Giotto and His Works in Padua


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Giotto


Book Description

"An introduction to Giotto's frescoes in Padua with an analytical essay, documents, and source materials ..."--Cover.




Giotto and the Arena Chapel


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This book is divided into two parts, the first presenting new evidence and reconstructions of the chapel's design and early history; the second offering new interpretations of Giotto's frescoes. Appendices present original sources, all of which are newly-discovered, unpublished or previously published in inaccessible editions. An outline of the early history of the Scrovegni family and the career of the chapel's patron, Enrico Scrovegni, introduces the first part of the book. It is argued that the chapel's varied functions played an important part in determining the form of the building and the content of its frescoes. A complete reconstruction of the appearance of the Arena Chapel at the time of its consecration in 1305 forms the basis for an entirely new understanding of Giotto's frescoes. Giotto was the architect of the Arena Chapel, architecture and decoration were completely integrated in his design. Changes in the design brief during the period 1300-1305 prevented the full realization of his design. Some of the paintings now seen in the Arena Chapel, which have always been attributed to Giotto, are not in fact by him. Several independent masters worked under Giotto's direction. He headed a flexibly-organized workshop. Part II is introduced by a discussion of the frescoes that would be encountered by visitors to the Arena Chapel. These frescoes were deliberately placed in these positions by Giotto in order to further a process of luminal transformation upon entry into sacred space. Giotto employed radically new compositional devices to evoke correspondences between the pictured protagonists in their fictive environments, and viewers in the real environment of the chapel. Dr. Laura Jacobus' research interests cover various aspects of Italian visual culture during the period c.1250-1450. She teaches at Birkbeck University of London.




Giotto


Book Description

"Giotto" by Harry Quilter is an essay about the facts of Giotto's life. The information has been taken from Vasari's Lives of the Painters and compared with those given by all later writers on the same subject. The descriptions of Padua, Assisi, and Florence were written on the spot, and the vignettes of the two former towns are reduced from sketches made by the author on purpose for the present work. The fresco of the Unknown Madonna, formerly attributed to Giotto, and still ascribed to him by the monks of Assisi, is reproduced here, by chromo-lithography, from a watercolor drawing made by the author at Assisi in the spring of last year—its only use is to show readers the kind of coloring prevalent in Giotto's work.




Giotto and His Publics


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Political strife and religious faction lacerated fourteenth-century Italy. Giotto's commissions are best understood against the background of this social turmoil. They reflected the demands of his patrons, the requirements of the Franciscan Order, and the restlessly inventive genius of the painter. Julian Gardner examines this important period of Giotto's path-breaking career through works originally created for Franciscan churches: Stigmatization of Saint Francis from San Francesco at Pisa, now in the Louvre, the Bardi Chapel cycle of the Life of St. Francis in Santa Croce at Florence, and the frescoes of the crossing vault above the tomb of Saint Francis in the Lower Church of San Francesco at Assisi.




Giotto


Book Description

"Thirty miles to the southwest of Venice, in a small park in Padua, lies a modest red brick building, the Scrovegni (or Arena) Chapel, that contains one of the jewels of Early Renaissance art: the most extensive fresco cycle by Giotto. Perfectly preserved, it established Giotto's genius for displacing the Byzantine style of painting and introducing the fundamental principles of Renaissance humanism into art. Painted around 1306, the nearly forty large frescoes that cover the walls and ceiling of the Chapel tell stories from the lives of the Virgin, Christ, and the Virgin's parents, Sts. Joachim and Anne. Created with a subtle yet brilliant array of colors - shimmering blues, golden reds, subtle ivories - these easy-to-read narrative panels have remained comprehensible and evocative to viewers for generations; this may be because, unlike much of the art that preceded Giotto, his images contain sacred figures that behave in human ways, bodies as well as faces that register human feelings familiar to us all. The Scrovegni Chapel is Giotto's masterpiece; it established him as the most famous artist of his day, not only in Italy but in all of Europe. It is little wonder that the art of Giotto has held the attention of Western civilization for over half a millennium"--Bookjacket.




Giotto the Painter. Volume 1-3


Book Description

Vol. 1: Life Giotto (1334) is the first European artist about whom it is possible to write following the schema of "life and work". The situation of the sources, however, is complicated: On Giotto's life, there are – on the one hand – biographical accounts from the mid-fourteenth century onwards that responded to various ideological requirements (patriotism, humanism, Renaissance ideology, cult of the artist); on the other, there is extensive documentary material from Giotto's lifetime, which seems to reflect less the biography of an artist than that of a bourgeois businessman resolutely climbing the social ladder. The present volume focuses on this second aspect of the Giotto figure's double life relating it to the form of existence of the pre-modern artist. Vol. 2: Works The paintings examined and contextualised in this volume are those secured for Giotto through early written sources. These sources also help to reconstruct the sequence of his works and artistic inventions as is plausible in the context of media culture in the decades around and after 1300: while Giotto was spiritually and intellectually formed in the sphere of the Florentine Dominicans, his artistic path began in Rome in the shadow of the Curia. The breakthrough to his own artistic concept came immediately before and during his work in Padua. In addition to prominent churchmen, ecclesiastical institutions, and the King of Naples, his clients were predominantly members of Italy's urban and financial elites. The adoption and further development of his inventions by other - especially Sienese - painters pressured him in his later years to try new approaches again. Vol. 3: Survival Giotto is considered by many to be the founder of modern painting. This thesis is discussed and modified in the present volume on an empirical basis. What emerges is that Giotto's impact cannot be reduced simply to the introduction of the study of nature. Rather, his art was involved in the development of pictorial idioms that were attuned to the skills and interests of their audiences. The new approaches in his painting contributed in particular to the possibility of examining and communicating psychological, narrative and allegorical content of great complexity outside the media of language and text, which not only changed the face of European art but certainly contributed to the intellectual opening of Western societies.




A Boy Named Giotto


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Eight-year-old Giotto the shepherd boy confesses his dream of becoming an artist to the painter Cimabue, who teaches him how to make marvelous pigments from minerals, flowers, and eggs and takes him on as his pupil.




Giotto and the Orators


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This highly acclaimed volume examines the one firm bridge between the art of the humanists and the painters of the early Italian Renaissance: what Petrarch and other humanists wrote about painting. Baxandall surveys the main themes of their art criticism and describes how their language conditioned their insights into painting.







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