JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS — 'RENAISSANCE IN ITALY'
The tale told about Giotto's first essay in drawing might be chosen as a parable: he was not found beneath a church roof tracing a mosaic, but on the open mountain, trying to draw the portrait of the living thing committed to his care. What, therefore, Giotto gave to art was, before all things else, vitality. His Madonnas are no longer symbols of a certain phase of pious awe, but pictures of maternal love. The Bride of God suckles her divine infant with a smile, watches him playing with a bird, or stretches out her arms to take him when he turns crying from the hands of the circumcising priest. By choosing incidents like these from real home life, Giotto, through his painting, humanized the mysteries of faith, and brought them close to common feeling. Nor was the change less in his method than his motives. Before his day painting had been without composition, without charm of color, without suggestion of movement or the play of living energy. He first knew how to distribute figures in the given space with perfect balance, and how to mass them together in animated groups agreeable to the eye. He caught varied and transient shades of emotion, and expressed them by the posture of the body and the play of feature. The hues of morning and of evening served him. Of all painters he was most successful in preserving the clearness and the light of pure, well-tempered colors. His power of telling a story by gesture and action is unique in its peculiar simplicity. There are no ornaments or accessories in his pictures. The whole force of the artist has been concentrated on rendering the image of the life conceived by him. Relying on his knowledge of human nature, and seeking only to make his subject intelligible, no painter is more unaffectedly pathetic, more unconsciously majestic. While under the influence of his genius we are sincerely glad that the requisite science for clever imitation of landscape and architectural backgrounds was not forthcoming in his age. Art had to go through a toilsome period of geometrical and anatomical pedantry before it could venture, in the frescos of Michelangelo and Raphael, to return with greater wealth of knowledge on a higher level to the divine simplicity of its childhood in Giotto.
In the drawing of the figure Giotto was surpassed by many meaner artists of the fifteenth century. Nor had he that quality of genius which selects a high type of beauty and is scrupulous to shun the commonplace. The faces of even his most sacred personages are often almost vulgar. In his choice of models for saints and apostles we already trace the Florentine instinct for contemporary portraiture. Yet, though his knowledge of anatomy was defective and his taste was realistic, Giotto solved the great problem of figurative art far better than more learned and fastidious painters. He never failed to make it manifest that what he meant to represent was living. Even to the non-existent he gave the semblance of reality. We cannot help believing in his angels leaning waist-deep from the blue sky, wringing their hands in agony above the Cross, pacing like deacons behind Christ when he washes the feet of his disciples, or sitting watchful and serene upon the empty sepulcher. He was, moreover, essentially a fresco-painter, working with rapid decision on a large scale, aiming at broad effects, and willing to sacrifice subtlety to clearness of expression.
The health of Giotto's whole nature and his robust good sense are every-where apparent in his solid, concrete, human work of art. There is no trace of mysticism, no ecstatic piety, nothing morbid or hysterical in his imagination. Imbuing whatever he handled with the force and freshness of actual existence, he approached the deep things of the Christian faith and the legend of St. Francis in the spirit of a man bent simply on realizing the objects of his belief as facts. His allegories of 'Poverty,' 'Chastity,' and 'Obedience,' at Assisi, are as beautiful and powerfully felt as they are carefully constructed. Yet they conceal no abstruse spiritual meaning, but are plainly painted "for the poor laity of love to read." The artist-poet who colored the virginal form of Poverty, with the briars beneath her feet and the roses blooming round her forehead, proved by his well-known canzone that he was free from monastic Quixotism and took a practical view of the value of worldly wealth. His homely humor saved him from the exaltation and the childishness that formed the weakness of the Franciscan revival. Giotto in truth possessed a share of that power which belonged to the Greek sculptors. He embodied myths in physical forms adequate to their intellectual meaning.