termed Giottino; and the Giottino of Vasari is said to have been born in 1324, and to have died early, of consumption, in 1357,—dates which must be regarded as open to considerable doubt. Stefano, the father of Tommaso, was himself a celebrated painter in the early revival of art; his naturalism was indeed so highly appreciated by contemporaries as to earn him the appellation of “Scimia della Natura” (ape of nature). He, it seems, instructed his son, who, however, applied himself with greater predilection to studying the works of the great Giotto, formed his style on these, and hence was called Giottino. It is even said that Giottino was really the son (others say the great-grandson) of Giotto. To this statement little or no importance can be attached. To Maso di Stefano, or Giottino, Vasari and Ghiberti attribute the frescoes in the chapel of S. Silvestro (or of the Bardi family) in the Florentine church of S. Croce; these represent the miracles of Pope S. Silvestro as narrated in the “Golden Legend,” one conspicuous subject being the sealing of the lips of a malignant dragon. These works are animated and firm in drawing, with naturalism carried further than by Giotto. From the evidence of style, some modern connoisseurs assign to the same hand the paintings in the funeral vault of the Strozzi family, below the Cappella degli Spagnuoli in the church of S. Maria Novella, representing the crucifixion and other subjects. Vasari ascribes also to his Giottino the frescoes of the life of St Nicholas in the lower church of Assisi. This series, however, is not really in that part of the church which Vasari designates, but is in the chapel of the Sacrament; and the works in that chapel are understood to be by Giotto di Stefano, who worked in the second half of the 14th century—very excellent productions of their period. They are much damaged, and the style is hardly similar to that of the Sylvester frescoes. It might hence be inferred that two different men produced the works which are unitedly fathered upon the half-legendary “Giottino,” the consumptive youth, solitary and melancholic, but passionately devoted to his art. A large number of other works have been attributed to the same hand; we need only mention an “Apparition of the Virgin to St Bernard,” in the Florentine Academy; a lost painting, very popular in its day, commemorating the expulsion, which took place in 1343, of the duke of Athens from Florence; and a marble statue erected on the Florentine campanile. Vasari particularly praises Giottino for well-blended chiaroscuro.
GIOTTO [Giotto di Bondone[1]] (1267?–1337), Italian painter, 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 commune 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 boyhood 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, Cimabue 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 renovator. The place where these early steps can still, according to tradition, be traced, is in the first and second, reckoning downwards, of the three 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 discerned, 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 painting 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 perhaps 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 altar-pieces, and to quicken the dead conventionalism 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 awakening of the time, and to remember that, as of all Italian communities Florence was the keenest in every form of activity both intellectual and practical, so it was natural that a son of Florence should be the chief agent in such an awakening. And in considering his career the question of his possible participation in the primitive frescoes of the upper courses at Assisi is best left out of account, the more so because of the deplorable condition in which they now exist. But with reference to the lowest course of paintings on the same walls, those illustrating the life of St Francis according to the narrative of St Bonaventura, no one has any doubt, at least in regard to nineteen or twenty of the twenty-eight subjects which compose the series, that Giotto himself was their designer and chief executant. In these, sadly as they too have suffered from time and wholesale repair, there can nevertheless be discerned the unmistakable spirit of the young Florentine master as we know him in his other works—his shrewd realistic and dramatic vigour, the deep sincerity and humanity of feeling which he knows how to express in every gesture of his figures without breaking up the harmony of their grouping or the grandeur of their linear design, qualities inherited from the earlier schools of impressive but lifeless hieratic decoration. The “Renunciation of the Saint by his Father,” the “Pope’s Dream of the Saint upholding the tottering Church,” the “Saint before the Sultan,” the “Miracle of the Spring of Water,” the “Death of the Nobleman of Celano,” the “Saint preaching before Pope Honorius”—these are some of the most noted and best preserved examples of the painter’s power in this series. Where doubt begins again is as to the relations of date and sequence which the series bears to other works by the master executed at Assisi and at Rome in the same early period of his career, that is, probably between 1295 and 1300. Giotto’s remaining undisputed works at Assisi are the four celebrated allegorical compositions 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
- ↑ Not to be confused with Giotto di Buondone, a contemporary citizen and politician of Siena.
