An enormous group of Italian trecento (1300s) paintings are currently assembled in the exhibition, Giotto e il Trecento, at the Complesso del Vittoriano through June 29, 2009. You may remember Giotto from your art history class: he was the Italian artist (1266-1337) considered fundamental to the developments in naturalism and the representation of three-dimensional space that later became so important in the Renaissance, starting c. 1400.
While the thesis of the exhibition repeats this standard narrative almost obsessively, missing other wonderful aspects of Giotto's art, the show is absolutely worth a visit. There are more lavish, richly colored, gilded trecento panels and polyptychs (multi-paneled altarpieces) than you are ever likely to see in one place. Maybe there are a few too many for the normal visitor, who may be tempted to cry out in defeat after about the fourth room of these intense images. Nevertheless, I strongly recommend the exhibition and have sketched below some ideas for making sense of it.
The exhibition opens with a few rooms that ought to be passed through as quickly as possible; save your attention for the artworks themselves. The first two of these preliminary spaces is dreadful, though designed to acquaint the visitor with the frescoes upon which Giotto's modern reputation rest. A fresco is a painting painted directly on a wall prepared with fresh, wet plaster. By nature is it is medium that is not portable and must be seen in situ. Thus the exhibition curators sought to include the most famous mural paintings from Florence, Padova, and Assisi.
Perhaps this is a fine idea, but the execution is visually and historically disastrous. The frescoes are reproduced as digital fragments on 9 separate screens that flicker and scroll of their own accord, while one giant screen allows the visitor to cause such movements herself. Yet a mural painting--particularly one by Giotto-- is fundamentally a solid, still image whose pigments penetrate into the substance of the wall, and whose imagery unfolds with the viewer's progression through space. These computer images invert the entire process, robbing the frescoes of all solidity and of their essential mural context, showing them instead as thin, detached, and moving about in a manner utterly dissociated from the spatial and gravitational order that made Giotto such an innovator. Of course the color is also inaccurate and the paintings' surfaces are represented as if 14th century fresco were a grainy digital affair. Thus, make haste past this travesty because Giotto's beautiful paintings are just around the corner--or around another three or four corners.
Perhaps with more measured haste you might look at the next rooms; they contain: in the brightly lit space, some examples of the gothic style that constituted the framework of the aesthetic world into which Giotto was born, and which partly comprised his style. The darkened rooms contain examples of the influence Giotto had, even in the sphere of manuscript illumination. The manuscripts are beautiful and worth a look, but don't worry if you don't find them all that exemplary of Giotto's famous naturalism. With a few exceptions, they are not. They are however very good examples of gothic art and much of their beauty comes from that--from the wonderful linear patterns and their correspondence to the flat dimensions and decorative shapes of the printed page.
Finally we arrive in the grand gallery with Giotto's paintings. As you look around, you may ask yourself what does his naturalism consist of? Or, why do we even call these images naturalistic? What's so different from the gothic style here? If you were expecting them to look 'real' like say, a Vermeer, or if you were expecting a dramatic difference from gothic art, you will likely be a bit confused as to what all the fuss is about. So in brief, Giotto's naturalism refers to certain differences from gothic painting in his approach to figures and space. Whereas gothic painting and sculpture shied away from heavy masses, corporeal volume, and the depiction of three-dimensional space, Giotto depicted his figures in bold, stocky proportions with a sense of solidity and plasticity of movement. Consider for example the stunning polyptych of the Madonna and Child with Saints Nicholas of Bari, John the Evangelist, Peter, and Benedict, of c. 1295-1300. Each figure is isolated in his own gold-background panel in the gothic tradition, but notice how the figures appear to stand out from the flat gold, with the illusion of three-dimensional mass created by the subtle shading of the figures' heads and draperies. Look also at the similar polyptych across the room with the central figure of Christ Blessing, with Mary and three saints, c. 1310-1315. Here too the proportions are broad and boxy, not thin and elongated like gothic figures, and they seem solid due to the gradations of tone. There is also considerable flexibility in the heads of the figures in the end panels; they turn as if to look at the central figure.
These traits are even more evident in Giotto's frescoes, in large part because a fresco's purpose is to decorate a large space and to convey meaning through broader elements of gesture and form in space. While this show necessarily consists of panel paintings and not frescoes, there are some fabulous fragments frescoes here. Consider for instance the wonderful little segment taken from the church of Santa Croce that depicts Mary Weeping, c. 1335, hanging just next to our polyptych of Christ making the blessing. Compared to this fresco, the altarpiece figures now seem stiff, frontal, and posed conventionally. The fresco shows not just the solid proportions of the others, but also a definite turn in the torso represented by the strongly foreshortened shoulders. We see the figure as if it were moving in an open space. Here also the modeling creates, in addition to volume, a sense of a spatial envelope around the figure.
These are examples of Giotto's famed naturalism. In the context of entire frescoed walls the effect is strengthened by architectural and landscape settings and by the fact that the holy stories are told in material terms: narratives of human figures drawn to scale, earthbound, and communicating by gesture. To my mind, however, naturalism is only part of the story--albeit the part that we moderns relate to more easily. Yet with so much emphasis on three-dimensionality Giotto ironically becomes a bit one-dimensional. That is to say, by focusing so exclusively on these aspects of naturalism (that more properly belong to the frescoes), we miss all the ways that Giotto, like his peers, created panel paintings from an existing and shared stylistic language that expressed quite clearly and intentionally the spiritual ideals and conceptual framework of his historical time. Fortunately there are many more rooms in this exhibition where you can ponder at length what else these trecento paintings might say to us.
In these several remaining galleries the curators adhere to their theme of Giotto's figural and spatial innovations (showing his influence in the different cities where he worked) but we don't have to be so single minded. On that theme I make only one observation: Where we do see the influence of Giotto, and not in the form of direct copying of pose or entire composition, we see that the pupils saw or chose to imitate different elements of the master's style. Consider, for example the Madonna and Child by Taddeo Gaddi, c. 1348-50 and another by Pacino di Buonaguida, c. 1320 and notice how distinct they are from one another. Gaddi clearly emulates the form of the eyes and the modeling of the head, and aspects of composition, while Buonaguida appears to have been most interested in the blockiness of Giotto's proportions.
A great number of paintings, however, are simply trecento panel paintings whose commonalities with one another and with Giotto demonstrate the existence of a strong and widely diffused tradition to which the master also belonged. Until the late middle ages, figural representations were commissioned and created as devotional images whose purpose had nothing to do with the imitation of the physical world. To the medieval mind truth was not revealed in the material facts of the world. Indeed the material world was thought to conceal the spiritual truths that constituted 'reality' in the middle ages. Thus representing the world as it appeared was relatively meaningless. Instead a carefully crafted artistic language was developed to convey the divine subject matter--which was fundamentally un-seeable. So as you look at the numerous altarpieces in the show, keep in mind that the flat gold settings were used to situate holy figures or stories in timeless realms, outside of man's mundane world. The wonderful sinuous movements and long thin proportions of the many shadowless figures, which are not Giottesque, were drawn this way intentionally in order to downplay the corporeal mass of the body and emphasize the ethereal, spiritual nature. The visual richness of color and decorative, mass-denying elegance add to this. Similarly, things like scale, pose, and placement were used symbolically (instead of 'naturalistically' or narratively as we think of them) to show a kind of divine hierarchy, a cosmos defined by spiritual order. These aspects of trecento art are beautifully illustrated in so many of the works in the exhibition.
Nonetheless, these are the characteristics that Giotto is said to have left behind. And he did. But, it is relevant to temper our enthusiasm for the new so that we do not project our attitudes and values onto the past where they do not belong (as they do not entirely belong to Giotto's altarpieces). This will also help us leave room to understand all the other historical changes occurring in Giotto's time that most likely led him to begin to conceive of material space, physical substance, human corporeality, etc. as meaningful ways to convey spiritual truth.
In this historical epoch, on the cusp of the so-called modern period, the physical world began to have meaning in itself. For many complex reasons relating to economic expansion and urbanization, material values and quantifiable tangible experience began to assume significance as measures of reality. Thus western European society began to turn to the seeable world as a guarantee of objective truth. Giotto is so important because we find certain elements of his art express this new concept. However, it expresses the old one too. In my opinion it is both more accurate and more interesting to recognize these several dimensions of Giotto's art.
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