Giotto di Bondone

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Statue of Giotto di Bondone, close to the Uffizi.

Giotto di Bondone (Colle di Vespignano, near Florence 1267 – January 8, Florence 1337), better known simply as Giotto, was a Florentine painter and architect. He is generally considered the first in a line of great artists who contributed to and developed the Italian Renaissance.

Giotto was born in poverty in the countryside near Florence, the son of Bondone, a peasant, and was himself a shepherd. Most authors believe that Giotto was his real name, and not an abbreviation of Ambrogio (Ambrogiotto) or Angelo (Angelotto).

Giotto's master work is the Arena Chapel cycle of the Cappella degli Scrovegni in Padua depicting the life of the Virgin and the passion of Christ completed around 1305.^[1] The scheme has 100 major scenes with the heavily sculptural figures set in compressed but naturalistic settings often using forced perspective devices. Giotto's major innovation was to conceive of a painted architectural framework or grisaille using trompe-l'oeil effects that directly influenced Masaccio and in turn Michelangelo in his scheme for the Sistine Chapel. Famous panels in the series include the Adoration of the Magi in which a comet like Star of Bethlehem streaks across the sky and the Flight from Egypt in which Giotto broke many traditions for the depiction of the scene. The scenes from the Passion were much admired by artists of the Renaissance for their concentrated emotional and dramatic force, especially the "Lamentation over the Dead Christ", and studies of the sequence by Michelangelo exist. The Ognissanti Madonna now in the Uffizi and the sole surviving major panel work by the artist also dates from this period.

1 Later life
2 Gallery
3 Reference
4 External links

[edit] Later life

Campanile di Giotto (Firenze)

In the fourteenth century Pope Benedictus XII was selecting artists to work for the Vatican, requesting from each applicant a sample of his ability. Although the Florentine painter Giotto was known as a master of design and composition, he submitted only a circle drawn freehand, the famous "0 of Giotto." Yet he was awarded the commission. Giotto's simple circle has been described as an ideal of elegance and perfection. ^[2]

At the request of the Pope, Giotto spent ten years in Rome. He was then employed by the King of Naples but little work remains from this period.

After 1320 Giotto returned to Florence, where he completed two fresco cycles and a number of altar pieces for the church of Santa Croce. Both of the fresco groups were badly damaged, though they show that in later years Giotto's style had become more ornate, perhaps as a response to the emerging International Gothic style. In 1334 Giotto was appointed chief architect to Florence Cathedral of which the Campanile bears his name, but was not completed to his design.

In his final years Giotto became friends with Boccaccio and Sacchetti, who featured him in their stories. In The Divine Comedy, Dante acknowledged the greatness of his living contemporary through the words of a painter in Purgatorio (XI, 94-96): "Cimabue believed that he held the field/In painting, and now Giotto has the cry,/ So the fame of the former is obscure."^[1] Giotto died while working on a "Last Judgement", including a portrait of Dante, for the Bargello Chapel in Florence.

He had three daughters: Bice, Caterina, and Lucia and three sons: Francesco, Niccola, and Donato