And now the artist, reflecting the new emphasis on personal ability or virtù, stood out from the guild or the group, and identified his product with his name. Niccolò Pisano had already freed sculpture from limitation to ecclesiastical motives, and subservience to architectural lines, by uniting a sturdy naturalism with the physical idealism of the Greeks. His pupil Andrea Pisano cast for the Florentine Baptistery (1300–6) two bronze halfdoors depicting in twenty-eight reliefs the development of the arts and sciences since Adam delved and Eve span; and these fourteenth-century works survive comparison with Ghiberti’s fifteenth-century “doors to Paradise” on the same building. In 1334 the Florentine Signory approved the designs of Giotto for a tower to bear the weight and scatter the chimes of the cathedral bells, and a decree was passed, in the spirit of the age, that “the campanile should be built so as to exceed in magnificence, height, and excellence of workmanship everything of the kind achieved of old by the Greeks and Romans when at the zenith of their greatness.”30 The loveliness of the tower lies not in its square and undistinguished form (which Giotto had wished to top with a spire), but in the Gothic traceried windows, and the reliefs, in colored marble, carved on the lower panels by Giotto, Andrea Pisano, and Luca della Robbia. After Giotto’s death the work was carried on by Pisano, Donatello, and Francesco Talenti, to whom the tower owes the culminating beauty of its highest arcade (1359).
Giotto di Bondone dominated the painting of the fourteenth century as Petrarch dominated its poetry; and the artist rivaled the poet in ubiquity. Painter, sculptor, architect, capitalist, man of the world, equally ready with artistic conceptions, practical devices, and humorous repartee, Giotto moved through life with the confidence of a Rubens, and spawned masterpieces in Florence, Rome, Assisi, Ferrara, Ravenna, Rimini, Faenza, Pisa, Lucca, Arezzo, Padua, Verona, Naples, Urbino, Milan. He seems never to have worried about obtaining commissions; and when he went to Naples it was as the palace guest of the king. He married and had ugly children, but this did not disturb the placid grace of his compositions, or the cheerful tenor of his life. He leased looms to artisans at twice the ordinary rental;31 however, he told the story of St. Francis, the apostle of poverty, in one of the outstanding works of the Renaissance.
He was still a youth when Cardinal Stefaneschi called him to Rome to design a mosaic—the celebrated Navicella, or Little Ship, showing Christ saving Peter from the waves; it survives, considerably altered, in the vestibule of St. Peter’s, inconspicuous above and behind the portico colonnade. It was probably the same Cardinal who commissioned the polyptych preserved in the Vatican. These products show an immature Giotto, vigorous in conception, weak in execution. Possibly a study of Pietro Cavallini’s mosaics in Santa Maria in Trastevere, and his fresco in Santa Cecilia, helped to form Giotto in those Roman years; while the naturalistic sculpture of Niccolò Pisano may have moved him to turn his eyes from the works of his predecessors to the actual features and feelings of living women and men. “Giotto appeared,” said Leonardo da Vinci, “and drew what he saw,”32 and the Byzantine petrifaction faded from Italian art.
Moving to Padua, Giotto painted in three years the famous frescoes of the Arena Chapel. Perhaps at Padua he met Dante; he may have known him in Florence; Vasari, always interesting and sometimes accurate, calls Dante the “close companion and friend” of Giotto,33 and ascribes to Giotto a portrait of Dante that formed part of a fresco in the Florentine Bargello or Palace of the Podesta. The poet, with exceptional amiability, celebrates the painter in The Divine Comedy.34
In 1318 two banking families, the Bardi and the Peruzzi, engaged Giotto to tell in frescoes the stories of St. Francis, St. John the Baptist, and St. John the Evangelist, in the chapels that they were dedicating in the church of Santa Croce in Florence. These paintings were whitewashed in later years; they were uncovered in 1853 and were repainted, so that only the drawing and the composition are Giotto’s. A like fate befell the celebrated frescoes in the double church of St. Francis at Assisi. That hilltop shrine is one of the major goals of pilgrimage in Italy, and those visitors who come to view the paintings attributed to Cimabue and Giotto seem as numerous as those who come to honor or solicit the saint. It was probably Giotto who planned the subjects and drew the outlines for the lower frescoes of the Upper Church; for the rest he seems to have confined himself to supervising the work of his pupils. These frescoes of the Upper Church narrate in detail the life of St. Francis; Christ Himself had rarely received so extensive a painted biography. They are masterly in their conception and composition, pleasant in their gentle mood and flowing harmony; they end once and for all the hieratic stiffness of Byzantine forms; but they lack depth and force and individuality, they are graceful tableaux without the color of passion or the blood of life. The frescoes in the Lower Church, less mangled by time, mark an advance in Giotto’s power. He seems to have been directly responsible for the pictures in the Magdalen Chapel, while his aides painted the allegories illustrating the Franciscan vows of poverty, obedience, and chastity. In this duplex church the legend of Francis gave a mighty stimulus, almost a new birth, to Italian painting, and generated a tradition ideally completed in the work of the Dominican Fra Angelico.
All in all, Giotto’s work was a revolution. We feel his faults because we know of the painting skills that were developed by the movement that he began. His drawing, modeling, perspective, and anatomy are painfully inadequate; art, like the medical science of Giotto’s time, was just beginning to dissect the human body, to learn the place, structure, and function of each muscle, bone, tendon, nerve; men like Mantegna and Masaccio would master these elements, and Michelangelo would perfect them, almost make a fetish of them; but in Giotto’s day it was still unusual to study, scandalous to represent, the nude. What is it, then, that makes the work of Giotto in Padua and Assisi a landmark in the history of art? It is the rhythmic composition, drawing the eye from every angle to the center of interest; the dignity of quiet motion, the soft and luminous coloring, the majestic flow of the narrative, the restraint of expression even in deep feeling, the grandeur of the calm that bathes these troubled scenes; and, now and then, the naturalistic portraiture of men, women, and children not as studied in past art but as seen and felt in the movement of life. These were the components of Giotto’s triumph over Byzantine rigidity and gloom, these were the secrets of his enduring influence. For a century after him Florentine art lived on his example and his inspiration.
In his wake came two generations of Giotteschi, who imitated his themes and style, but rarely touched his excellence. His godson and pupil, Taddeo Gaddi, almost inherited art; Taddeo’s father, and three of Taddeo’s five sons, were painters; the Italian Renaissance, like German music, tended to run in families, and prospered there through the transmission and accumulation of techniques in homes, studios, and schools. Taddeo began as an apprentice to Giotto; by 1347 he was at the head of Florentine painters; even then, however, he signed himself devotedly “Discepol di Giotto il buon maestro.”35 He became so rich through his industry as painter and architect that his descendants could afford to be patrons of art.