Giotto: The Most Excellent Painter - Part II
Dr. Rocky Ruggiero
Few artists in history have had an impact on their fields the way Giotto did in the 14th century.
Giorgio Vasari claimed “For after the many years during which the methods…of good painting had been buried…it was Giotto alone who…rescued and restored the art…” After nearly a millennium in which Byzantine-style pictorial forms dominated western art, Giotto, like his teacher Cimabue before him, turned to Nature as his guide. Giotto introduced convincing 3-dimesional settings, movement, drama, emotion, psychology and sculptural modeling to a world of painting that was by dominated by flat, abstract icons. Simply put, Giotto revolutionized painting. His innovations became the foundation of Western painting for centuries to come. The influence of Giotto can be seen in the works of artists such as Donatello, Masaccio, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Caravaggio, all the way up to Picasso, Rothko and Frank Stella. Giotto was, in the words of a 14th-century contemporary, the merchant Giovanni Villani, "the most sovereign master of painting in his time.”
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LECTURE 1 "Cimabue, Duccio and Giotto - Altarpieces for the Virgin Mary & Peter"
Giotto’s most celebrated altarpiece is the “Ognissanti Madonna” which once sat on the high altar of the Florentine church of the Ognissanti. Working against the Byzantine conventions of the day, Giotto was able to create an image of Mary enthroned that is both naturalistic and majestic. This lect...
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LECTURE 2 "Cimabue, Duccio and Giotto - Altarpieces for the Virgin Mary & St.
"Cimabue, Duccio and Giotto - Altarpieces for the Virgin Mary and St. Peter"
Around 1320, Giotto was called to Rome by Cardinal Giacomo Gaetani Stefaneschi to paint an altarpiece for the old Basilica of St. Peter. The painting, known as “The Stefaneschi Altarpiece” was located either on the high...
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LECTURE 3 "The Bardi Chapel"
Between 1317 and 1337, Giotto painted the walls of the two principal family chapels in the Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence. The Bardi Chapel contains six scenes from the “Life of St. Francis,” with a seventh scene – the most important of St. Francis’ life: “St. Francis Receiving the Stigmata”...
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LECTURE 4 "The Peruzzi Chapel"
The fresco cycle in the Peruzzi Chapel was either produced simultaneously with or shortly after the completion of the Bardi Chapel. Here Giotto painted scenes from the lives of St. John the Baptist and St. John the Evangelist, in honor of the chapel’s patron Giovanni Peruzzi. Executed in the “a s...
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LECTURE 5 "Giotto's Late Works and Architecture"
In the last decade of his life, while continuing his work in the Bardi and Peruzzi Chapels in Santa Croce, Giotto also executed the altarpiece of the Baroncelli Chapel in the same church. In 1329, he was called to Naples by King Robert of Anjou. Then in 1334, he was named capomaestro of the “Camp...
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LECTURE 6 "Giotto's Legacy"
Giotto’s immediate followers – Taddeo and Agnolo Gaddi, Bernardo Daddi, Giusto de’ Menabuoi, Guariento, Altichiero, Jacopo Avanzi – were to carry on his legacy for the rest of the 14th century, followed by Renaissance painters such as Masaccio and Fra Angelico into the 15th century and beyond. I...
