Essay on "Giotto Di Bondone"

Essay 5 pages (1626 words) Sources: 5

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Giotto's Method Of Teaching Religious Stories Through Art

Giotto di Bondone resurrected the narrative art form through a new and modern style of naturalism combined with a traditional and medieval style of didacticism. He produced works that could impress upon a congregation a sense of devotion, history, structure, morality, and ingenuity. Thus, it is no surprise that critics like Giorgio Vasari and Matteo Palmieri viewed Giotto as the artist who brought painting back to life following the stale and cliched iconographic works of the medieval world (Johnson 256). This paper will examine the function of Giotto's art, how it was used to teach people the religious stories that comprised their Faith and how it helped shape the course of artistic expression for Renaissance artists.

The novelty of Giotto was his insistence on breaking the Byzantine mold that had restrained the works of artists like Cimabue. Giotto envisioned a new style of painting, one in which "new modes of expression" could be achieved with the naturalistic representation of characters from Scripture, depicted as real "figures with moral power" (Johnson 257). In Giotto's work, familiar characters lost their iconographic staleness and became alive, depicted in scenes of activity, as in Betrayal of Christ (c. 1303), which shows a black devil supporting Judas as he receives his thirty pieces from the men who sought to crucify Christ. The image tells the story of Judas' betrayal in a nighttime setting that suggests the dark, conspiratorial nature of the narrative, the devilish character of Judas, and the brazen audacity of the high priests. The picture was part of a set known as the Arena Chapel narratives, and a congregation in Giotto's time would have found in the paintings "figures grouped in an intelligible and skilful way, making the narrative point clearly, located firmly in space and set against a background which looks something like the real world" (Johnson 256). The emphasis that Giotto gave to his paintings was a realistic sense. This emphasis on realism helped convey the idea to contemporary congregations that these narratives were real and true and involved actual persons in actual places in actual time. In other words, Giotto was concerned primarily with asserting the reality of the Faith. To do so, he broke the mold of Byzantine works of iconographic piety and set out on a new course to illustrate the Faith in a dynamic, naturalistic style.

In his Legend of St. Francis, for example, Giotto illustrated 28 scenes from the life of St. Francis that provided an overall narrative account of the life of the saint in pictures that could readily be understood by the Church laity. "Sermon to the Birds," the fifteenth scene in the narrative, depicts St. Francis in the act of giving a blessing to the birds, which have obviously been attending to his words. Any congregation of Giotto's day would have already been familiar with the story of St. Francis. This picture, however, would have helped the laity visualize the scene in a new and powerful way. Indeed, the painting provides a naturalistic setting, with sky, trees, and horizon; it shows birds in various states of attendance, some swooping down from the branches of a tree, others already settled on the ground. It shows holy St. Francis, bent at the waist, with depth of character and three-dimensional effect, bestowing his blessing on the creatures. The blossoms in the trees give the overall sense of the power of grace in relation to nature, deepening in the audience the Church teaching that grace builds on nature. Thus, Giotto's novel approach to didacticism could be said to be rooted in a new, naturalistic approach to painting. Its emphasis was on realism rather than on the traditional Byzantine form. As Kren and Marx note, "Giotto makes plain the extraordinary nature of events through the reaction of a secondary figure -- in this case, through the Franciscan friar, who raises his hand with a surprised expression on his face" (Kren, Marx "Legend of St. Francis: 15. Sermon to the Birds"). In other words, Giotto showed the reality of the extraordinary and the divine working through the ordinary and the everyday. Rather than illustrate these ideas in the old iconographic style, Giotto wanted his pictures to reflect reality as well as the ancient ideas of the Faith.

The reality in which Giotto found himself was rapidly changing, of course. The Church was undergoing a transformation as religious orders (depicted by authors like Dante and later Chaucer) fell into corrupt habits and members of the Church like the 14th century cleric Jean Wyclif engaged in heresy and were condemned by the Church. Wyclif's teaching, for example, meant to dissociate the reality of dogma like transubstation from the sacrifice of the Mass. As Robert Shearer notes,

Wyclif began to reexamine the teachings of the church on the nature of communion. Wyclif concluded his examination by rejecting the teaching of the church that Jesus' body and blood were physically present in the elements of bread and wine. He argued that the bread and wine remained bread and wine (in contrast to the teaching of the church called transubstantiation -- that the bread and wine literally became Jesus' flesh and blood). This break with church teaching was so radical that many of his followers deserted him. (Shearer 81).

If Wyclif tried to undo the reality that the Church taught, Giotto meant to reinforce the reality of Church doctrine. Wyclif preached through words. Giotto taught through a new style of pictorial narrative.

In a sense, therefore, Giotto adhered both to the traditional underpinnings of artistic narrative (the didactic expression of the Faith) and the development of the new technique of naturalism and realism. The latter helped support the former in his case. Other artists of the same era showed a similar attachment to two uniquely different approaches: Nicola Pisano, for example, was a sculptor who embodied both the old world classical Roman style as well as the new international Gothic style. His son Giovanni Pisano influenced the designers of the facade of the Orvieto Cathedral, which like the works of Giotto, depicted (in sculptural form, however) scenes from Scripture with impressive realism and elegant expression. Italian arts at this time, like the Church, were undergoing a tremendous transformation as various strains of influence and technique merged together to push the boundaries of artistic expression beyond what had previously been allowed.

Giotto was not alone in his rejuvenation of didactic expression in painting. Duccio's Madonna and Child represents as well as anything by Giotto the kind of art being produced at the end of the 13th and the beginning of the 14th century in Italy. Duccio's Madonna illustrates the Child Jesus in the lap of His Mother the Virgin Mary. In other words, this is a painting of the God Whom the men and women of Duccio's day worshipped. Indeed, Duccio's Madonna is a marvelous reflection of the kind of iconography popular throughout the Middle Ages. As Giorgio Vasari states, "Duccio devoted himself to the imitation of the ancient manner, but very judiciously gave his figures a certain grace of outline, which he succeeded in securing notwithstanding the great difficulties presented by the branch of art now in question" (Vasari 146). Duccio depicted in a traditional manner the religious beliefs of his age but also gave them a special touch -- a breath of freshness and life. His Madonna and Child, in a way, foreshadow the coming humanism that grew out of the Renaissance. In fact, the very parapet behind which the Madonna and Child are situated seems to invite the viewer to be a part of the scene. It invites him to accept the Madonna and Child as a part of his life -- as though bringing to reality the abstract concepts which they represent. In… READ MORE

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