Word: giotto
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...youth, Henri Matisse was enthralled by Giotto's religious frescoes in the Arena Chapel at Padua. But not until last year, at 78, did Matisse himself turn to religious art; then he began work on the little Dominican chapel that he had planned for the town of Vence, in the hills back of Nice. When he has finished, the result may be a 20th Century rival to Giotto's 14th Century work at Padua...
...that double-edged dictum, Spanish Philosopher José Ortega y Gasset cuts the ground from under the moderns and anti-moderns alike. Writing with gloomy detachment in the current Partisan Review, Ortega traces the evolution of painting from Giotto to Picasso, describes it as "a unique and simple action with a beginning...
...Giotto, says Ortega, was "a painter of solid and independent bodies." Three centuries later, Velasquez emphasized "hollow space"-the area between the eye and the thing seen. In recording only a dazzle of colored lights, the impressionists brought painting smack up to the retina. Picasso carried the same process a step further, painting what was back of the eyeball, inside his head. "[In the Picasso school] the eyes, instead of absorbing things, are converted into projectors of private flora and fauna. Before, the real world drained off into them; now, they are reservoirs of irreality...
...make a new start, Rivera went to Italy, studied the murals of Giotto, Uccello and Andrea del Castagno...
...long on his feet, he will be unable to paint the pictures on the walls directly, plans to do them on tile which will afterward be baked and placed in position. He hopes that the painting will have the same sort of impact that he himself once received from Giotto's frescoes at Padua...