Vasari's Lives of the Artists: Giotto, Masaccio, Fra Filippo Lippi, Botticelli, Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, Titian
by Giorgio Vasari
from Dover Publications
Giotto Di Bondone: 1267-1337 (Taschen Basic Art)
by Norbert Wolf
from Taschen
A central figure of the Early Renaissance
According to legend, he was discovered by Cimabue as a boy, sketching his father's sheep. Giotto di Bodone (1266-1337) was the most famous and influential painter of his generation in Italy. As the pioneer of modern painting, his impact was so enormous that his artist colleagues in Florence, however capable, were left struggling to keep up. His services were engaged by numerous high officials and princes, including the Pope and his cardinals, King Robert of Anjou, and the Scaligeri and Visconti. All these works, including the large secular cycles, are lost. Amongst his surviving works, his masterpieces are undoubtedly his decoration, from 1303 to 1305, of the private chapel built by the financier Enrico Scrovegni for his family in a former Roman amphitheatre in Padua, the fresco cycle in the Upper Church of Assisi, and the frescos in side chapels of Santa Croce in Florence. The simplicity and strength of his forms, as well as the humanism he infused in his works, set him apart from his Byzantine contemporaries and at the forefront of Italian painting in the early years of the Renaissance.
Giotto: The Scrovegni Chapel
by Claudio Bellinati
from Grafiche Vianello Srl
Giotto di Bondone, 1267-1337, is best known for the frescoes he painted in the Arena Chapel, Padua, his best preserved work. This notable series of 38 frescoes illustrate the life of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary and show Giotto's uncompromising rigor, realism and inspired imagination. In this exquisite, magnificently illustrated volume, Claudio Bellinati's texts help the reader to discover the literal, poetic and artistic significance of every scene. The elegant layout accompanies each fresco with the passage from the Gospels or Apocrypha to which it refers, and an iconographic reading. For the first time, there is a complete analysis of Giotto's magnificent narrative. Three small mirrors still decorate the halo of Christ in Judgment today. When the morning light came from the east and sun's rays, shining through the glass window fell on Christ's halo a new splendor spread through the chapel, imbuing the scene with solemnity, centrality and beauty. It was then that the mysterium Mariae
Giotto: The Frescoes of the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua
by Giuseppe Basile
from Skira
Preceded by long and complex preparatory work on the building and the surroundings, the intervention of conservation on the mural decoration has made it possible to arrest the acceleration of the process of decay. This decay was chiefly the result of the combined action of damp and pollution, but had been further aggravated by the use of unsuitable restoration materials during the intervention carried out in the early sixties.
Once the problem that had prompted the decision to intervene on Giotto's cycle had been resolved, it was thought only proper to respond to the need to restore the paintings as much as possible to their original state.
The result has been to render the revolutionary spatial layout of the work more legible, along with the formal values through which Giotto expressed himself, in particular the quality of his coloring, something that is usually (and inexplicably) undervalued.
But several genuine discoveries have also emerged, such as his use of the technique required to make mock marble ("marmorino" or "Roman stucco") and of oil to "bind" the white lead, which as a consequence has not undergone any process of alteration. This has revealed, at an unparalleled level (at least as far as our current knowledge is concerned), effects of sunlight or luminosity that it would be hard to regard as produced by chance.
Victims and Villains in Vasari's Lives (Bettie Allison Rand Lectures in Art History)
by Andrew T. Ladis
from The University of North Carolina Press
Giorgio Vasari's The Lives of the Artists (1550, 1568) has been a key subject of study for students of the Italian Renaissance over the hundreds of years since its publication. It has maintained a powerful grip on the historical imagination and continues to influence the way scholars treat the Renaissance, its artists, and the entire intellectual enterprise of Western art. Focusing on Vasari's literary and narrative achievements, Andrew Ladis turns to Vasari's villains, rather than his heroes, to demonstrate the biographer's foremost interest in glorifying Michelangelo.
Approaching Lives on Vasari's terms--as the grand story of the rebirth and triumph of art in Italy--Ladis argues that Vasari was not a mere compiler of facts, but a shrewd, self-confident author aware of the power of metaphor. With a literary reading of the text, Ladis analyzes Vasari's motives and methods as an attempt to portray the great Michelangelo as a Christlike exemplum of ultimate light and goodness. Through biographic details both real and invented, Vasari presents all other artists as various players with varying degrees of heroic and villainous value. Antiheroic characters such as Buffalmacco, Lippi, and Castagno, Ladis argues, serve to accentuate the contrasting greatness of Michelangelo.
Giotto: The Arena Chapel Frescoes : Illustrations, Introductory Essay, Backgrounds and Sources, Criticism (Norton Critical Studies in Art History)
from W. W. Norton & Company
Giotto, Master Painter and Architect: Florence (Giotto and the World of Early Italian Art: An Anthology of Literaure)
This four-volume set provides the most comprehensive collection of modern scholarly literature on the artist and his work. Assembling writings that are as disparate as they are sometimes hard to retrieve, it permits readers to consider the state of scholarship on a variety of specific problems surround Giotto's life and sheds light on larger historical issue concerning early Italian art and culture. In doing so, the series lays bare the methodological preoccupations of scholars since the nineteenth century. Above all, matters of connoisseurship and the larger question of the nature of the matter's art have governed the study of Giotto. Perhaps in part because of the intractability of the problems involved in arriving at an agreed-upon catalogue and chronology for Giotto, the Arena Chapel has served the chief means of demonstrating Giotto's pictorial subtlety, his dramatic range, and his intellectual depth. Curiously, the Arena Chapel came to be regarded as the cornerstone of Giotto's genius only in the nineteenth century. The notion of the essentially sculptural character of Giotto's art, pervasive in modern scholarship, is likewise recent, acquiring canonical status thanks to Bernard Berenson's celebration of "tactile values" in the Ognissanti Madonna.
The third volume considers Giotto's career, both as a painter and as an architect, in his native Florence.
Giotto
by Francesca Flores D'Arcais
from Abbeville Press
Giotto: The Scrovegni Chapel, Padua (Great Fresco Cycles of the Renaissance)
by Brock Cole
from George Braziller
Assisi Problem and the Art of Giotto
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