Giotto

by Harry Quilter

Leaving the question of the actual authorship undecided just now, notice how far this hypothesis, besides having strong internal evidence in its favour, goes to solve the difficulties of this matter; by it we account easily and naturally for the Giottesque qualities which we find in these works, and also for their comparative feeble significance. And by the effort to combine the Byzantine manner of Cimabue with the simplicity of Giotto, we account for all the very inferior architecture with which these pictures are crowded: architecture which is to a certain extent Giottesque in form, but seems to be wholly conventional in colouring and arrangement.

Giotto would naturally say to his pupil something of this sort: "Look here, Gaddi, this a great chance for you to distinguish yourself; mind you make the most of it. Don't forget that what you have to do is to complete Cimabue's work; you must not make his compositions look more absurd and unnatural than you can help; above all, your work must be in keeping with his in colour, or you'll spoil the church. Mind you preserve the character of the architecture, and keep it uniform throughout; and if you let your work be a little conventional, it will be all the better."

So we may imagine Giotto talking to his pupil; and the compositions are exactly such as might have been produced after such an exhortation, by an earnest, but not very brilliant pupil, in attempting to combine as much as possible of the character of Giotto's work, with the form of Cimabue's compositions.

Indeed, these frescoes frequently fall between the two stools of naturalism and conventionalism, and have the merits of neither. The architecture is throughout utterly absurd, worse, because not so refined as that of the Byzantine, and quite without the beauty of Giotto; an effort towards the simplicity of the buildings in the frescoes of the Arena Chapel being nevertheless observable, though it results only in a toy-shop architecture of the lowest order, yellow and blue towers being stuck one against another.

The figures, too, show the attempt to depict emotion, but without success; and lastly, the colouring, as at present seen, is crude, to the verge of discordancy; but upon this last it would be unsafe to lay much stress, as it is impossible to say what deterioration may not have resulted from the damp, which in some places has actually obliterated the composition altogether. This execution by a pupil would also account for Giotto having restricted himself to shades of grey, green, and blue in the two frescoes at the end of the chapel to which I have above referred. The subjects of these are St. Francis preaching to the Birds, and St. Francis' Dream; and amongst all the Giottos I have seen, there is no more harmonious piece of colouring than in the last named of these works.[67]

There is one piece of corroborative evidence in favour of these works being by Taddeo Gaddi that I may quote for what it is worth, which is, that in the series of panels in the Gallery at Berlin which formerly were part of the frescoes in the Santa Croce of Florence, and which are certainly, according to Crowe and Cavalcaselle, the work of Gaddi; "the subjects are, in fact, more or less repetitions of those in the Upper Church of Assisi." Now it seems more probable that Gaddi should have repeated his own compositions than that he should have repeated those of some unknown master, especially one of such comparatively feeble powers.

Here I must leave the consideration of the authorship of these frescoes; as I said in the beginning, it is a much vexed question, and one that there is at present no positive evidence for deciding; the one thing that is certain is that in a very short time, if it has not happened already, the frescoes will, to all intents and purposes, have entirely vanished.

Crowe and Cavalcaselle hold that there were a series of painters who worked at the Upper Church, and that the whole history of the revival of early Italian art is comprised and explained in these paintings, and seem to hold that Giotto painted only one or two of these frescoes; while, lastly, in one of Dr. Dohme's German series of biographies, which is the latest work issued on this subject, we have the author maintaining the thesis that Giotto painted all these frescoes (in the lower row), and that when he had finished this series he began again upon those of the Lower Church.

Of the various opinions, those of Vasari and Lindsay can, I think, be shown to be wrong from a comparison of the dates of Giotto's works. In the first place there is no evidence whatever to hint at two visits to Assisi, except Vasari's statement that Giotto was invited to Assisi by Fra Mure. Now Fra Mure, who was general of the Franciscan order, only held that post between 1296 and 1302, and therefore if he invited Giotto to complete the frescoes of the Upper Church, it must have been between those years; but from a register preserved in the Vatican, the famous Navicella mosaic was executed by Giotto in 1298, and that he was still at Rome in 1300, is proved by a portion of a fresco representing Pope Boniface announcing the opening of the Jubilee, which took place 1300, and upon the completion of which work Giotto betook himself to Florence, and painted the famous frescoes in the Bargello, in one of which the portrait of Dante occurs. Dante was exiled in 1302, and this, and many minor considerations, point to the date 1301-2 for the execution of these frescoes. It is therefore easy to see that Giotto could not have had the possibility of accepting Fra Mure's invitation between the dates of 1296 and 1302. The question remains whether the lower row of frescoes were executed by Giotto at any subsequent period?