The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (70 page)

Giotto’s confidence in his talent was proverbial. When Pope Boniface VIII wanted some pictures painted for St. Peter’s, Vasari recounts, he sent a courtier to Florence “to see what sort of man was Giotto.” Since artists in Siena had already supplied samples of their work, the courtier asked Giotto for “some little drawing, to the end that he might send it to His Holiness.”

Giotto’s
tour de talent
won the pope’s commission and “there was born from it the proverb that is still wont to be said to men of gross wits: Thou art rounder than Giotto’s circle!” Called to Rome, Giotto painted five scenes from the life of Christ for the apse of St. Peter’s and the chief panel in the sacristy. The pope was so well pleased that he gave Giotto six hundred ducats of gold, “besides granting him so many favours that they were talked of throughout all Italy.”

While the facts of Giotto’s life are overcast with legend, there is no doubt
of his role as a creator of modern painting. He transformed schematic religious symbols into warm living figures and so showed the way for creating human figures that transcended religion. The art of painting in the West followed his pioneer efforts to humanize the lore of Christianity, to make religion real. The image of nature would come later. But Christianity provided the first arena and the drama where Western artists brought the visible world to life.

In Florence Giotto applied his talents to the familiar Christian stories, but he did not allow himself to be imprisoned in the familiar ways of treating them. The novelty of his way of painting at once attracted disciples. Among them was Cennino Cennini (c.1370–c.1440), whose influential
Craftsman’s Handbook
(
Libro dell’arte
, 1437), one
of
the first treatises on art to discuss the proportions of man, defined the new tradition of Giotto. Now, at last, he declared, painting “justly deserves to be enthroned next to theory, and to be crowned with poetry.” For “an occupation known as painting … calls for imagination, and skill of hand, in order to discover things not seen, hiding themselves under the shadow of natural objects, and to fix them with the hand, presenting to plain sight what does not actually exist.” It was Giotto who “changed the profession of painting from Greek [Byzantine] back into Latin [Roman], and brought it up to date; and he had more finished craftsmanship than anyone has had since.”

A century after his death Giotto was already recognized as a one-man Renaissance. With the rise of Christianity and the persecution of idolatry by the Iconoclasts, Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378–1455) recounts (c.1450): “all the statues and pictures of such nobility, antiquity and perfection were destroyed and broken to pieces.… the most severe penalty was ordered for anyone who made any statue or picture. Thus ended the art of sculpture and painting and all the teaching that had been done about it.… Art was ended and the temples remained white for about six hundred years.” Then, Ghiberti notes, Cimabue made feeble efforts to revive painting in his Byzantine (“Greek”) style. But it was left to Giotto, whom Cimabue himself had discovered on the Florentine countryside, to “introduce the new art,” abandon the “crude” Byzantine manner, and attract disciples “as gifted as the ancient Greeks.”

Bold in his manner, he was comfortingly familiar in his matter. He painted only Christian subjects, but impressed his viewers by saying something new in an old vocabulary. Even the casual student can sense this in the grandeur, bulk, and depth of his
Virgin in Majesty
(the Ognissanti Madonna; c.1310), still among the first paintings to greet the visitor to the Uffizi in Florence. With Gothic liberation he refreshed the central figures of Christian iconography.

Giotto’s undisputed triumph of Christian-lore-brought-to-life was his grand series of frescoes (1303–8) in the nave of the Scrovegni Arena Chapel in the Church of the Annunziata in Padua. In front of this chapel every year the life of the Virgin Mary was dramatized in miracle plays. On the walls of the small bare church, Giotto dramatized his story in three tiers of narrative frescoes. Underneath he painted a monochrome band of personified Virtues and Vices. Among the virtues are Prudence, Fortitude, Temperance, Justice, Hope, Faith, Charity, and among the vices are Envy, Despair, Wrath, Injustice, Inconstancy, Folly, Infidelity or Idolatry. All figures have a statuesque human bulk and roundness, with limbs revealed under naturally flowing garments. Each shows the medieval emblem and the familiar gesture of its subject. But they have a bodily reality that had not been known in Western painting for centuries, on distinctive landscapes of rocks, hills, and valleys with real sheep and goats and pigs, and identifiable trees and flowers and weeds.
The Adoration of the Magi
is saved from cliché by three distinctive kings with a unique camel in a mystic rocky landscape. If we want to understand what the Christ story meant and why it survived into the age of naturalist art, we cannot do better than review the Arena Chapel.

The principles of perspective were not to be rediscovered for another century, and the knowledge of anatomy was not to be modernized for more than a century. Still, Giotto found his own way to depict space and the roundness of the human body. An empirical artist without a theory of his own, he introduced the art of modern painting; the science was still to come.

The stature of the works insistently attributed to him is a measure of his originality and his influence. Vivid frescoes of biblical stories and the legend of Saint Francis in the Church of San Francesco in Assisi bear the mark of Giotto’s “modern” style—the realism, human warmth, variety of expression, and telling details of landscape. What scholars now call “the Assisi Problem” arises from the variety of styles in these frescoes. Cimabue himself may have painted some of them. The role of Giotto there has been overshadowed by the uncertain date of his birth, which might have made him too young for this important commission. But across northern Italy, in Santa Maria Novella in Florence, in Rimini and Padua, crucifixes revealed the power of Giotto and his disciples to humanize the stereotype. Giotto’s fame as an artist was recognized by his fellow citizens of Florence in 1334, when
they named him
capomaestro
, or surveyor, of their cathedral and architect to the city. He showed the versatility expected of artists of his age when, a few months later, he began building the bell tower beside the cathedral, which was finished only after his death.

W
HAT
Giotto did for the human body and the Christian story, only a century later another Florentine would do for architecture. Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446) found his archetypes in the monuments of ancient Rome. In 1401, luckily for Western architecture, the twenty-four-year-old Filippo did not win the competition to make the bronze reliefs for the doors of the Baptistery of San Giovanni in Florence. The judges announced a tie between him and Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378–1455) and urged the two to collaborate. When Brunelleschi refused to work except on his own terms, the commission went to Ghiberti, and Brunelleschi left Florence in pique. “So he went to Rome where at the time one could see beautiful works in public places,” his contemporary biographer Antonio Manetti (1423–1491) reported. He would give a brilliant new afterlife to the Roman arts of building.

A Florentine background more different from that of Giotto would be hard to imagine. Brunelleschi’s father, of a respectable old family, prospered by supplying the army of the city. Apprenticed as a goldsmith, Brunelleschi soon showed remarkable talent. Despite his youth, he received a commission to sculpt a wooden crucifix for the church of Santa Maria Novella, and his advice was sought on public buildings. If he had won the commission for the Baptistery doors, he might have remained only a prosperous sculptor in Florence and Western architecture might not have borne his mark.

His friend Donatello (1389?–1466), who would play for sculpture the pioneer role that Giotto played for painting, accompanied him, and, according to Manetti, “together they made rough drawings of almost all the buildings in Rome and in many places beyond the walls, with measurements of the widths and heights as far as they were able to ascertain by estimation, and also the lengths, etc. In many places they had excavations made in order
to see the junctures of the membering of the buildings and their type—whether square, polygonal, completely round, oval, or whatever … they estimated the heights … of the entablatures and roofs from the foundations. They drew the elevations on strips of parchment graphs with numbers and symbols which Filippo alone understood.” The puzzled Romans called them “treasure hunters,” for they could imagine no other motive for all the digging and measuring.

Brunelleschi had no difficulty finding the treasure he was seeking, which was the dignity and elegance of the ancient Roman buildings. “He found a number of differences among the beautiful and rich elements of the buildings—in the masonry, as well as in the types of columns, bases, capitals, architraves, friezes, cornices, and pediments, and differences between the masses of the temples and the diameters of the columns; by means of close observation he clearly recognized the characteristics of each type: Ionic, Doric, Tuscan, Corinthian, and Attic. As may still be seen in his buildings today, he used most of them at the time and place he considered best.”

Giotto, Brunelleschi, and their fellows pioneered the Renaissance recreation on which we have built modern times. Celebrated as “inventors and discoverers of many methods that had been buried for about six hundred years,” they also unwittingly conjured up a “Middle Ages” between two ages of classic excellence. Without them it might have been unnecessary to imagine the cultural hiatus that has plagued us ever since.

From Rome Brunelleschi brought back to Florence the vocabulary and the grandeur of the Roman style with some of the secrets of Roman building technology, and gave them new life. Just as Dante had translated Christian mythology from Latin into the Italian vernacular, and as Giotto had translated painting from the Byzantine (“Greek”) into the Latin (Roman), Brunelleschi revived a Tuscan order in architecture. He aimed to prove that “the years between” were not a gulf but only an interruption, as he adapted the grandiose Roman forms to Florentine buildings on a smaller scale with a new grace and light elegance.

What is called the first true Renaissance building, and the first in Brunelleschi’s own style, is the Foundling Hospital (1419–24) in Florence, built by his own guild of silk merchants and goldsmiths. The façade of the loggia shows how far he has come from the Gothic, how much he has depended on the classical motifs, and how boldly he has adapted them. A light series of rounded arches is supported by slim columns with a dominant horizontal element above, covering a vault of small domed bays in a square plan. The interior of his chapel for the Chapter House attached to Santa Croce and built for the Pazzi banking family (c.1430) also uses columns, pilasters, and arches for a Pompeian grace. Blank white walls subdivided by gray pilasters
are quite unlike the high windows, carved pillars, and infiltering light of the Gothic. The classical orders lend a touch of elegance to a modest interior. He also uses his Roman vocabulary for grander buildings like the basilical churches of San Lorenzo (c.1419) and of Santo Spirito (c.1434) in the shape of a Latin cross, or the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, a central-domed octagon.

Brunelleschi learned more than a style and a set of motifs from the ancient Romans. His triumph as a re-creator would be posthumous and worldwide, for the archetypes of Roman architecture, its columns, domes, and architraves, would be revived in new combinations in buildings on every continent, and celebrated in America in countless county courthouses and post offices, on the façades of ambitious community builders, in Monticello and on Capitol Hill. In his own time he created a unique monument of architecture that was as eloquent of Renaissance Florence as the Pantheon was of Hadrian’s Rome or Hagia Sophia of Byzantium. Using Roman techniques and a bold engineering imagination he built the dome of the cathedral of Florence, which dominates the skyline and still charms twentieth-century visitors.

The citizens of Florence had begun their cathedral back in 1296, a century before Brunelleschi made his first trip to Rome. In 1334 Giotto had been honored by the commission to design the bell tower, but work on the main structure had proceeded slowly. By the early fifteenth century the nave was completed and work began on the great octagon at the east (altar) end. As the walls of the complex octagon rose, overseers of the works found themselves confronted with a vast opening 138.5 feet across, which had to be covered by a dome. They had no choice. But how to do it? How their urban rivals—Pisa, Siena, Milan, Padua—might have enjoyed the spectacle of an ambitious city that could not even roof its own cathedral! But successive supervising architects had evaded the problem by focusing on every other part of the work. By about 1413 the walls of the octagon drum at the east end had risen to their full 180 feet and the challenge had to be faced.