The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (191 page)

Giottesques
.

A term applied to the 14th-cent. followers of
Giotto
. The best-known of the ‘Giotteschi’ are the Florentines Taddeo
Gaddi
,
Maso di Banco
, Bernardo
Daddi
, and to a lesser extent the
Master of St Cecilia
. Giotto's most loyal follower was Maso, who concentrated on the essential and maintained the master's high seriousness.

 
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(
c.
1267–1337).
Florentine painter and architect. Giotto is regarded as the founder of the central tradition of Western painting because his work broke free from the stylizations of
Byzantine art
, introducing new ideals of naturalism and creating a convincing sense of pictorial space. His momentous achievement was recognized by his contemporaries (Dante praised him in a famous passage of
The Divine Comedy
, where he said he had surpassed his master
Cimabue
), and in about 1400 Cennino
Cennini
wrote ‘Giotto translated the art of painting from Greek to Latin.’ In spite of his fame and the demand for his services, no surviving painting is documented as being by him. His work, indeed, poses some formidable problems of attribution, but it is universally agreed that the fresco cycle in the Arena Chapel at Padua is by Giotto , and it forms the starting-point for any consideration of his work. The Arena Chapel (so-called because it occupies the site of a Roman arena) was built by Enrico Scrovegni in expiation for the sins of his father, a notorious usurer mentioned by Dante . It was begun in 1303 and Giotto's frescos are usually dated
c.
1305–6. They run right round the interior of the building; the west wall is covered with a
Last Judgement
, there is an
Annunciation
over the chancel arch, and the main wall areas have three tiers of paintings representing scenes from the life of the Virgin and her parents, St Anne and St Joachim, and events from the Passion of Christ. Below these scenes are figures personifying Virtues and Vices, painted to simulate stone
reliefs
—the first
grisailles
. The figures in the main narrative scenes are about half life-size, but in reproduction they usually look bigger because Giotto's conception is so grand and powerful. His figures have a completely new sense of three-dimensionality and physical presence, and in portraying the sacred events he creates a feeling of moral weight rather than divine splendour. He seems to base the representations upon personal experience, and no artist has surpassed his ability to go straight to the heart of a story and express its essence with gestures and expressions of unerring conviction.
The other major fresco cycle associated with Giotto's name is that on the Life of St Francis in the Upper Church of S. Francesco at Assisi. Whether Giotto painted this is not only the central problem facing scholars of his work, but also one of the most controversial issues in the history of art. The St Francis frescos are clearly the work of an artist of great stature (their intimate and humane portrayals have done much to determine posterity's mental image of the saint), but the stylistic differences between these works and the Arena Chapel frescos seem to many critics so pronounced that they cannot accept a common authorship. Attempts to attribute other frescos at Assisi to Giotto have met with no less controversy (see also
MASTER OF THE ST FRANCIS LEGEND
and
MASTER OF ST CECILIA
). There is a fair measure of agreement about the frescos associated with Giotto in Sta Croce in Florence. He probably painted in four chapels there, and work survives in the Bardi and Peruzzi chapels, probably dating from the 1320s. The frescos are in very uneven condition (they were whitewashed in the 18th cent.), but some of those in the Bardi Chapel on the life of St Francis remain deeply impressive. Nothing survives of Giotto's work done for Robert of Anjou in Naples, and the huge mosaic of the Ship of the Church (the
Navicella
) that he designed for Old St Peter's in Rome has been so thoroughly altered that it tells us nothing about his style. In Rome he would have seen the work of Pietro
Cavallini
, which was as important an influence on him as that of his master Cimabue.
Several panel paintings bear Giotto's signature, but it is generally agreed that the signature is a trademark showing that the works came from Giotto's shop rather than an indication of his personal workmanship. Similarly, the Stefaneschi Altarpiece (Vatican Mus.) is connected with Giotto in a credible early source, but it is now regarded as having only tenuous links with him. On the other hand, the
Ognissanti Madonna
(Uffizi, Florence,
c.
1305–10) is neither signed nor firmly documented, but is a work of such grandeur and humanity that it is universally accepted as Giotto's. Among the other panels attributed to him, the finest is the Crucifix in Sta Maria Novella, Florence. On account of his great fame as a painter, Giotto was appointed architect to Florence Cathedral in 1334; he began the celebrated campanile, but his design was altered after his death. In the generation ofter his death he had an overwhelming influence on Florentine painting; it declined with the growth of
International Gothic
, but his work was later an inspiration to
Masaccio
, and even to
Michelangelo
. These two giants were his true spiritual heirs.

 
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Giovanni da Maiano
.

See
BENEDETTO DA MAIANO
.

 
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(active 1420–82).
One of the most attractive and idiosyncratic painters of the Sienese School, sometimes called Giovanni dal Poggio, from the district of the city where he lived. Little is known of his life, but there is a considerable number of surviving works by him—all small-scale religious panels. He may have been taught by
Taddeo di Bartolo
and was influenced notably by
Gentile da Fabriano
and
Sassetta
, but his style is highly personal and engaging, with rather whimsical figures inhabiting strange landscapes. After centuries of neglect his reputation was revived by
Berenson
, who called him ‘the El
Greco
of the
quattrocento
’.

 
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