GIOTTO.
"Where Cimabue found the shepherd boy,
Tracing his idle fancies on the ground."
ROGERS's _Italy_.
Giotto was born[37] at the small village of Vespignano, about fourteen
miles from Florence, amidst surroundings, the chief characteristics of
which are very beautifully described by Mr. Ruskin in the following
paragraph:--
"Few travellers can forget the peculiar landscape of that district of
the Apennines. As they ascend the hill which rises from Florence to
the lowest peak in the ridge of Fiesole, they pass continually beneath
the walls of villas bright in perfect luxury, and beside cypress
hedges inclosing fair terraced gardens, where the masses of oleander
and magnolia, motionless as leaves in a picture, inlay alternately
upon the blue sky their branching lightness of pale rose colour and
deep green breadth of shade, studded with walls of gleaming silver;
and shining at intervals through their framework of rich leaf and
rubied flower, the far-away bends of the Arno beneath its slopes of
olive, and the purple peaks of the Carrara mountains tossing
themselves against the western distance, where the streaks of
motionless clouds hover above the Pisan sea. The traveller passes the
Fiesolan ridge, and all is changed. The country is on a sudden lonely.
Here and there indeed are seen the scattered houses of a farm grouped
gracefully upon the hill-sides; here and there a fragment of tower
upon a distant rock; but neither gardens nor flowers, nor glittering
palace exists. Only a gray extent of mountain-ground tufted
irregularly with ilex and olive; a scene not sublime, for its forms
are subdued and low; not desolate, for its valleys are full of sown
fields and tended pastures; not rich nor lovely, but sunburnt and
sorrowful, becoming wilder every instant as the road winds into its
recesses, ascending still, until the higher woods, now partly oak and
partly pine, dropping back from the central crest of the Apennines,
leave a partial wilderness of scathed rock and arid grass, withered
away here by frost, and there by strange lambent tongues of earth-fed
fire."[38]
Giotto's name is, according to Lord Lindsay, a contraction of
Ambrogiotto. In the modern sense of the word, he appears to have had
absolutely no education, for we find him when ten years old engaged in
tending sheep upon the hill-side. It is noticeable that for one who
was to effect the change in art which Giotto subsequently produced, no
amount of early training could have been so beneficial, as the silent
undogmatic one, that he received amongst the fresh meadows, and under
the blue skies. The native genius within him grew gradually in
strength, unhelped save by the influences of rustic life, and
unhindered by tradition or example. It was no doubt to these early
shepherd days, that he owed the strong sympathy with nature that he
retained during his whole career, and his power of representing simple
facts of animal life. Throughout all his pictures, even those of
his latest period, whenever he got a chance of introducing an animal
he always seized it eagerly, and the little touches of dog, donkey,
and ox nature which may be found scattered here and there in his
works, form one of its most peculiar and pleasing features; especially
when we consider that this was to artists an absolutely virgin soil.
Thus in the fresco at Assisi[39] representing the birth of Christ,
perhaps the most remarkable portion of the picture is the manner in
which the two donkeys are poking their heads over the manger to
examine the child, with that expression of happy placid stupidity, so
well known to all who have ever had to do with these animals. And
again, in the sculpture of the shepherd, forming one of the series
round the base of the Campanile at Florence, the expression of the
puppy's face, (grave consideration mixed with a sense of
responsibility) as he watches the sheep filing past the shepherd's
tent, is wonderfully natural, and worthy of Sir Edwin Landseer, except
that it is in one way much too good for him, in its thorough
dogginess; Landseer always intensified his animals' feelings to the
very verge of caricature. Hence one reason why he was so commonly and
universally popular.
[Illustration: PASTORAL LIFE. BAS-RELIEF DESIGNED BY GIOTTO.
_On the Campanile, Florence._]
At any rate, such was Giotto's early life, spent in simple rural
duties, and untroubled by school-boards and science primers; but when
he was about ten years old, a strange event occurred which changed the
whole current of his history. For there came riding through the valley
the famous painter of Florence, Cimabue, then at the height of his
reputation, and passed close to where the boy shepherd was sitting
neglectful of his duties, trying to draw one of his flock with a piece
of sharp slate upon the surface of rock.
We may suppose that there was something in the work which the painter
knew to be genius, for according to all the legends, he does not
appear to have hesitated in the least, but after asking the boy if he
would like to go with him, and receiving a glad answer in the
affirmative, he obtained the father's permission, took him to
Florence, and installed him in his own studio.
It must be remembered that an artist's studio was a very different
place in 1286, from what we call by the same name at the present time.
It resembled a workshop, in which the pupils prepared and ground the
colours under the master's direction, deriving what instruction they
might from seeing him work and hearing him talk; nor were they allowed
to touch brush or pencil till they had rendered themselves thorough
masters of the preparation of the various colours, temperas, &c. A
mastery which, as we have seen, was supposed at that time to take
about six years to acquire.
So the boy lived with his master in Florence, and worked, much as a
house painter's apprentice works now; drawing, no doubt, at every odd
minute in the meantime, in fear and trembling, and thinking art was a
very much longer business than he had bargained for, when he left his
home to become a painter.
Many days no doubt he looked out from the rough building where he and
his fellow pupils were grinding the master's colours, and saw Cimabue
standing in the shady garden, before a great glory of crimson drapery
and golden background, and many a time his heart sank within him as he
looked, and he thought it impossible that he could ever acquire that
marvellous skill. But on these early days all the biographies are
alike silent, there is not even an apocryphal anecdote of Vasari's to
enliven the darkness; and whatever we may fancy, we know absolutely
nothing.
The next point of Giotto's life where history takes up the record is
at the incident of the O. Briefly told, this is as follows. About
1296,[40] according to Lord Lindsay, Boniface VIII.[41] was desirous
of adding to the decorations of St. Peter's, "and sent one of his
courtiers from Treviso to Tuscany to ascertain what kind of man Giotto
might be, and what were his works." On his way the messenger received
designs from various artists in Siena, and then came to Giotto, told
him of his mission, and no doubt showed him the elaborate designs
which he had received from the Sienese artists. Whereupon Giotto drew
with one sweep of his arm a circle in red ink, of perfect accuracy,
and gave it to the messenger, refusing to send any other design,
"whereby," says Vasari, "the Pope and such of his courtiers as were
well versed in the subject, perceived how far Giotto surpassed all the
other painters of his time."
Whatever truth there may be in the details of this incident, it is, as
Ruskin points out,[42] significant in showing the manner in which the
Pope and his counsellors judged of art: _i.e._, that the best workman
was the best man, which for a rough and ready test is not altogether a
bad one.
The date of Giotto's visit to Rome is still further fixed by an
assertion of Baldinucci's that there is a record in the Vatican in a
register, to the effect that the mosaic of the _Navicella_ (which is
still in the portico of St. Peter's though enormously damaged), was
executed at Rome in 1298. If this be true, and though quoted by Crowe
it is not contradicted, it fixes the date of Giotto's visit as at all
events not later than that year. Of the works of Giotto at Rome I
shall speak in a subsequent chapter, in which I shall endeavour to fix
upon the analogy of style, the order in which Giotto painted at
Florence, Padua, and Assisi. It should have been noticed that Crowe
and Cavalcaselle make the incident of the O occur in the time of
Benedict XI, by supposing that that Pope sent from Avignon "at the
request of Petrarch, to seek out the best artists of Italy for the
purpose of restoring and adorning the churches and palaces of Rome
which were falling into decay." This, however, leaves Giotto's first
visit to Rome in 1298 unaccounted for, and contradicts Vasari and
Lindsay, apparently without sufficient cause, for it seems highly
improbable that if the painter had been already engaged in painting
and designing mosaics for St. Peter's, that in after years the Pope
should have thought it necessary to have a proof of his skill.
However, the date of this visit to Rome is of little importance, as
the whole of the works of Giotto in that city have been long
destroyed, with the exception of the mosaic of the _Navicella_, and
some small panel pictures in the Sacristy of St. Peter's.[43]
About the year 1300 it seems probable that Giotto returned to
Florence, and in the following year painted in the Chapel of the
Podesta--commonly called the Bargello. It was here that Giotto
introduced (I believe for the first time in the history of mediæval
Italian art) accurate portraits of living people into his picture of
_Paradise_. It is here that the famous portrait of Dante in his early
manhood was discovered after having been covered with whitewash for
two hundred years.
It was with the greatest difficulty that an American named Kirkup, and
Signor Bezzi obtained permission from the Italian government to remove
the whitewash from this fresco of _Paradise_ at their own expense.[44]
All the frescoes in this chapel are very greatly injured by time and
neglect, whitewash and restoration, and especially the Dante portrait,
which has suffered most of all from the last-mentioned cause. As I
shall have little occasion to refer to the works in this chapel in
subsequent chapters, I may here say that in my opinion Crowe and
Cavalcaselle have erred in attributing all of them to Giotto.[45]
There are many which show little, if any, trace of the master's hand,
and others which are apparently imitations by pupils; as, however, the
frescoes are all exceedingly defaced, it is not worth while to dwell
minutely on this point.[46]
In less than two years from the date of this picture of the
_Paradise_, Dante was exiled to Verona, and for three or four years
Giotto did not see him again. In the year 1306, when Giotto went to
Padua to paint the Arena Chapel, Dante also settled in that town.[47]
Within a year from the painting of the Bargello, Giotto married a
lady, of whom, no matter what may have been her virtues or
attractions, posterity knows little or nothing, save that she bore the
painter several children, and that her name was Ciuta di Lapo. It was
shortly after this period of his life that he produced what must on
the whole be considered the greatest work of his life--the decoration
of the Scrovegni Chapel at Padua. This was a small barn-like edifice
of perfectly plain exterior, which had just been built by Enrico
Scrovegni on the site of an old Roman amphitheatre, and dedicated to
the Madonna.
According to some accounts, Giotto himself was its architect; but this
has only been surmised from the fact of his decoration being so
admirably suited to the building. The fact probably being that had the
building been of a different or more elaborate shape, he would have
treated it in a different manner. As it was, the extreme simplicity of
the arrangement of the frescoes, is most happily in harmony with the
simplicity of the architecture. Here he seems to have lived for
several years, and here as we have said came Dante in 1306, having
passed the intervening years of his exile at Bologna. According to
Baldinucci, our painter had no less than six children, all of whom
were of a surpassing ugliness; and it is recorded that Dante remarked
upon this circumstance to him, pretending to be surprised that one who
could paint such beautiful figures should have such ugly sons; to
which Giotto replied by a jest more suited to his own times, than to
ours. Indeed, all that the biography of Giotto amounts to after this,
is an account of his various jokes and eccentricities, most of which,
I must confess, seem to me of very poor quality, somewhat akin to the
pleasantries told at the tea-table of a humorous schoolmaster, or to
those which are murmured between the pauses of the work, at the weekly
meetings of a Dorcas society. However, all the historians agree in
asserting that he was a man of infinite jest, and the humour of these
anecdotes may well have evaporated in the course of six hundred years.
The following, which I give as it occurs in Vasari, derives a certain
interest from the quaint simplicity with which the biographer tells
it, and the naïve way in which justice is depicted as of course being
on the side of the best speaker, is not without a certain amount of
significance, even in our enlightened nineteenth century.
"Giotto, as we have said before, was of an exceedingly jocund humour,
and abounded in witty and humorous remarks, which are still well
remembered in Florence. Examples of these may be found not only in the
writings of Messer Giovanni Boccaccio, but also in the three hundred
stories of Franco Sacchetti, who cites many amusing instances of his
talent in this way. And here I will not refuse the labour of
transcribing some of these stories, giving them in Franco's own words,
that my readers may be made acquainted with the peculiar phraseology
and modes of speech used in those times, together with the story
itself. He says there in one of these, to set it forth with its proper
title:--
"'_To Giotto, the great painter, is given a buckler to paint by a man
of small account. He, making a jest of the matter, paints in such sort
that the owner is put out of countenance._'
"Every one has long since heard of Giotto, and knows how greatly he
stood above all other painters. Hearing the fame of the master, a rude
artisan, who desired to have a buckler painted, perhaps because he was
going to do watch and ward in some castle, marched at once to the
workshop of Giotto, with one bearing the shield behind him. Having got
there he speedily found Giotto, to whom he said, 'God save thee,
master! I would fain have thee paint me my arms on this shield.'
"Giotto, having observed the man and considered his manner, replied
nothing more than--'When wilt thou have it finished?' which the other
having told him, he answered, 'Leave the matter to me;' and the fellow
departed. Then Giotto, being left alone, began to think within
himself, 'What may this mean? Hath some one sent this man to make a
jest of me? However it be, no man before ever brought me a buckler to
paint; yet here is this simple fellow who brings me his shield, and
bids me paint his arms upon it as though he were of the royal family
of France. Of a verity, I must make him arms of a new fashion.'
Thinking thus within himself, he takes the said buckler, and having
designed what he thought proper, called one of his scholars and bade
him complete the painting. This was a tin scullcap, a gorget, a pair
of iron gauntlets, with a cuirass, cuishes, and gandadoes, a sword, a
dagger, and a spear. Our great personage, of whom nobody knew
anything, having returned for his shield, marches forward and
inquires, 'Master, is the shield painted?' 'To be sure it is,' replied
Giotto; 'bring it down here.' The shield being brought, our wise
gentleman that would be, began to open his eyes and look at it,
calling out to Giotto, 'What trumpery is this that thou hast painted
me here?' 'Will it seem to thee a trumpery matter to pay for it?'
answered Giotto. 'I will not pay five farthings for it all,' returned
the clown. 'And what didst thou require me to paint?' asked Giotto.
'My arms.' 'And are they not here,' rejoined the painter; 'is there
one wanting?' 'Good, good,' quoth the man. 'Nay, verily, but it is
rather bad, bad,' responded Giotto. 'Lord, help thee, for thou must
needs be a special simpleton; why, if a man were to ask thee, "Who art
thou?" it would be a hard matter for thee to tell him; yet here thou
comest and criest, "Paint me my arms!" If thou wert of the house of
the Bardi, that were enough; but thou! what arms dost thou bear? Who
art thou? Who were thy forefathers? Art thou not ashamed of thyself?
Begin at least to come into the world before thou talkest of arms, as
though thou wert Dusnam of Bavaria at the very least. I have made thee
a whole suit of armour on thy shield, if there be any other piece,
tell me, and I'll put that too.' 'Thou hast given me rough words, and
hast spoiled my shield,' declared the other; and going forth, betook
himself to the justice, before whom he caused Giotto to be called. The
latter forthwith appeared, but on his side summoned the complainant
for two florins, the price of the painting, and which he demands to
be paid.
"The pleadings being heard on both sides, and Giotto's story being
much better told than that of our clown, the judge decided that the
latter should take away his buckler, and should pay six livres to
Giotto, whom they declared to have the right. Thus the good man had to
pay and take to his shield; whereupon he was bidden to depart, and not
knowing his place had it taught to him on this wise."
In 1307, Giotto appears to have finished his work at the Scrovegni
Chapel, and removed to Florence, where he ultimately settled down. Of
this period of his life little, if anything, is known. He went to
Assisi some time after this, when I have found it impossible to
discover.[48] He painted during these latter years at Florence, in
four chapels of the Santa Croce, at Ravenna (and at Ferrara and
Verona, according to Vasari); probably also he made excursions from
Florence into many of the neighbouring towns, but no certain traces of
his work exist. In 1328 he was commissioned to paint the portrait of
Charles of Calabria, the son of Robert of Naples, and in 1330 was sent
for by the latter to adorn some of the Neapolitan churches. On his way
back to Florence, he painted at Gaeta and Rimini some frescoes which
have quite perished. These were his last works in painting, with the
exception of some produced during a brief visit to Milan in 1335, for
which he obtained the permission of the government to absent himself
from the superintendence of the Cathedral and Campanile. The year
previous he had been made master of the works of the Cathedral, and
chief builder to the city of Florence; and while he was still engaged
upon his bell tower and the cathedral façade, before his eyes had lost
their lustre, or his hand its cunning, he died suddenly in 1336.
Such is the life of our old master as far as we can gather it from the
scanty materials before us: to what does it amount? That a boy showed
signs of genius; that a man fulfilled his early promise; that a great
painter was for once a prophet in his own country and in his own time;
and that all history can tell us of him, is that he made bad jokes,
and had six ugly children. Such, I say, is the history of Giotto as I
have gathered it from the chronicles of Vasari, Baldinucci, and Lanzi,
Kugler, Rumohr, Crowe, and Jameson; but there is another history of
the man, of greater worth and fuller meaning than can be found in
these musty records; there is that which the painter has written with
his own hand, in colours which yet retain much of their pristine
brightness. The best record of the artist is neither his questionable
witticisms, nor these rough outlines of his life, but that which
shines forth clearly still on the walls of Santa Croce and the arches
of Assisi. What that record means to us, I will try to explain.
FOOTNOTES:
[37] "The date is disputed. Crowe now gives 1266, but I have,
throughout, followed Vasari and other writers who give 1276. All the
chronology of Giotto, except the date of his death, is highly
uncertain."--H. Q.
[38] "At Pietro Mala. The flames rise two or three feet above the
stony ground out of which they spring, white and fierce enough to be
visible in the intense rays even of the morning sun."--J. R.
[39] This fresco is, I think, the work of one of Giotto's pupils, but
probably executed from the master's design, or under his
superintendence, or in any case is an imitation of Giotto's method of
introducing animal life into his compositions.
[40] After working at Assisi and Pisa, according to Vasari, who is
followed by Kugler. It is quite clear that Kugler is wrong in
supposing that when Giotto visited Rome in 1298, he had previously
executed the frescoes on the ceiling of the Lower Church at Assisi,
for those works are evidently later than those of the Upper Church,
and even in point of time it is impossible that both series could have
been painted prior to 1298, when the painter was but twenty-two.
[41] Vasari says Benedict XI., but Rumohr shows it was Boniface who
invited Giotto to Rome. Schorn, in note to Vasari.
[42] _Giotto and his Works in Padua._ Published for the Arundel
Society.
[43] Portions of what is called the Stefaneschi altar piece; I am
informed very fine in quality, but cannot speak from experience.
[44] It was subsequently defrayed by the Tuscan government.
[45] Crowe considers them to be undoubtedly his.
[46] That the large fresco of _Paradise_, in which the portraits of
Dante and Corso Donati occur is by Giotto, is, I think, quite certain.
[47] The house where Dante lived is still shown to strangers.
[48] I may here say once for all that owing to my ignorance of the
Italian language, and the small amount of time at my disposal, it has
been out of my power to undertake that research amongst the MSS.
stored in the public libraries of Italy by which alone could the
accurate chronology of Giotto's life be determined.