Medieval World
Giotto di Bondone (1267–1337)
Italian Proto-Renaissance painter.
Giotto di Bondone (c. 1267–1337) is the painter later ages credited with reopening the road to nature. Working in Florence and Padua at the turn of the fourteenth century, he broke the flat, pattern-bound conventions of the Italo-Byzantine 'Greek manner' and gave painted figures weight, volume, and above all feeling. His people stand on the ground, cast the sense of real bodies beneath their robes, and grieve, embrace, and flinch like human beings.
His masterpiece is the fresco cycle of the Scrovegni (Arena) Chapel in Padua, painted around 1305 for the banker Enrico Scrovegni. Across its walls the life of the Virgin and the Passion of Christ unfold as continuous human drama staged in believable space. In the Lamentation, mourners bend over the dead Christ while angels wheel overhead in raw anguish; in the Kiss of Judas, the whole composition converges on the terrible locked gaze between Christ and his betrayer.
Giotto's fame was immediate and enduring. Dante, his near-contemporary, named him in the Divina Commedia as the painter who had eclipsed Cimabue; Vasari, two centuries later, made him the hero who restored painting to the imitation of nature. Through the Florentine tradition he founded, his weighty, grave figures reach forward to Masaccio and Michelangelo — the young Michelangelo drew studies after Giotto's frescoes. He stands at the threshold of the Renaissance.
The words the record keeps using: grave, tender, weighty, human, dignified, compassionate.
At a glance
- Lived 1267–1337
- Origin Italian
- Worked in Florence, Padua
- Era Medieval World
- Movements Proto-Renaissance
- Mediums Fresco, Egg tempera on panel
- Techniques Buon fresco, Tempera hatching, Gold ground and assist
Works in the archive
- Lamentation (The Mourning of Christ), 1305 (Scrovegni (Arena) Chapel, Padua)
The dead Christ lies cradled by his mother while mourners press close and ten angels tumble through the sky in open grief. It is one of the most moving images of sorrow in Western art, and a demonstration that painting… - The Kiss of Judas (The Arrest of Christ), 1305 (Scrovegni (Arena) Chapel, Padua)
Amid a bristling crowd of torches and clubs, Judas swings his great yellow cloak around Christ to give the betraying kiss. The tumult of raised weapons frames a single still center: the two men face to face. - Ognissanti Madonna (Madonna in Maestà), 1310 (Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence)
The Virgin sits enthroned in majesty with the Christ child, surrounded by angels and saints, painted for the church of Ognissanti in Florence. Beside the older Byzantine-manner Maestàs now hung near it in the Uffizi,…
What was said
Credette Cimabue ne la pittura / tener lo campo, e ora ha Giotto il grido, / sì che la fama di colui è scura.
Vasari credited Giotto with restoring the art of painting to the good path, abandoning the crude Byzantine 'Greek manner' and returning to the direct imitation of nature.
In the Lamentation Giotto uses a diagonal rock ridge to steer the eye to Christ's face and places anonymous mourners with their backs to us in the foreground, giving the figures real bulk and drawing the viewer into the space of grief.
Lineage
Learned from Cimabue
Passed on to Michelangelo Buonarroti
What would Giotto make of your idea?
The Artiquity Studio makes a new picture in this hand's manner from a few words or a photograph — grounded in the technique, palette and subjects recorded above, and always credited "after Giotto di Bondone", never passed off as a found work. Open the Studio with Giotto · Keep a life moment the way Giotto would · Pictures made after Giotto