Fig. 22. Giotto. St. Francis before the Soldan. Compare Fig. [11].—Bardi Chapel, Santa Croce.
Fig. 23. Giotto. Death of St. Francis.—Bardi Chapel, Santa Croce.
With this noble and deeply felt composition we virtually take leave of Giotto. For though he lived for many years yet, the works of his old age have largely perished. In the chapel at Assisi dedicated to St. Mary Magdalen are fine frescoes in which he surely had a leading part. From 1330 to 1333 he worked at Naples for King Robert of Anjou. Nothing remains from this visit except certain shrewd jests which the painter exchanged with the King. In 1334 Florence recalled him, and made him capomaestro of the Cathedral. Giotto designed the flower-like tower which rises lightly beside the temple of Our Lady of the Flower, invented and perhaps cut in marble certain reliefs on the base representing the crafts of men, but did not live to see the loveliest of bell towers finished. The task was completed by his pupil and artistic executor, Taddeo Gaddi. In the last years Giotto conceived vast compositions of a religious and political sort for the public buildings of the Commune. There were allegories of a strong and weak state, in the Bargello, the prison-fortress of the Captain of the People. These great symbolical designs are a kind of missing link between Giotto and the panoramic painters who followed him. We may find an echo of this lost work in the Civic Allegories in the Palazzo Pubblico of Siena. These were doing at the moment of Giotto’s death by a Sienese painter, Ambrogio Lorenzetti, who had studied the great Florentine master devoutly. Nothing of Giotto’s latest phase is left save a few figures in the battered frescoes in the Bargello which contain the idealized portrait of youthful Dante, Figure [24], and the gracious Dormition of the Virgin at Berlin, Frontispiece.
Fig. 24. Giotto. Dante, tracing from the ruined fresco in the Bargello.
Just before Giotto died, the tyrant of Milan borrowed him from Florence. Giotto soon returned, to die early in the year 1337, being seventy years old. Almost single-handed he had made Italian painting. He had lent life and warmth to the cold and academic reform of the Roman painters. He had expressed a maximum of feeling, without sacrifice of dignity. He had worked out beautiful and impressive forms of composition wherein symmetry and contrast met harmoniously. He had mastered the expression of mass on a plane surface with a certainty and energy no artist before had even imagined, and that few since have equalled. He had forecast and led the way in every manner of realistic figure painting.
Florence, when true to herself, could only repeat Giotto in one phase or another of his activity. In her casual and sprightly mood, she carries on the method of Giotto’s stories of St. Francis at Assisi, in mystical reflection and symbolism she must build on the allegories over St. Francis’ tomb and on the lost political frescoes; in her mood of strenuous search for reality she can but repeat the Paduan chapter of Giotto’s strivings, in rare moments of vision and fulfilment she will merely begin where the Santa Croce frescoes of Giotto ended.
However Giotto be ranked, and personally I see no greater artist on the rolls of history, his is indisputably the greatest single achievement; for no other artist who accomplished so much began with so little. It was no exaggeration that made Lorenzo Ghiberti regard the advent of Giotto as the coming to life of an art that had been buried for centuries. It is indeed the measured classicism of Giotto’s art that constitutes its greatness—its sweet and lucid reasonableness, its rugged yet disciplined strength. Seneca or Marcus Aurelius would have understood it perfectly, as Giotto himself, for his mellow wisdom and wit, would have been a welcome visitor at Horace’s Sabine farm. In his broad and flexible insight, his love of mankind, his clear perceptions of aims and ready acceptance of limitations, in his pathos without exaggeration, in his constructive skill without ostentation, in his simplicity without bareness, he is the authentic and indispensable link between the beauty of Greece and Rome and that of the Italian Golden Age. To know him is to know almost everything that is needful about older European painting, not to know him is to lack the very rudiments of an artistic education.