans, and other professionals6 this form of artistic freedom was welcomed by those who had democratic or political influence. Giottos decorating of the family chapels of the wealthiest citizens of Fl orence and Padua suggests that art was seen as an ultimate aesthetic deputation of virtue and power. In S. Croce Giotto painted the life of St. Francis in the Bardi chapel and those of the two St. Johns in the Peruzzi chapel. The Bardi and Peruzzi were the two greatest banker families of Florence and court bankers of the kings of England and Naples, to the latter of whom Giotto was court painter between 1328-32.7 These were important developments for fourteenth century art as at Peruzzi Giotto incorporates portrait heads, presumably of the Peruzzi family. As Antal phrases itit was the wealthiest citizens of Florence who were the first to be represented, outside a fresco or religious painting, in almost wholly independent portraits, though still for the time being inside the same frame.8 by and by artwork was to completely separate portraits from religious paintings so that the individual could be represented as independent of, but still connected to, the spiritual realm.Fourteenth -century frescoes reveal that individualism was greatly esteemed in the Italian city-republics, and a developing trend for freedom of expression can be seen in Giottos pupils and successors such as Taddeo Gaddi. The lives of Christ, the Virgin and the Saints were the subjects of many important paintings and sculptures licenced at the time. However, although these subjects continue those used by Giotto, his style began to be vary by his pupils. His idea of a painting as a single unified whole was taken further by incorporating a great diversity of individual elements within that whole. As Antal explains itThe painters abandoned Giottos centripetal emphasis in order to obtain a fuller narrative the list of figures is greater, they are individualised and more vehement in their movements, more lusty or more charming sometimes landscape predominates, and the architecture is richer and more Gothic.9However, Giottos work was still to prove pivotal to the changes occurring during the fourteenth century. By mid-century, Italy saw a surge of artistic output which integrated new ideals into earlier modes of representation. Over time, figures became more naturalistic, and the linear and angular quality of change state on figures became softened. As mentioned above, Giottos volumetric figures of Madonna and of Christ express these qualities nearly a century earlier. These works were to influence major fourteenth century artists such as Michelangelo and Raphael. As seen in Madonna and Child Giotto experimented with the form of the figure and created a shadow effect, adding three dimensionality to the painting. This solution to creating the deception of solidity to his figures was genuine by the later artists who are famous for their keen eye for detail.With Giotto, the two dimensional world of thirteenth-century Italian painting was alter into an analogue for the real world.10 It was the simplicity of his style and his mastery of illusion which attract the audie nces of his time. As Bernard Berenson puts itWith the simplest means, with almost rudimentary light and vestige, and functional line, he contrives to render, out of all the possible outlines, out of all the possible variations of light and shade that a given figure may have, only those that we must assign for special attention when we are actually realizing it.11Giotto was to lay the foundations of a solution artistic movement in fourteenth century Italy. Later artists developed the simplicity of his use of line, form and three-dimensionality. His bold use of colour and opus was to precipitate a wealth of changes in the styles and tastes of fourteenth century Italian art, and his contributions to the history of aesthetics are perhaps some of the most ecumenical in history.BibliographyAntal, F., 1947, Florentine Painting and Its Social Background the Bourgeois land out front Cosimo De Medicis Advent to Power XIV and Early XV Centuries. capital of the United Kingdom K. PaulBenn ett, A., 1999, Giotto. London Dorling KindersleyBerenson, B., 1953, The Italian Painters of the Renaissance. Phaidon New YorkHale, J.R., 1954, England and the Italian Renaissance The branch of Interest in Its record and Art. London Faber and FaberOsmond, S.F., 1998, The Renaissance Mind reverberate in Art. military personnel and I, Vol. 13http//www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/iptg/hd_iptg.htm.Further ReadingHenderson, J., and Verdon, T., (eds), 1990, Christianity and the Renaissance attribute and Religious Imagination in the Quattrocento. Syracuse Syracuse University PressMartindale, A., 1969, The clear Paintings of Giotto. London Weidenfeld and Nicholson.Murray, L., and Murray, P., 1963, The Art of the Renaissance. New York PraegerFootnotes1 Osmond, S.F., 1998, The Renaissance Mind Mirrored in Art. World and I, Vol. 13. p.1.2 Hale, J.R., 1954, England and the Italian Renaissance The Growth of Interest in Its History and Art. London Faber and Faber, p.60.3 Bennett, A., 1999, Giott o. London Dorling Kindersley, p.25.4 Ibid, p.66.5 Ibid, p.71.6 Osmond, S.F., 1998, The Renaissance Mind Mirrored in Art. World and I, Vol. 13.7 Antal, F., 1947, Florentine Painting and Its Social Background the Bourgeois Republic before Cosimo De Medicis Advent to Power XIV and Early XV Centuries. London K. Paul, p.159.8 Ibid, p.159.9 Ibid, p.174.10 http//www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/iptg/hd_iptg.htm.11 Berenson, B., 1953, The Italian Painters of the Renaissance. Phaidon New York, p.44.