Giotto's Life & Painting

Those in Florence suggest that he was a successful property owner and well enough off to lend money to others. Those in Naples suggest that he was sufficiently personable to be accepted at the Angevin court there. Literary sources from the first half of the century suggest activity also at Rome, Avignon, Padua, Rimini, and Milan (Martindale, 1966, 5).

Many of the details of Giotto's life can only be inferred. Scholars look at the paintings he is known to have made at a middle stage in his life and extrapolate back to consider what he would have bene likely to have done ten years earlier. It is generally agreed today that Giotto must have been trained in some workshop based in the city of Rome, the most important center for wall painting in the late thirteenth century. On account mentions that there was work by Giotto in S. Francesco at Assisi about 1313, the same year as the mention of Giotto in the Purgatorio. This account unfortunately failed to mention which works in the church were Giotto's

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entieth century (Baccheschi, 1966, 9). Giotto's iconography is for the most part the time-honored language of Christian imagery, but in the legends of S. Francis, Giotto greatly enlarges his scope. Giotto in his style broke from the bonds of medieval tradition and introduced into painting a new feeling for nature and the human form. Giotto seems to have reacted against the apocalyptic grandeur of his teacher, Cimabue, and instead was attracted to more classical forms: In his narrative scenes from the Life of S. Francis and from Holy Script he rendered the human actors and their sparing gestures with dignity and restraint, creating a basic language to which Masaccio could turn a hundred years hence. . . He had come to liberate the art of painting from the Byzantine formula and ornateness and to recover its nakedness and truth (Godfrey, 1965, 14). Of all the work produced by Giotto, only two blocks of undisputed work survive. the first is the painting in the Arena Chapel at Padua, firmly authenticated and dated between 1303 and 1313. It also forms the pivotal point for all Giotto studies. the second set is in Sta Croce, Florence, a series of frescoes divided between the Peruzzi and Bardi chapels. The tradition of their auth
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