Vision and Design

by Roger Fry

We have already considered the Presepio as an example of Giotto’s power of giving the actual setting of a scene without losing its heroic quality. It is also an example of his power of visualising the psychological situation; here, the sudden thrill which permeates an assembly at a moment of unwonted exaltation. It depicts the first representation of the Nativity instituted at Greccio by S. Francis; it is the moment at which he takes the image of the Infant Christ in his arms, when, to the ecstatic imaginations of the bystanders, it appeared for an instant transformed into a living child of transcendent beauty. The monks at the back are still singing the Lauds (one can almost tell what note each is singing, so perfect is Giotto’s command of facial expression), but the immediate bystanders and the priest are lost in wrapt contemplation of S. Francis and the Child.[29]

One of the most beautiful of the whole series is the fresco which represents the nuns of S. Clare meeting the Saint’s body as it is borne to burial. Throughout the series Giotto took Bonaventura’s life as his text, and it is interesting to see how near akin the two renderings are, both alike inspired by that new humanity of feeling which S. Francis’ life had aroused. Having described the beauty of the Saint’s dead body, “of which the limbs were so soft and delicate to the touch that they seemed to have returned to the tenderness of a child’s, and appeared by many manifest signs to be innocent as never having done wrong, so like a child’s were they,” he adds,

Therefore it is not to be marvelled at if seeing a body so white and seeing therein those black nails and that wound in the side which seemed to be a fresh red rose of spring, if those that saw it felt therefor great wonder and joy. And in the morning when it was day the companies and people of the city and all the country round came together, and being instructed to translate that most holy body from that place to the city of Assisi, moved with great solemnity of hymns and songs and divine offices, and with a multitude of torches and of candles lighted and with branches of trees in their hands; and with such solemnity going towards the city of Assisi and passing by the church of S. Damiano, in which stayed Clara the noble virgin who is to-day a saint on earth and in heaven, they rested there a little. She and her holy virgins were comforted to see and kiss that most holy body of their father the blessed Francis adorned with those holy stigmata and white and shining as has been said.

Bonaventura, we see, had already conceived the scene with such consummate artistic skill that it was, as it were, ready made for Giotto. He had only to translate that description into line and colour; and in doing so he has lost nothing of its beauty. Giotto, like Bonaventura, is apparently perfectly simple, perfectly direct and literal, and yet the result is in both cases a work of the rarest imaginative power. Nor is it easy to analyse its mysterious charm. Giotto was a great painter in the strictest and most technical sense of the word, but his technical perfection is not easily appreciated in these damaged works, and one cannot explain the effect this produces by any actual beauty of the surface quality of the painting; it depends rather on our perception, through the general disposition and action of the figures, of Giotto’s attitude to life, of the instinctive rightness of feeling through which he was enabled to visualise the scene in its simplest and most inevitable form.

We come now to the three last frescoes of the series which show such marked differences from the rest, though some of the peculiarities, the minute hands and elegant features, appear in parts of some of the preceding frescoes, notably in our last: we may imagine that an assistant working under Giotto was, as the work progressed, given a larger and larger share in the execution, and finally carried out the three last frescoes alone. But this is pure hypothesis; all we can do at present is to note the difference not only of types, but even to some extent in the manner of conception, that they evince. One of them recounts the story of a woman of Benevento devoted to S. Francis, who died after forgetting one of her sins in her last confession. At the intercession of the dead Saint she was allowed to come to life again, finish her confession, and so defeat of his prey the black devil who had already come for her soul. Here the whole spacing out of the composition indicates a peculiar feeling, very different from Giotto’s. The artist crowds his figures into narrow, closely-packed groups, and leaves vast spaces of bare wall between. In this particular instance the result is very impressive; it intensifies the supreme importance of the confession and emphasises the loneliness and isolation of the soul that has already once passed away. When we look at the individual figures the differences are even more striking; the long thin figures, the repetition of perpendicular lines, the want of variety in the poses of the heads, a certain timidity in the movements, the long masks, too big in proportion for the heads, the tiny elegant features, elongated necks, and minute hands—all these characteristics contrast with Giotto’s tendency to massive proportions and easy expansive movements. Not that these figures have not great beauty; only it is of a recondite and exquisite kind. The artist that created these types must have loved what was sought out and precious; though living so long before Raphael, he must have been something of a “pre-Raphaelite.”

We have no clue to the identity of this pseudo-Giotto; he is quite distinct from Giotto’s known pupils, and indeed may rather have been a contemporary artist who came under Giotto’s influence than one trained by him. Besides the frescoes at Assisi, we are fortunate enough to possess one other picture by this interesting artist. It is a small altar-piece dedicated to S. Cecilia, which hangs in the corridor of the Uffizi, and has been attributed both to Cimabue and to Giotto. The long Rosetti-like necks and heads, the poses, in which elegance is preferred to expressiveness, and the concentration of the figures so as to leave large empty spaces even in these small compositions, are sufficient grounds for attributing it to Giotto’s fellow-worker at Assisi.[30]

In the year 1298 Giotto entered into a contract with Cardinal Stefaneschi to execute for him the mosaic of the “Navicella,” now in the porch of S. Peter’s. We have in this the first ascertainable date of Giotto’s life. It is one which, however, fits very well with the internal evidences of his style, as it would give the greater part of the last decade of the thirteenth century as the period of Giotto’s activity in the Upper Church at Assisi. One other work on the evidence of style we may attribute to the master’s pre-Roman period, and that is the Madonna of the Academy at Florence. Here Giotto followed the lines of Cimabue’s enthroned Madonnas, though with his own greatly increased sense of solidity in the modelling and vivacity in the poses. It cannot, however, be considered as a prepossessing work. It may be due to restoration that the picture shows no signs of Giotto’s peculiar feeling for tonality; but even the design is scarcely satisfactory, the relation of the Madonna to the throne is such that her massive proportions leave an impression of ungainliness rather than of grandeur. In the throne itself he has made an experiment in the new Gothic architecture, but he has hardly managed to harmonise it with the earlier classic forms of the Cosmati, which still govern the main design. We shall see that in his work at Rome he overcame all these difficulties.

In Rome Giotto worked chiefly for Cardinal Stefaneschi. This is significant of Giotto’s close relations with the Roman school, for it was Bartolo, another member of the same family, who commissioned the remarkable mosaics of Sta. Maria in Trastevere, executed in 1290, mosaics which show how far the Roman school had already advanced towards the new art, of which Giotto’s work was the consummation.

The mosaic of the “Navicella,” which was the greatest undertaking of Giotto’s activity in Rome, is unfortunately terribly restored. We can, however, still recognise the astonishing dramatic force of the conception and the unique power which Giotto possessed of giving a vivid presentation of a particular event, accompanied by the most circumstantial details, and at the same time suggesting to the imagination a symbolical interpretation of universal and abstract significance. Even the surprising intrusion of a genre motive in the fisherman peacefully angling on the shore does not disturb our recognition of this universal interpretation, which puts so clearly the relation of the ship of the Church, drifting helplessly with its distraught crew, to the despairing Peter, who has here the character of an emissary and intermediary, and the impassive and unapproachable figure of Christ himself.

The daring originality which Giotto shows in placing the predominant figure at the extreme edge of the composition, the feeling for perspective which enabled him to give verisimilitude to the scene by throwing back the ship into the middle distance, the new freedom and variety in the movements of the Apostles in the boat, by which the monotony of the eleven figures crowded into so limited a space is evaded, are proofs of Giotto’s rare power of invention, a power which enabled him to treat even the most difficult abstractions with the same vivid sense of reality as the dramatic incidents of contemporary life. It is not to be wondered at that this should be the work most frequently mentioned by the Italian writers of the Renaissance. The storm-gods blowing their Triton’s horns are a striking instance of how much Giotto assimilated at this time from Pagan art.