Word: giottos
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...freedom with him--was the 20-ft.-wide mural he did for Peggy Guggenheim. He painted it in one outpouring rush, in a day and a night. Mural isn't by any means an abstract painting. It retains the essence of subject matter shared by most "classical" murals, from Giotto to Matisse--the projection of human figures on a large plane surface. But the movement isn't suave. The figures are arabesques, coiling, jammed together, recognizable as figures because of their verticality but lacking most identifiable signs of the human body. They seem to repeat one another, but in fact...
Pasolini's insatiable appetite for art, literature, music, film and theory led him to devour the work of Giotto, Verdi, Genet, Marx and Rossellini without discrimination, absorbing their genius and using it as inspiration for his own paintings, poems, novels, and, finally, films. His volatile artistic energy took off in every direction...
...were approaching Florence, the city of Michelangelo, of Giotto, of Raphael. The Uffizi, a Florence art gallery, had been bombed the month before and we were somewhat apprehensive...
...Piombo, were shredded by flying glass. No doubt the terrorists, whoever they were -- and Italian authorities seem to be in little doubt that the beleaguered Mafia set the bomb -- would have much preferred to have taken out Botticelli's Birth of Venus, Michelangelo's Doni Tondo and perhaps a Giotto or two. But as an image of unrepentant terrorist power striking back against the Italian state, the bombing of the Uffizi could hardly have been improved upon. Florentine tourism may plummet. No Italian museum or church, however great or venerated, can be considered safe from this new breed of butchers...
...learned about this tension and its anxieties from Cezanne. But there has never been a great figurative artist who did not feel and exemplify it. It can be as poignant in Giotto or even in Poussin as it is in Cezanne or Matisse. For Matisse it was of prime importance, whereas in abstract art it tends to fall away, because one end of the cord is no longer anchored in the world and its objects. This is not an argument against abstraction, but it helps explain why, in those abstract paintings that derive from Matisse, one so rarely feels...