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 fatherÂ’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.
Vasari's Lives of the Artists: Giotto, Masaccio, Fra Filippo Lippi, Botticelli, Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, Titian
by Giorgio Vasari
from Dover Publications
Giotto: The Arena Chapel Frescoes : Illustrations, Introductory Essay, Backgrounds and Sources, Criticism (Norton Critical Studies in Art History)
from W. W. Norton & Company
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 and Mediaeval Art (Masters of Art)
Giotto (Masters of Italian Art Series)
by Anne Mueller
from Konemann
Giotto: Complete Works (Library of Great Masters)
by Luciano Bellosi
from Riverside Book Company
Knights of Art, Stories of the Italian Painters
by Amy Steedman
GIOTTO, . . . BORN 1276, DIED 1337
FRA ANGELICO, . . '' 1387, '' 1466
MASACCIO, . . . '' 1401, '' 1428
FRA FILIPPO LIPPI,. . '' 1412, '' 1469
SANDRO BOTTICELLI,. . '' 1446, '' 1610
DOMENICO GHIRLANDAIO, '' 1449, '' 1494
FILIPPINO LIP . . '' 1467, '' 1604
PIETRO PERUGINO, . '' 1446, '' 1624
LEONARDO DA VINCI,. . '' 1462, '' 1619
RAPHAEL, . . . '' 1483, '' 1620
MICHELANGELO, . . '' 1476, '' 1664
ANDREA DEL SARTO, . '' 1487, '' 1631
GIOVANNI BELLINI, . '' 1426, '' 1616
VITTORE CARPACCIO,. . '' 1470? '' 1619
GIORGIONE, . . '' 1477? '' 1610
TITIAN, . . . '' 1477, '' 1676
TINTORETTO, . . '' 1662, '' 1637
PAUL VERONESE, . . '' 1628, '' 1688
Giotto: The Scrovegni Chapel, Padua (Great Fresco Cycles of the Renaissance)
by Brock Cole
from George Braziller
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.
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