Word: giottos
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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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...
...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...
...theme is most explicitly stated in The Last Mohican, a wry and witty fable about a serious-minded student named Fidelman who goes to Italy to write a monograph on Giotto. He scarcely steps from his train in Rome before his personal Old Man of the Sea latches onto him: one Shimon Susskind, a slat-thin Jewish refugee from, of all places, Israel ("The desert air makes me constipated...
...shoe: he pops up in a trattoria to spoil Fidelman's appetite by hungrily watching him eat; he stands shivering at his side to shame Fidelman for having warm clothing. Given four dollars, Susskind contemptuously counts the money, demands: "If four, then why not five?" Giotto forgotten. Fidelman is systematically robbed and humiliated, but learns what wise men have known for centuries: that a man is responsible for the life he saves...
...Giotto's murals are still young, which means that they will probably live until they crumble. Whether or not Rivera's murals, too, will breathe life for generation after generation is unanswerable. An artist of Rivera's stature might be compared to a rocket that dies boosting a satellite in the form of art. Symbolically enough, his last completed picture was of a baby holding a Russian satellite. He was buried with much honor, but naturally no church rites, in Mexico's Rotunda of Illustrious Men. While Mexican Communists paraded the hammer and sickle. Fellow Painter...