Giottos biography
Giotto, a biography full of legends
Giotto di Bondone (1266/7-1337) is considered one of the greatest artists of the Medieval Age and his biography is rich of curious anecdotes, but many of them are legends. According to the tradition, Giotto was born in Vicchio, in the Mugello, in a family of farmers that moved to Florence when he was a child. His parents gave him in custody to Cimabue, the famous painter. According to another version, Cimabue noticed the young Giotto while he was drawing a sheep on a rock, because he worked as a shepherd in the country near Vicchio.
Many stories talk about Giotto’s extraordinary artistic abilities. He was considered very able in freehand drawing: according to Vasari, he was able to draw perfect circumferences without compass: this is the famous “Giotto’s O”.
Another story talks again about Cimabue: while he was away, his pupil has drawn a lifelike fly on the painting he was working on and he tried to brush it off, because it seemed real. Because of this fact he understood that his pupil had outdid him: it was time for Giotto to open his own workshop!
We don’t know for sure if Giotto was Cimabue’s pupil, even if they are often quoted together, above all for stylistic reasons. If this apprenticeship was true, Giotto could had follow Cimabue in Rome: here maybe he knew Arnolfo di Cambio, that made him work in Assisi. These are theories, because we don’t know nothing about some periods of Giotto’s life.
For example, it is said that he was a very ugly man: probably this rumor is due to his origin. Deformities were very common in the countryside. Even if he was a great artist in town, people remembered his origin.
We know some documents that describe a man very smart, that interpreted the new social class from the artistic point of view: the bourgeoisie. The concreteness of his art was very appreciated and he worked in some important Italian towns as Florence, Assisi, Rome, Bologna, Padua, Rimini…
However he
Giotto Di Bondone Biography In Details
Early years
Giotto was probably born in a hilltop farmhouse, perhaps at Colle di Romagnano or Romignano; since 1850 a tower house in nearby Colle Vespignano, a hamlet 35 kilometres north of Florence, has borne a plaque claiming the honour of his birthplace, an assertion commercially publicised. He was the son of a man named Bondone, described in surviving public records as "a person of good standing". Most authors accept that Giotto was his real name, but it may have been an abbreviation of Ambrogio (Ambrogiotto) or Angelo (Angelotto).
The year of his death is calculated from the fact that Antonio Pucci, the town crier of Florence, wrote a poem in Giotto's honour in which it is stated that he was 70 at the time of his death. However, the word "seventy" fits into the rhyme of the poem better than would have a longer and more complex age, so it is possible that Pucci used artistic license.
In his Lives of the Artists, Giorgio Vasari relates that Giotto was a shepherd boy, a merry and intelligent child who was loved by all who knew him. He was discovered by the great Florentine painter Cimabue, drawing pictures of his sheep on a rock. They were so lifelike that Cimabue approached Bondone and asked if he could take the boy as an apprentice. Many scholars today consider the story legendary and think it more probable that Giotto's family was well-off, and had moved to Florence where Giotto was sent to Cimabue's workshop as an apprentice.
Vasari recounts a number of such stories about Giotto's skill. He writes that when Cimabue was absent from the workshop, his young apprentice painted such a lifelike fly on the face of the painting that Cimabue was working on, that he tried several times to brush it off. Vasari also relates that when the Pope sent a messenger to Giotto, asking him to send a drawing to demonstrate his skill, Giotto drew, in red paint, a circle so perfect that it se Italian painter and architect (c. 1267 – 1337) For other uses, see Giotto (disambiguation). Giotto di Bondone (Italian:[ˈdʒɔttodibonˈdoːne]; c. 1267 – January 8, 1337), known mononymously as Giotto, was an Italian painter and architect from Florence during the Late Middle Ages. He worked during the Gothic and Proto-Renaissance period. Giotto's contemporary, the banker and chronicler Giovanni Villani, wrote that Giotto was "the most sovereign master of painting in his time, who drew all his figures and their postures according to nature" and of his publicly recognized "talent and excellence".Giorgio Vasari described Giotto as making a decisive break from the prevalent Byzantine style and as initiating "the great art of painting as we know it today, introducing the technique of drawing accurately from life, which had been neglected for more than two hundred years". Giotto's masterwork is the decoration of the Scrovegni Chapel, in Padua, also known as the Arena Chapel, which was completed around 1305. The fresco cycle depicts the Life of the Virgin and the Life of Christ. It is regarded as one of the supreme masterpieces of the Early Renaissance. The fact that Giotto painted the Arena Chapel and that he was chosen by the Commune of Florence in 1334 to design the new campanile (bell tower) of the Florence Cathedral are among the few certainties about his life. Almost every other aspect of it is subject to controversy: his birth date, his birthplace, his appearance, his apprenticeship, the order in which he created his works, whether he painted the famous frescoes in the Upper Basilica of Saint Francis in Assisi, and his burial place. Tradition says that Giotto was born in a farmhouse, perhaps at Colle di Romagnano or Romignano. Since 1850, a tower house in nearby Colle Vespignano has borne Know as “the great Giotto”, Giotto di Bondone was the leading artist at the start of Italy’s Renaissance and the Florentine School of painting. According to Giorgio Vasari (1511 – 1574), who dedicated a chapter to the painter in his The Lives of the Artists, Giotto was the tipping point of Italian art from the Byzantine style, into the Renaissance. It is said that that last great painter of the Byzantine era, Cimabue (1240 – 1302), discovered a young Giotto in his rawest form. As written by Vasari: “One day Cimabue was going about his business between Florence and Vespignano, and he came upon Giotto who, while his sheep were grazing, was sketching one of them in a lifelike way with a slightly pointed rock upon a smooth and polished stone without having learned how to draw it from anyone other than Nature. This caused Cimabue to stop in amazement…” It is from here that Cimabue brought Giotto into the bustling activity of the art world in Florence, where he excelled beyond measure of the time. How much of this story is true, is open for debate, but it is true that Giotto apprenticed in Cimabue’s studio in Florence. Vasari’s other account of Cimabue and Giotto tells of the young artist painting a fly so life-like that Cimabue continually tried to brush it off the canvas. He also travelled with Cimabue to Rome and there may be several works that Giotto contributed to in Cimabue’s commissions. His earliest individual works include a fresco of the Annunciation and his quite large Crucifix, painted for the Santa Maria Novella in Florence. Giotto also painted in Rome from 1297 – 1300 and created his Badia Polyptych for the high altar of the Badia in Florence, which now hangs in the Uffizi Gallery. Giotto’s masterpiece is often considered the fresco cycles he painted for the Scrovegni Chapel or Arena Chapel in Padua, with depictions of salvation seen in the Life of Christ and the Life of the Virgin and also a Last Judgment piece. The combined works, complete Giotto
Early life and career
Giotto