Giotto contributions to the renaissance

Summary of Giotto

Giotto is one of the most important artists in the development of Western art. Pre-empting by a century many of the preoccupations and concerns of the Italian High Renaissance, his paintings ushered in a new era in painting that brought together religious antiquity and the developing idea of Renaissance Humanism. Indeed, his influence on European art was such that many historians believe it was not matched until Michelangelo took over his mantle some two centuries on.

Giotto is best known for the way he explored the possibilities of perspective and pictorial space, and in so doing, he brought a new sense of realism to his religious parables. His interest in humanism saw him explore the tension between biblical iconography and the everyday existence of lay worshippers; bringing them closer to God by making art more relevant to their lived experience. His figures were thus infused with an emotional quality not seen before in high art, while his architectural settings were rendered according to the optical laws of proportion and perspective.

Accomplishments

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Giotto

ca. 1267 - 1337

The Italian painter Giotto di Bondone was born in Vespignano near Florence, where he died. He is often appreciated for his innovations in painting. Painting had got into a rut, and Giotto created a first impetus for the Italian Renaissance.

Giotto imbued his figures with personality and tried to give expression to their faces and bearing, as is clearly visible from his major work: the frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, a.k.a. the Arena Chapel. Giotto may very well have been the first painter succeeding in creating unified compositions: there is unity between the figures and their surroundings and unity among the figures, interacting as they do through gesture and emotion.

Giotto's work is celebrated during his lifetime. Dante proclaims him larger than Cimabue, the Italian artist considered the most important until then, and probably Giotto's teacher.

Few works may be ascribed to him with absolute certainty: a series of frescoes in Padua, more frescoes and altarpieces in the Santa Croce in Florence and a painting of the Madonna, presently on di

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Biography

Florentine painter and architect. He was already recognized by Dante as the leading artist of his day. His significance to the Renaissance can be gauged from the fact that not only the leaders in the early 15th-century transformation of the arts, such as Masaccio, but the key figures of the High Renaissance, such as Raphael and Michelangelo - one of whose early studies of Giotto's frescoes in the Peruzzi Chapel, Santa Croce, has survived - were still learning from him and partly founding their style on his example. The reasons for this are twofold. Firstly, his art is notable for its clear, grave, simple solutions to the basic problems of the representation of space and of the volume, structure, and solidity of 3-dimensional forms, and above all of the human figure. Secondly, he was a genius at getting to the heart of whatever episode from sacred history he was representing, at cutting it down to its essential, dramatic core, and at finding the compositional means to express its innermost spiritual meaning and its psychological effects in terms of simple areas of pain