Word: giotto
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...jaded by the unnatural deconstructions of 20th century art cannot easily imagine the electric impact Giotto made by painting natural human figures that reached out of their frames to communicate directly with the observer. This was not simply a marvel in a superstitious age but also the artistic birth of the Renaissance. Giotto fathered a radical revolution of startling genius that set the course of Western art for the next 600 years...
Little is known of the life and development of Giotto di Bondone, born around 1267 to peasants in the bucolic valleys outside Florence. Legend says the country boy tending his flocks was discovered by the painter Cimabue, who saw him draw a fine sheep upon a rock. A more likely tale has him haunting Cimabue's Florentine bottega until the painter made him an apprentice. There Giotto absorbed his mentor's strength of drawing and sense of drama, but nature was his true teacher. He divined how to depict, with brush and pigment, the human body according to the prescription...
...Giotto painted his Bible stories and tales of saints across the cathedral walls of Italy. Yet we see his brilliance today in a bare handful of surviving documented works. The famous 28 scenes of St. Francis' life adorning the Upper Church in Assisi--to most of us the embodiment of his work--are of hotly disputed authorship. Yet many experts still believe no other known hand could have created the economical drama, narrative power and intense depiction of human emotion that mark the best of them...
...Giotto's genius is definitively preserved in Padua in a small chapel completely decorated in powerful renditions of the life of the Virgin Mary and the Passion of Christ. In each panel a few simple figures anchored in the foreground vividly act out the joy, grief, fear and pity of the Christian story. Giotto's gift lay in transforming the viewer into a participant: people felt as if they could touch holy figures Ruskin once called "Mama, Papa and the Baby...
...breaking through the stilted conventions of medieval art, bringing his neighbors into direct communion with the sacred, Giotto single-handedly elevated painting from the service of symbolism to the mirror of mankind...