Word: giotto
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CHRIST walked the earth as a human being; yet for 13 centuries thereafter he was painted as a weightless, spiritual being, more in his divine aspect than in his human one. Then Giotto di Bondone, a Tuscan farmer's boy, broke the spell. He changed the course of art by proving that spirit and flesh, holiness and reality, could be pictured together as one image...
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...
...reigned nonetheless. Closest to his own heart is his proudest achievement, indeed the only one in which he is willing to acknowledge true pride, his remarkable and extensive library. He is reflected especially in the substance and fruit of his learning, his extraordinary collection of Italian painting ranging from Giotto to Bellini...