the life of Saint Francis; the Peruzzi Chapel, painted in
fresco secco and now in poor condition, depicts three
scenes each of the lives of saints John the Evangelist
and John the Baptist, themes probably suggested by
the patron’s name, Giovanni Peruzzi. These two cycles
are key works in any reconstruction of Giotto’s career,
but both lack any documentation whatsoever. The only
certainty is that they postdate the cycle in the Arena
Chapel and give us our best indication of Giotto’s later
activity. Most of Giotto’s documented works— such
as his frescoes for the Lateran Palace in Rome, painted
for the jubilee year of 1300; and the Navicella mosaic
for the facade of old Saint Peter’s in Rome (possibly
1310), Giotto’s most celebrated composition in his
own day—survive only in much altered fragments. His
signed works, such as the Baroncelli Altar-piece (in
Santa Croce, Florence; possibly 1328) and the Bolo-
gna Polyptych (in the Pinacoteca, Bologna; possibly
1332), are manifestly not products of his own hand but
rather workshop assemblages probably following his
designs.
Giotto’s great success and fortune in his day is at-
tested to by numerous known circumstances: the large
workshop under his training, including such subse-
quently successful artists as Bernardo Daddi, Maso di
Banco, and Taddeo Gaddi; his numerous land purchases
and business transactions, recorded in various archives,
including guarantees of loans and the lease of a loom
for a considerable sum; and his extensive sojourns in the
Italian peninsula and beyond. He went to Rome, Rimini,
Padua, Naples (from 1328 to 1334; there, he was made
fi rst painter to King Robert of Anjou), Milan (where he
was sent by the commune of Florence to work in the
service of Duke Azzone Sforza in 1336), and possibly
Avignon. Late in life Giotto was honored with appoint-
ments as head of works at Santa Reparata, the cathedral
of Florence; and as chief engineer to the city of Florence,
in which capacity he designed the campanile, or bell
tower, of the cathedral.
The magnitude of Giotto’s accomplishment is still
breathtaking. His works have a physical and psychologi-
cal naturalism that seems thoroughly removed from me-
dieval conventions of stylization and abstraction. When
one compares Cimabue’s Santa Croce Crucifi x (1280s,
Museo dell’Opera di Santa Croce, Florence), which was
already quite innovative for the suppleness of its forms,
with Giotto’s Santa Maria Novella Cross (1301–1302,
Santa Maria Novella, Florence), executed only some
twenty years later, a vast gulf seems to separate the two.
Cimabue’s gracefully abstracted symbolic presence of
Christ on the cross contrasts with the corpse depicted
by Giotto—the body extended forward in space, the
legs buckled under its weight, the head hanging down,
and the face in a death grimace. Giotto’s brutal render-
ing is, in fact, the fi rst thoroughly realistic portrayal of
Christ crucifi ed in the history of Christian imagery. His
Madonna and Child Enthroned, painted for the church
of the Ognissanti in Florence (1306–1310; now in the
Uffi zi, Florence), advances this insistent realism even
further. Through sheer volume, the Madonna conveys
a commanding physical presence. Great pleats of cloth
clearly articulate the massive form of the body beneath
the drapery, and the angels and saints overlap one an-
other in space as they attentively turn their gaze on the
mother and child. No longer a miniature adult as in Ci-
mabue’s Santa Trinita Maestà (c. 1280, Uffi zi, Florence),
Giotto’s Christ child has the chubby constitution of a real
infanr. Perhaps most compelling for the viewer’s sense
of communion with the divine, especially in comparison
with the slightly earlier maestàs of Cimabue or Duccio,
the throne in Giotto’s Madonna and Child Enthroned
truly seems to surround and sustain the great bulk of the
Madonna, and to project forward believably into space.
A series of steps leads logically up to the Madonna and
child; the viewer is given the impression of implicit ac-
cessibility to the divine by this clear path of approach.
In fact, the Ognissanti Madonna and Child Enthroned
is ingeniously designed as a participatory work of art,
for the Christ child’s blessing is actuated only when
viewers stand before the altarpiece, completing the circle
of adoration that has been left open in order to include
them. No earlier maestà had made the presence of the
divine so persuasive, and subsequent treatments such as
Duccio’s great Maestà (1309–1311) for the high altar
of the cathedral in Siena were perhaps infl uenced by
Giotto’s spatially convincing design.
Besides his volumetric and spatial constructions,
Giotto man ifested a genius for narrative drama; his
scenes of the Life of the Virgin and Christ in the Arena
Chapel or the Life of Saint Francis in the Bardi Chapel in
Santa Croce display some of the canniest understanding
of human nature ever set down in paint. This physical
and psychological realism is perfectly congruent with
the evangelical designs of a contemporary movement:
the mendicant orders, such as the Dominicans and above
all the Franciscans, that earnestly sought to educate the
public in the message of the faith through empathic
meditation on the lives of the central protagonists of the
Christian saga of salvation, especially Mary and Christ.
Giotto’s sponsorship chiefl y by Franciscan patronage
throughout his career was certainly no coincidence, for
his lifelike rendering of biblical narratives was precisely
the kind of physical cue the Franciscans sought to effect
a union between layman and creed.
One of the most intractable problems in art history
has been unraveling the mystery of Giotto’s beginnings.
To develop his revolution, Giotto clearly had to draw
on extant sources and ideas. Most obvious is his debt
to the sculptors Arnolfo di Cambio, Nicola Pisano, and
Nicola’s son Giovanni Pisano, whose works of the laterGIOTTO DI BONDONE