Giotto left many followers,[[12]] not one of whom at all understood his greatness. Like his friend Dante, he was distantly admired, but really loved only in bits. As perceptive a person as the artist biographer Vasari lavishes praise upon Giotto for his more trivial inventions—the Christ Child struggling out of the arms of the High Priest, for example. So Giotto’s followers picked unintelligently from his great accomplishment, choosing what the master himself would least have valued—his simple contours without his significant mass, his variety and vivacity without his warmth and restraint. On their own account they added complication. The sparse economy of Giotto’s best work could never have appealed to Florence at large. Something richer and gayer was wanted, more like Florentine life itself as it became after the general loosening up of manners and morals following the plague of 1348. Its chronicler, the author of the “Decameron,” fairly represents the new spirit. The best of the younger painters have indeed something of Boccaccio’s mentality—his light touch, his charm, his panoramic richness, his fluid and undisciplined grace. Thus arises what I may call the panoramic style of fresco painting—superficial, full of episodes and accessories, still religious in theme, but mundane in spirit, often cleverly conceived, and very superficially felt. These artists had grasped neither the meaning of Giotto’s drawing nor the beauty of his decorative formulas, they saw only his variety and energy. Meanwhile a great Sienese painter, Ambrogio Lorenzetti, a profound admirer of Giotto, had worked out a nobly spectacular form of painting in which the stage setting was elaborate and realistic. He painted much in Florence about 1334 and his novelties allured the new men. So we find fresco painting tending in a scenic direction, and panel painting following the same course more conservatively—not merely in Florence and Siena, but throughout Northern Italy as well.
Fig. 25. Giotto’s Assistant at Assisi. Flight into Egypt. Compare Figure [14].—Lower Church, Assisi.
Fig. 26. Taddeo Gaddi. St. Joachim Meets St. Anna. Compare Fig. 13a.—Baroncelli Chapel, Santa Croce.
Many of Giotto’s immediate pupils are mere names to us. Maso, whom the sculptor commentator Ghiberti praised for his sweetness, Stefano whom he dubbed the “ape of nature,” Puccio Capanna—their work must be at Assisi, but criticism has not succeeded in clearly disengaging it. The nameless master who executed the Franciscan allegories at Assisi and designed the stories of Christ’s youthful days, in the adjoining right transept, is the most accomplished and individual follower of Giotto. He works for grace, pathos, sumptuousness, and decorative breadth. He is a Giotto with the angles rubbed down. By comparing Giotto’s Flight of the Holy Family to Egypt, with the later version at Assisi, Figure [25], we may grasp the difference between master and scholar. Giotto is brusque, harsh, noble; the flight through a rocky defile gives a sense of urgency and peril; the composition carries forward like the ram of a battleship. In the version at Assisi the flight has become an attractive family excursion through a romantic valley; the mood is gentle, charming, unspecific. A moment in an epic has been attenuated into an idyl. This master never fails to express a dreamy sort of poetry, and in such compositions as the Massacre of the Innocents, and the Calvary, he commands a genuine pathos. He is exactly what Giotto might have been, had he skipped the strenuous Paduan phase, and become a decorator without the preliminary discipline of the draughtsman. There are reasons for thinking that this work was done by a shop assistant of Giotto’s, who for many years directed the decoration of the Lower Church at Assisi in Giotto’s stead. Some of the work in the Childhood of Christ, I believe, may be as late as 1330 to 1335.
Taddeo Gaddi is a more definite and less pleasing personality. He was Giotto’s godson and his assistant for twenty-four years, presumably from 1313 to 1337, as well as his artistic executor. Whether in panel or fresco, he was an admirable craftsman; in tempera, a fine colorist. His panels are widely scattered, some ten being in the United States; his frescoes, all that we need to note, are in Santa Croce. In the Baroncelli Chapel, just after Giotto’s death, Taddeo finished these frescoes of the early life of the Virgin, repeating themes which Giotto had used both in Padua and elsewhere in Santa Croce itself. His way of competing with Giotto is to stir and add and mix things up. Compare the meeting of Anna and Joachim at the Beautiful Gate in the two masters; Giotto at Padua is grave, noble, heartfelt; how he discriminates between the masculine clutch of the old husband and the tender embrace of the wife—how drastic the conception is, but also how clear and stately. Poor Taddeo on the other hand brings the sacred pair together with the bounce of a modern dance, Figure [26]. He brings no brains to bear, and almost no feelings, just a sprightly and wholly casual inventiveness. Certain delightful little panels with stories of Christ and St. Francis which he did in Giotto’s shop for the doors of the sacristy wardrobes of Santa Croce remind us of the pity that he ever ceased to be an interpreter of a greater man’s designs. In the fresco of Job’s trials, in the Campo Santo, Pisa, he seems nearly a great artist. Conceivably he worked on designs of his late master. At least he had a certain critical sense, for at an artist’s reunion at San Miniato, about 1360, he told Andrea Orcagna and the rest of the company that painting had constantly declined since Giotto and was declining every day. He transmitted, his sound craftsmanship to a son, Agnolo, who decorated the Choir of Santa Croce with the legends of the Cross. He carried down the panoramic style to the end of the 14th century, practicing it with more taste than his father, achieving a grace without much inwardness or force.
A later contemporary of Giotto’s, Buonamico Buffalmacco,[[13]] seems to have inherited something of Giotto’s power, but the identification of his work is very uncertain, and he lives for us chiefly as an egregious wag in the pages of the Italian story writers.
Fig. 27. Giottino. Deposition—Uffizi.