Giotto and the birth of Renaissance painting

Few painters have been credited with inventing an art. Giotto di Bondone (c. 1267–1337) is one of them. Trained in late Duecento Florence, working in Assisi, Rome, Padua, and Naples, and the personal friend of Dante Alighieri — who placed him in the Commedia among the proud — Giotto is the figure to whom historians of Italian art most often return when they need to mark the moment when the hieratic conventions of Byzantine panel painting and the stylised linearism of the Roman school gave way to a language of volume, weight, and human feeling. His frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, signed OPVS IOCTI and dated by inscription to the period beginning in 1303 and completed within a few years of 1305, are the earliest surviving monument of that language on an ambitious scale, and they remained, for at least two centuries, the touchstone by which painters in Italy and beyond measured their own work.

A painter in late Duecento Italy

Giotto’s career has to be set against the very different pictorial world he inherited. The dominant tradition of Italian panel painting at the end of the thirteenth century was, despite the precision of its conventions, fundamentally anti-naturalistic. The Byzantine icons that flooded the Mediterranean after the fall of Constantinople in 1204 and the Tuscan painters working in a related idiom used gold grounds, schematic drapery folds drawn in lines of white on darker colour, and figures that floated against an abstract space. Cimabue (c. 1240–c. 1302) was the most admired master of that idiom in late Duecento Florence; the apocryphal anecdote in which the young Giotto, then a shepherd boy in the Mugello, draws a sheep on a slab of rock and so attracts Cimabue’s notice, is the form in which Giorgio Vasari — writing his Lives in 1550, almost two hundred and fifty years after the events — chose to dramatise the transition from one art to another. The story is unreliable as biography but exact as mythology: the Tuscan workshop tradition of the trecento is unthinkable without the line that descends from Cimabue through Giotto.

The earliest documents of Giotto’s working life are a series of payments in the Roman archives. He was paid for work in the old St. Peter’s Basilica around 1298–1300, he signed (with the Roman painter Pietro Cavallini) a mosaic in the apse of old St. Peter’s that is known from drawings made before its destruction, and he is documented at the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. The most ambitious early project associated with him is the lost cycle in the Upper Church of San Francesco at Assisi, now generally assigned to Giotto and his shop on the basis of both style and the early Trecento dating that the recent restoration of the vaults has done much to confirm.

The Scrovegni cycle

The commission for the chapel — an aisled rectangular hall attached to the palace of Enrico Scrovegni, the wealthy Paduan banker whose father Reginaldo had been notorious as a usurer and who was himself the subject of a remorseless passage in Dante’s Inferno (xvii, 64–75) — gave Giotto a single enclosed space to design from the foundations up. The plan, the load-bearing structure, the fictive architecture painted on the entrance wall, the dado of allegorical Virtues and Vices that runs around the lower walls, the great blue dado above it studded with medallions, and three superimposed narrative registers of frescoes on the side walls — all of these are part of a single pictorial argument. Vasari reports that Giotto refused to receive anything but the rental income from the chapel in payment, a story that may well be a humanist flourish on the part of the patron’s heirs, but it captures the unusual character of the project: not a commission for a portable altarpiece, but the shaping of a place.

The narrative cycle begins on the upper register of the entrance wall with the Annunciation to Joachim, the parents of the Virgin, and proceeds chronologically along the side walls to the Nativity of the Virgin, the Presentation in the Temple, the Flight into Egypt, and the Massacre of the Innocents, before turning to the public life of Christ on the long wall facing the altar, the Crucifixion at the centre, and culminating on the entrance wall in the great Last Judgment with the Scrovegni family presented to the Virgin and Child. Across the fictive marble dado the seven Virtues on the liturgical north wall answer the seven Vices on the south wall; the chromatic rhyme, with Charity and Envy as the two extremes, is one of the most studied visual structures in the history of Western art.

A new pictorial language

What Giotto’s contemporaries recognised in the cycle was not the novelty of its iconography but the novelty of its body. The Lamentation over the dead Christ on the long wall is the locus classicus. The dead Christ lies across the foreground on a white shroud; the Virgin bends over him, supported by John and the other holy women; the Magdalene clutches the feet of Christ; at the lower right, in a gesture that every later painter in Italy was to know, Joseph of Arimathea turns his head away, the two arms describing a sudden, twisted diagonal. There is no gold ground, no halo framing a flat gold disc: the haloes are tilted so that they can be read as discs in space, the bodies of the mourners have measurable weight, and the rocky landscape behind them recedes in registers of increasingly blue tone that anticipate, by two generations, the systematic use of aerial perspective.

The technical means by which Giotto achieved these effects were understood only partially until the cleaning and conservation campaigns of the late twentieth century. The fresco surface, worked in true buon fresco on a single day per giornata, has been preserved from later over-painting in ways that most trecento frescoes have not; the result is a colour range of unusual warmth, especially in the umber and ochre tones of the ground. The modelling of the bodies depends on the slow gradation of light and shadow, and the proportions of the figure follow a system — perhaps unconsciously — that is close to that of late antique wall painting rather than that of Byzantine icons. The compositional methods are, as James Stubblebine (1969) and Florens Deuchler (1971) demonstrated in their monograph studies, the first step toward the unified pictorial space of the Quattrocento.

The narrative method of the cycle is not only pictorial but architectural: the painted architecture of the fictive chapel, with its pilasters, its coffered soffit, and its open arcades, anticipates by a generation the Brunelleschian classicism of the Quattrocento. John White (The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space, 1957, 3rd edn. 1987) treats the Scrovegni cycle as the first sustained example of a systematic pictorial space in the European tradition; Samuel Edgerton (The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective, 1975) treats it as the first sustained example of a rational pictorial space. The fictive marble dado, the fictive sky, and the fictive architecture of the cycle together constitute, on the most cautious reading, the most ambitious single pictorial argument of the European Middle Ages.

Workshop, followers, and the difficulty of attribution

The expansion of the Giotto question since the 1960s has complicated any simple account of “the artist.” The great monograph of Luciano Bellosi (1995) and the work of Angelo Tartuferi on the Assisi vaults, of Giulia Sinibaldi on the panel paintings, and of Giancarlo Gentilini on the crosses have together shown that what used to be called “Giotto’s workshop” was in fact a confederation of highly individual painters — among them the Master of the Stefaneschi Altarpiece, the Master of the Vele of Assisi, and the young Taddeo Gaddi — to whom Giotto’s designs were transmitted, in some cases at one remove, through drawings or cartoons. The implication, which Baxandall (Giotto and the Orators, 1971) underlined, is that what we call “Giotto’s art” was as much a way of making available to a workshop as the work of an individual hand.

That this is so is itself one of the most important facts about Trecento painting, and it is the precondition for the Giottoesque vocabulary that runs through the work of Bernardo Daddi, Andrea Pisano, Maso di Banco, and Giovanni del Biondo in Florence, and that surfaces, sometimes unexpectedly, in the southern workshops of Pietro Cavallini and Pietro Lorenzetti in Rome and Siena, and in the international Gothic art of Simone Martini in Avignon.

A historiography in three acts

It is impossible to write about Giotto without acknowledging the historiography. The first great act is Vasari’s: in the Lives of 1550 and 1568, Giotto is the founder of the Tuscan school, the man who “opened the gate” of the natural way of painting, and the moral point of departure for the whole Rinascita. The second act is Jacob Burckhardt’s, in the Cultur der Renaissance in Italien (1860), where Giotto is the first witness to the modern individual and the discovery of personality in Western art; this reading, contested by Wallace K. Ferguson in The Renaissance in Historical Thought (1948) and by Millard Meiss in his Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death (1951), was rehabilitated for the next generation of art historians by Millard Meiss’s account of Giotto and by the more cautious historicism of Frederick Hartt and John White. The third act, still ongoing, is the post-1960s re-attribution work that I have sketched above, and the conservation science of the Scrovegni Chapel that has done so much to recover the original surface and so to clarify Giotto’s actual practice.

To write about Giotto well in 2026 is, then, to hold all three acts in suspension at once: the trecento patron’s, the risorgimento historian’s, and the contemporary conservator’s. The Scrovegni Chapel, still one of the most visited monuments in Europe, continues to make the question vivid.