LIVING MOMENTS IN TIME

The records on Giotto are much more complete than Duccio. He was a practical man who madea great deal of money and managed his affairs well. He owned land and lent money at interest like any good prosperous Florentine, but there is no indication that he was anything but an honest man as well as a successful one. The fact that he was a Florentine may account for the high esteem in which he was held, for it was Florence that would discover the artist as a man of  God given talents and freedoms. Thus, Giotto might be considered the first Renaissance artist. Dante had already written, in Canto XI of ”Purgatorio”: ” In painting Cimabue thought to hold the field; now hath Giotto all the cry, so that the other’s fame is less extoll’d.”

Giotto. Lamentation

Cimabue is the link between conventional Byzantism and Giotto’s drastic revolution, and Giotto has been called, without the best basis in the world, Cimabue’s pupil. The Arena Chapel remains his unquestioned and unviolated masterwork, and it is difficult to believe that any lost works by Cimabue or by other artists could give more than the faintest hints of precedents. Cimabue seems unimportant in comparison to the individual genius of Giotto.

Giotto’s Arena Chapel frescoes do not appear to be given justice as individual reproduced pieces to be studies in isolation. Photography and reduction in size are said to produce a heaviness of outline that flattens the roundness of the figures making the full volumes tend towards mere bulkiness. Evidently, the soft powdery surface of the frescoes, the impression of pearliness is lacking under, or lacking all aura, in mechanical reproduction. There is a progression of the story as it follows from section to section; each incident conceived in its own appropriate emotional air as part of a unit as in a symphonic musical composition.
”Bryson examined the Kiss of Judas by Giotto in the Arena Chapel in Padua, c. 1305, and the Kiss of Judas by Duccio in the Maestra Altarpiece, 1308-1311. He believes Giotto created fa more convincing realism, which he explains through his form of Semiotics. Giotto provides much information beyond Judas kissing Christ. Bryson found information in the profiles of Christ and Judas. In a Formal examination of the line, the edges of Christ’s forehead and nose are straight, which suggest associations with “right” and “rectitude.” Christ is higher up than Judas, with a strong and expansive neck. Judas’s head is tilted so that his neck is hidden below his garment. These are signs as to the moral superiority of Christ, who looks down on Judas and is more open, honest, and self-assured.”

Giotto. Arena Chapel. Padua

Giotto’s ”Lamentation”  in an ultimate expression whose power is felt even when the painting is reproduced in isolation as a print. The figures are remarkable for their fullness and soldity, qualities that are set off by the band of angels who, fading into the diaphanous sky, swirl and flutterin an agony of grief like frantic birds. The barren landscape holds a single tree, leafless; what can grow and flourish in the face of such tragedy?

Symbolically however, the tree is a happier prophecy. Dante describes a Tree of Knowledge, withered through the sin of Adam and Eve, but revivified by the death of Christ, the sacrificial atonement for original sin, and the restorer of life. Yet, the literary reminder may be incidental to the impact of the painting, an impact that would be great even if it were divorced from the Christian story. The composition of ”Lamentation” seems clear, but very complex with regard to the unifying elements of Duccio which are strictly delineated by line. In Lamentation, the mourning figures occuy, singly, their own space and, together, define a hollow in which the body of Christ and his mother are embraced. The only disrupting note schematically, would be the haloes, which tend to intrude on the modeled forms and by necessity and tradition, be worn like so many golden platters by saints who otherwise are conceived as human beings suffering human grief.

Duccio. Kiss of Judas

Outside the Christian context, Lamentation is simply a great work of art, whose figures suggest comparison with sculpture; full and solid and in obeyance with the laws of gravity while emphasizing the rational. From this point of departure, Giotto added the human and psychological.  The figures, one by one, and as an entity, tell a story of gresat passion, irrespective of ones faith. Giotto was the beginning of a universalized expression of emotion that each could share. Like any great tragic composition, whether written or painted, Lamentation invites vicarious participation that purifies through pity, if not through terror.

Giotto’s revolution was an articulation, a recognition, of the capacity for grandeur in human emotion. He is usually called the first Renaissance artist, because in humanizing the Christian story, he opened a tradition of reference to nature. He is also a great artist in the classical tradition, which ennobles people in their physical being, as a vessel of the intellect and the spirit.  His art is beyond time and space; Giotto’s art is universal.

Giotto. Betrayal of Christ