Painter of the Bible
Giotto di Bondone
Giotto di Bondone is the painter who broke the Byzantine spell over Western religious art.
Life & work
Giotto di Bondone is the painter who broke the Byzantine spell over Western religious art. Born around 1266 in the village of Vespignano in the hills above Florence, apprenticed (according to the long tradition first written down by Vasari) to the older Florentine master Cimabue, and active across central and northern Italy for the next half-century, he replaced the gold-ground hieratic figures of medieval mosaics and panel paintings with weighty, three-dimensional bodies in legible architectural and landscape settings. The whole subsequent history of European painting — from Masaccio to Raphael to Caravaggio — passes through his innovations.
The Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, painted in fresco between roughly 1303 and 1305 for the wealthy banker Enrico Scrovegni, is the supreme surviving expression of his mature style. Across thirty-eight scenes on the chapel walls, he tells the joined stories of the lives of Joachim, Anna, the Virgin Mary, and Christ, ringed by allegorical figures of the Virtues and Vices and crowned by a vast Last Judgment on the entrance wall. The Lamentation, the Kiss of Judas, the Raising of Lazarus, and the Entry into Jerusalem are among the most-reproduced images in the history of Christian art and remain the textbook examples of psychological portraiture in the religious image.
Beyond Padua, Giotto's hand is documented or persuasively attributed in the Upper Church of San Francesco in Assisi (the Saint Francis cycle of the late thirteenth century), the Bardi and Peruzzi Chapels in Santa Croce in Florence, the Stefaneschi Triptych for old Saint Peter's in Rome (now in the Vatican Pinacoteca), and the Ognissanti Madonna (Uffizi). He served as capomaestro of the Florence Cathedral works from 1334 and designed the lower courses of its bell tower — still called Giotto's Campanile — before his death in Florence in 1337.
His patrons were Franciscans, Dominicans, civic commissions, and individual lay donors of new wealth, and his subject matter was almost entirely the Christian narrative. He turned the saints of the late medieval world into recognizable people moving in plausible space, and the Bible into a sequence of stories the viewer could enter.
Notable works in detail
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Lamentation (The Mourning of Christ)
The Lamentation, painted in fresco around 1305 on the lower north wall of the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, is among the most reproduced and most pivotal images in the history of Western Christian painting. Giotto stages the moment after the Deposition: the body of Christ has been laid on a low rock at ground level, the Virgin holds her dead son's head in her lap, John flings his arms back in grief, and Mary Magdalene kneels at the feet. A diagonal rocky outcrop runs across the upper register and frames a sky filled with weeping angels, ten of them, each in a distinct posture of grief — clutching their faces, tearing their hair, holding their hands to their cheeks. The composition rejects the conventions of Italo-Byzantine tradition: the figures have weight and turn in space, the emotion is legible and individual rather than hieratic, and the Virgin is allowed to express the maternal grief that the older tradition had largely suppressed. The fresco is the central document of the Giottesque revolution that opens the entire history of European painting.
The Kiss of Judas, painted around 1305 in the second register of the Scrovegni Chapel walls in Padua, depicts the moment of the betrayal in Gethsemane. Judas embraces Christ, his cloak swinging out around them both to fill the center of the composition; their faces are inches apart in profile, Christ's calm and steady, Judas's set in a fixed and ugly stare. Around the central pair the soldiers crowd in with raised lances and torches, Peter on the left side cuts off the ear of the high priest's servant Malchus, and a hooded figure on the right blows a long shofar-like horn into the night. The yellow of Judas's cloak — read in late-medieval iconography as the color of treachery — became, through Giotto's invention, the standard color for the Judas figure in subsequent Italian painting. The composition is one of the most reproduced single panels of the entire Scrovegni cycle.
The Last Judgment fills the entire entrance wall of the Scrovegni Chapel — the wall the worshipper sees on leaving the chapel after Mass — in a vast composition painted around 1305. Christ enthroned in glory inside a great rainbow-colored mandorla occupies the center; the apostles flank him on either side; the resurrected dead rise from their graves below; the elect are led toward heaven on the left, and the damned tumble into a graphic, flaming hell on the right. At the foot of the cross in the lower-center foreground kneels Enrico Scrovegni — the wealthy banker who commissioned the chapel as a pious atonement for his father's documented usury — offering a model of the chapel itself to the Virgin and two attendant angels. The fresco is both a visual program of Christian eschatology and an unusually direct documentary record of the patron-painter relationship at the dawn of the Italian Trecento.
The Nativity, painted in the upper register of the Scrovegni Chapel walls around 1305, depicts the birth of Jesus in a thatched lean-to under a starry sky. Mary reclines on the straw with her newborn son in her arms; Joseph sits crouched at the foot of the manger, his head bowed and his hand to his cheek in a posture of weary contemplation that Giotto effectively invented for the Joseph figure and that subsequent Italian painting would imitate for two hundred years. The ox and the ass occupy the back of the stable; angels announce the birth to a small group of shepherds in the upper-right corner of the field. The composition combines the new Giottesque commitment to legible weighted figures and shallow architectural space with a tender naturalism in the Virgin's gesture toward the newborn that was unprecedented in earlier medieval Italian painting.
The Raising of Lazarus, painted in the second register of the south wall of the Scrovegni Chapel around 1305, illustrates the climactic miracle of John 11. Christ stands on the left side of the composition with his right arm extended in command; the bound, bandaged figure of Lazarus stands upright in the open tomb on the right side, just emerging from the dead; the sisters Martha and Mary kneel between them at Christ's feet. Behind Lazarus, two attendants hold their noses and avert their faces from the smell of decomposition that the Gospel text specifically names. The composition crystallizes Giotto's central pictorial achievement: the moving body in legible space, conveying scriptural narrative with both theological seriousness and observed human reaction. The Lazarus figure became the canonical visual treatment of the subject in Italian painting; almost every subsequent Quattrocento and Renaissance treatment of the scene refers back to this Paduan fresco.
The Marriage at Cana, painted in the upper register of the south wall of the Scrovegni Chapel around 1305, illustrates the first public miracle of Christ as recorded in John 2: the conversion of water into wine at the wedding feast. Giotto stages the scene at a long horizontal table running the full width of the composition, with the bride and groom seated under a baldachin at the right, Christ and his disciples ranged along the left, and the master of the feast tasting from one of six enormous jars in the center foreground. The Virgin sits next to her son; an attendant pours fresh water into another of the jars at the moment of the miracle. The composition is among the most reproduced from the Scrovegni cycle and a foundational treatment of a New Testament subject that the next four centuries of European painting — Veronese above all — would return to repeatedly as an excuse for elaborate banqueting scenes.
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