Word: giotto
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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HENRY KOERNER, 44, is one of the nation's best living painters,*but he has long worked in the shadows of two masters, first Giotto and then Cézanne. His latest work still shows their influence, yet displays a new and surer synthesis that is unmistakably Koerner...
...second term would undertake a close examination of the stylistic metamorphoses of Western painting as reflected by a small number of works of the greatest masters from Giotto to the decline of the Baroque at the end of the seventeenth century. Here, the ways of looking at a painting as discussed in the first term would give depth to a historical study of art styles. The student at last would have a chance to emerge with a deep familiarity with a significant era in art history. What is far more important, the course will have made a thorough attempt...
Sadly enough, many of Giotto's paintings have been lost or mutilated. Some have been plastered over; others "improved" by latter-day restorers. But last week a few were being rediscovered in Florence. An inner wall of the Badia church had been chipped away to reveal traces of a Giotto Annunciation mentioned by Vasari. At the Santa Croce, centuries of overpainting have been successfully peeled away from Giotto's still astonishingly fresh depictions of the lives of Saint Francis of Assisi, John the Baptist and John the Apostle. On another wall, plaster was painstakingly peeled away to reveal...
...Giotto's masterpiece is the Life of Christ, with which he covered the little Arena Chapel at Padua. Of all his major works, it has been least tampered with. The Nativity, though patches have flaked away, retains something of its original hues, and the forms are all there still and all clear (see color). The animals, the dreaming Joseph, the rapt shepherds and the choiring angels together form a kind of halo around the central drama: a mother's first sight of her baby...
...flat, hieratic panels of his teacher, Cimabue, were more Byzantine than Italian, more like presentations of ideas than pictures of events. Giotto made the Madonna smile, for the first time, and weep as well. His Life of Christ is first of all the life of a man, born of woman and in the midst of humanity. The translucent humanness of Giotto's masterpiece reflects Christ's divinity like sunlight in a prism...