GIOTTO (GIOTT0 DI BONDONE) (I267?-1337), Italian painter (not to be confused with Giotto di Buondone, a contem porary citizen and politician of Siena), was born at Vespignano in the Mugello, a few miles north of Florence, according to one account in 1276, and according to another, which from the few known circumstances of his life seems more likely to be correct, in 1266 or 1267. His father was a landowner at Colle in the com mune of Vespignano, described in a contemporary document as vir praeclarus, but by biographers both early and late as a poor peasant ; probably therefore a peasant proprietor of no large possessions but of reputable stock and descent. It is impossible to tell whether there is any truth in the legend of Giotto's boy hood which relates how he first showed his disposition for art, and attracted the attention of Cimabue, by being found drawing one of his father's sheep with a sharp stone on the face of a smooth stone or slate. With his father's consent, the story goes on, Cima bue carried off the boy to be his apprentice, and it was under Cimabue's tuition that Giotto took his first steps in the art of which he was afterwards to be the great emancipator and renova tor. The place where these early steps can, according to tradition, be traced, is in the courses of frescoes which adorn the walls of the nave in the Upper Church of St. Francis at Assisi. These frescoes represent subjects of the Old and New Testament, and great labour, too probably futile, has been spent in trying to pick out those in which the youthful handiwork of Giotto can be dis cerned, as it is imagined, among that of Cimabue and his other pupils. But the truth is that the figure of Cimabue himself, in spite of Dante's testimony to his having been the foremost painter of Italy until Giotto arose, has under the search-light of modern criticism melted into almost mythical vagueness. His accepted position as Giotto's instructor and the pioneer of reform in his art has been attacked from several sides as a mere invention of Florentine writers for the glorification of their own city. One group of critics maintain that the real advance in Tuscan paint ing before Giotto was the work of the Sienese school and not of the Florentine. Another group contend that the best painting done in Italy down to the last decade of the 13th century was not done by Tuscan hands at all, but by Roman craftsmen trained in the inherited principles of Italo-Byzantine decoration in mosaic and fresco, and that from such Roman craftsmen alone could Giotto have learnt anything worth his learning. The debate thus opened is far from closed, and considering how scanty, ambiguous and often defaced are the materials existing for discussion, it is per haps never likely to be closed. But there is no debate as to the general nature of the reform effected by the genius of Giotto himself. He was the great humanizer of painting; it is his glory to have been the first among his countrymen to breathe life into wall-pictures and altarpieces, and to quicken the dead conven tionalism of inherited practice with the fire of natural action and natural feeling. Upon yet another point there is no question ; and that is that the reform thus effected by Giotto in painting had been anticipated in the sister art of sculpture by nearly a whole generation. About the middle of the 13th century Nicola Pisano had renewed that art, first by strict imitation of classical models, and later by infusing into his work a fresh spirit of nature and humanity, perhaps partly caught from the Gothic schools of France. His son Giovanni had carried the same re-vitalising of sculpture a great deal further ; and hence to some critics it would seem that the real inspirer and precursor of Giotto was Giovanni Pisano the sculptor, and not any painter or wall-decorator, whether of Florence, Siena or Rome.
In this division of opinion it is safer to regard the revival of painting in Giotto's hands simply as part of the general awaken ing of the time, and to remember that, as of all Italian communi ties, Florence was the keenest in every form of activity both intel lectual and practical, so it was natural that a son of Florence should be the chief agent in such an awakening. And in consider ing his career the question of his possible participation in frescoes of the Upper Church at Assisi is best left out of account. Giotto's undisputed works at Assisi are the four celebrated allegorical com positions in honour of St. Francis in the vaulting of the Lower Church,—the "Marriage of St. Francis to Poverty," the "Allegory of Chastity," the "Allegory of Obedience" and the "Vision of St. Francis in Glory." These works are scarcely at all retouched, and relatively little dimmed by time ; they are of a singular beauty, at once severe and tender, both in colour and design ; the compo sitions, especially the first three, fitted with admirable art into the cramped spaces of the vaulting, the subjects, no doubt in the main dictated to the artist by his Franciscan employers, treated in no cold or mechanical spirit but with a full measure of vital humanity and original feeling. Had the career and influence of St. Francis had no other of their vast and far-reaching effects in the world than that of inspiring these noble works of art, they would still have been entitled to no small gratitude from man kind. Other works at Assisi which most modern critics, but not all, attribute to Giotto himself are three miracles of St. Francis and portions of a group of frescoes illustrating the history of Mary Magdalene, both in the Lower church; and again, in one of the transepts of the same Lower church, a series of ten frescoes of the Life of the Virgin and Christ, concluding with the Cruci fixion. It is to be remarked as to this transept series that several of the frescoes present not only the same subjects, but with a certain degree of variation, the same compositions as are found in the master's great series executed in the Arena chapel at Padua and that the Assisi versions show a greater degree of technical accomplishment than the Paduan versions, with a more attractive charm and more abundance of accessory ornament.
Yet a third work by the master at Rome is a repainted fragment at the Lateran of a fresco of Pope Boniface VIII. pro claiming the jubilee of 1300. To about i 302 or 1303 would belong, if there is truth in it, the familiar story of Giotto's "0." Pope Benedict XI., the successor of Boniface VIII., sent, as the tale runs, a messenger to bring him proofs of the painter's powers. Giotto would give no other sample of his talent than an 0 drawn with a free sweep of the brush from the elbow ; but the pope was satisfied and engaged him at a great salary to go and adorn with frescoes the papal residence at Avignon. Benedict, however, dying at this time (13os), nothing came of this commission.
At this point in Giotto's life we come to the greatest by far of his undestroyed and undisputed enterprises, and one which can with some certainty be dated. This is the series of frescoes with which he decorated the entire internal walls of the chapel built at Padua in honour of the Virgin of the Annunciation by a rich citizen of the town, Enrico Scrovegni, perhaps in order to atone for the sins of his father, a notorious usurer whom Dante places in the seventh circle of hell. The building is on the site of an ancient amphitheatre, and is therefore generally called the chapel of the Arena. Since it is recorded that Dante was Giotto's guest at Padua, and since we know that it was in 1306 that the poet came from Bologna to that city, we may conclude that to the same year, 1306, belongs the beginning. of Giotto's great under taking in the Arena chapel. The scheme includes a Saviour in Glory over the altar, a Last Judgment, full of various and impres sive incident, occupying the whole of the entrance wall, with a series of subjects from the Old and New Testament and the apocryphal Life of Christ painted in three tiers on either side wall, and lowest of all a fourth tier with emblematic Virtues and Vices in monochrome ; the Virtues being on the side of the chapel next the incidents of redemption in the entrance fresco of the Last Judgment, the Vices on the side next the incidents of perdition.
When the middle ages came to a close Giotto was laying the foundation upon which the progress of the Renaissance was after wards securely based. In his day the knowledge possessed by painters of the human frame and its structure rested only upon general observation and not upon detailed or scientific study; while to facts other than those of humanity their observation had never been closely directed. Of linear perspective they possessed but elementary and empirical ideas, and their endeavours to ex press aerial perspective and deal with the problems of light and shade were rare and partial. As far as painting could possibly be carried under these conditions, it was carried by Giotto. In its choice of subjects, his art is entirely subservient to the religious spirit of the age in which he lived. Many of those truths of nature to which the painters of succeeding generations learned to give accurate and complete expression, Giotto was only able to express by way of imperfect symbol and suggestion. But among the ele ments of art over which he has control he maintains so just a balance that his work produces in the spectator less sense of im perfection than that of many later and more accomplished masters. In some particulars his painting has never been surpassed in mastery of expressive line and of harmonious decorative tint, in the massing and scattering of groups, and in the direct and vital gestures of the figures.
Of many other works said to have been executed by Giotto at Padua, all that remains consists of some scarce recognizable traces in the chapter-house of the great Franciscan church of St. Antonio. Besides Padua, he is said to have resided and left great works at Ferrara, Ravenna, Urbino, Rimini, Faenza, Lucca and other cities; in some of them paintings of his school are still shown, but noth ing which can fairly be claimed to be by his hand. It is recorded also that he was much employed in Florence; but the vandalism of later generations has effaced nearly all that he did there. Among works whitewashed over by posterity were the frescoes with which he covered no less than five chapels in the church of Santa Croce. Two of these, the chapels of the Bardi and the Peruzzi families, were scraped in the early part of the i qth century, and very impor tant remains were uncovered and immediately subjected to a process of restoration which robbed them in part of their authen ticity. The frescoes of the Bardi chapel tell again the story of St. Francis, to which so much of his best power had already been devoted ; those of the Peruzzi chapel deal with the lives of St. John the Baptist and St. John the Evangelist. Such scenes as the Funeral of St. Francis, the Dance of Herodias's Daughter, and the Resurrection of St. John the Evangelist, which have to some extent escaped the disfigurements of the restorer, are among ac knowledged classics of the world's art. The only clues to the dates of any of these works are to be found in the facts that among the figures in the Bardi chapel occurs that of St. Louis of Toulouse, who was not canonized till 1317, therefore the painting must be subsequent to that year, and that the "Dance of Salome" must have been painted before 1331, when it was copied by the Loren zetti at Siena. The only other extant works of Giotto at Florence are a fine "Crucifix," not undisputed, at San Marco, and the majestic altar-piece of the Madonna, in the Uffizi.
It appears that Giotto towards the end of his life had come under the notice of Duke Charles of Calabria, son of King Robert of Naples, during the visits of the duke to Florence which took place between 1326 and 1328, in which year he died. Soon after wards Giotto must have gone to King Robert's court at Naples, where he was enrolled as an honoured guest and member of the household by a royal decree dated Jan. 20, 1330. Another docu ment shows him to have been still at Naples two years later. Tra dition says much about the friendship of the king for the painter and the freedom of speech and jest allowed him ; much also of the works he carried out at Naples in the Castel Nuovo, the Castel dell' Uovo, and the church and convent of Sta. Chiara. Not a trace of these works remains. According to Vasari he illus trated by order of King Robert St. John's Apocalypse, of which various copies are still extant in churches in southern Italy. The original version was discovered in the panels in possession of Count Erbach of Furstenau.
Meantime Giotto had been advancing, not only in years and worldly fame, but in prosperity. He was married young, and had, so far as is recorded, three sons, Francesco, Niccola and Donato, and three daughters, Bice, Caterina and Lucia. He had added by successive purchases to the plot of land inherited from his father at Vespignano. His fellow-citizens of all occupations and degrees delighted to honour him. And now, in his 68th year (if we accept 1266/7 as the correct date of birth), on his return from Naples, he received the final and official testimony to the esteem in which he was held at Florence. By a solemn decree of the Priori on April 12, 1334, he was appointed master of the works of the cathedral of Sta. Reparata (later and better known as Sta. Maria del Fiore) and official architect of the city walls and the towns within her territory. What training as a practical architect his earlier career had afforded him we do not know, but his interest in the art from the beginning is made clear by the carefully studied architectural backgrounds of many of his frescoes. Dying on Jan. 8, 1336 (old style 1337), Giotto only enjoyed his new dignities for two years. But in the course of them he had found time not only to make an excursion to Milan, on the invitation of Azzo Visconti and with the sanction of his own government, but to plan two great architectural works at Florence and super intend the beginning of their execution, namely the west front of the cathedral and its detached campanile or bell-tower. The unfinished enrichments of the cathedral front were stripped away in a later age. The foundation-stone of the Campanile was laid with solemn ceremony on July 18, 1334. Its lower courses seem to have been completed from Giotto's design, and the first course of its sculptured ornaments (the famous series of primitive Arts and Industries) actually by his own hand, before his death. It is not clear what modifications of his design were made by Andrea Pisano, who was appointed to succeed him, or again by Francesco Talenti, to whom the work was next entrusted; but the incom parable structure as we now see it stands as a fitting monument to the genius who first conceived it.
The art of painting, as re-created by Giotto, was carried on throughout Italy by his pupils and successors for nearly a hun dred years, until a new impulse was given to art by the combined influences of naturalism and classicism in the hands of men like Donatello and Masaccio. Most of the anecdotes related of the master are probably inaccurate in detail, but the general char acter which tradition has agreed in giving him can never be assailed. He was from the first a kind of popular hero. He is cele brated by the poet Petrarch and by the historian Villani. He is made the subject of tales and anecdotes by Boccaccio and by Franco Sacchetti. From these notices, as well as from Vasari, we gain a distinct picture of the man, as a master craftsman, to whose strong combining and inventing powers nothing came amiss; conscious of his own deserts, never at a loss either in the things of art or in the things of life, and equally ready and efficient whether he has to design the scheme of some great spiritual allegory in colour or imperishable monument in stone, or whether he has to show his wit in the encounter of practical jest and repartee.