Vision and Design

by Roger Fry

The next ascertainable date in Giotto’s life is that of the decoration of the Arena chapel at Padua, begun in 1305. Here at last we are on indisputable ground. The decoration of this chapel was conceived by Giotto as a single whole, and was entirely carried out by him, though doubtless with the help of assistants, and although it has suffered from restoration it remains the completest monument to his genius. The general effect of these ample silhouettes of golden yellow and red on a ground of clear ultramarine is extraordinarily harmonious, and almost gay. But essentially the design is made up of the sum of a number of separate compositions. The time had not come for co-ordinating these into a single scheme, as Michelangelo did in the ceiling of the Sistine. In the composition of the separate scenes Giotto here shows for the first time his full powers. Nearly every one of these is an entirely original discovery of new possibilities in the relation of forms to one another. The contours of the figures evoke to the utmost the ideal comprehension of volume and mass. The space in which the figures move is treated almost as in a bas-relief, of which they occupy a preponderant part. As compared with the designs at Assisi the space is restricted, and the figures amplified so that the plastic unity of the whole design is more immediately apprehended. I doubt whether in any single building one can see so many astonishing discoveries of formal relations as Giotto has here made. Almost every composition gives one the shock of a discovery at

Giotto. Pietà	Arena Chapel, Padua
Plate VI.

once simple, inevitable, and instantly apprehended, and yet utterly unforeseeable. In most compositions one can guess at some of the steps by which the formal relations were established. Here one is at a loss to conceive by what flight of imagination the synthesis has been attained. We will consider a few in greater detail.

Giotto was, I believe, the first artist to represent the Resurrection by the Noli me tangere. The Byzantines almost invariably introduced the Descent into Hades or the Three Maries at the Tomb. In any case it is characteristic of Giotto to choose a subject where the human situation is so intimate and the emotions expressed are so poignant. Here, as in the “Navicella,” where he was free to invent a new composition, he discards the bilateral arrangement, which was almost invariable in Byzantine art, and concentrates all the interest in one corner of the composition. The angels on the tomb are damaged and distorted, but in the head and hands of the Magdalene we can realise Giotto’s greatly increased power and delicacy of modelling as compared with the frescoes at Assisi. It is impossible for art to convey more intensely than this the beauty of such a movement of impetuous yearning. The action of the Christ is as vividly realised; almost too obviously, indeed, does he seem to be edging out of the composition in order to escape the Magdalene’s outstretched hands. This is a striking instance of that power which Giotto possessed more than any other Italian, more indeed than any other artist except Rembrandt, the power of making perceptible the flash of mutual recognition which passes between two souls at a moment of sudden illumination.

In the “Pietà” (Plate) a more epic conception is realised, for the impression conveyed is of a universal and cosmic disaster: the air is rent with the shrieks of desperate angels whose bodies are contorted in a raging frenzy of compassion. And the effect is due in part to the increased command, which the Paduan frescoes show, of simplicity and logical directness of design. These massive boulder-like forms, these draperies cut by only a few large sweeping folds, which suffice to give the general movement of the figure with unerring precision, all show this new tendency in Giotto’s art as compared with the more varied detail, the more individual characterisation, of his early works. It is by this consciously acquired and masterly simplicity that Giotto keeps here, in spite of the unrestrained extravagance of passion, the consoling dignity of style. If one compares it, for example, with the works of Flemish painters, who explored the depths of human emotion with a similar penetrating and sympathetic curiosity, one realises the importance of what all the great Italians inherited from Græco-Roman civilisation—the urbanity of a great style. And nowhere is it felt more than here, where Giotto is dealing with emotions which classical art scarcely touched.

It is interesting that Giotto should first have attained to this perfect understanding of style at Padua, where he was, as we know, in constant intercourse with Dante. Dante must have often watched him, perhaps helped him by suggestions, in decorating the chapel built with the ill-gotten wealth of that Scrovegni whom he afterwards seated amid the usurers on the burning sands of Hell.

It is mainly by means of the composition and the general conception of pose and movement that Giotto expresses the dramatic idea. And regarded from that point of view, these frescoes are an astounding proof of Giotto’s infallible intuitions. The characters he has created here are as convincing, as ineffaceable, as any that have been created by poets. The sad figure of Joachim is one never to be forgotten. In every incident of his sojourn in the wilderness, after the rejection of his offering in the temple, his appearance indicates exactly his mental condition. When he first comes to the sheepfold, he gazes with such set melancholy on the ground that the greeting of his dog and his shepherds cannot arouse his attention; when he makes a sacrifice he crawls on hands and knees in the suspense of expectation, watching for a sign from heaven; even in his sleep we guess at his melancholy dreams; and in the scene where he meets his wife at the Golden Gate on his return, Giotto has touched a chord of feeling at least as profound as can be reached by the most consummate master of the art of words.

It is true that in speaking of these one is led inevitably to talk of elements in the work which modern criticism is apt to regard as lying outside the domain of pictorial art. It is customary to dismiss all that concerns the dramatic presentation of the subject as literature or illustration, which is to be sharply distinguished from the qualities of design. But can this clear distinction be drawn in fact? The imaginings of a playwright, a dramatic poet, and a dramatic painter have much in common, but they are never at any point identical. Let us suppose a story to be treated by all three: to each, as he dwells on the legend, the imagination will present a succession of images, but those images, even at their first formation, will be quite different in each case, they will be conditioned and coloured by the art which the creator practises, by his past observation of nature with a view to presentment in that particular art. The painter, like Giotto, therefore, actually imagines in terms of figures capable of pictorial presentment, he does not merely translate a poetically dramatic vision into pictorial terms. And to be able to do this implies a constant observation of natural forms with a bias towards the discovery of pictorial beauty. To be able, then, to conceive just the appropriate pose of a hand to express the right idea of character and emotion in a picture, is surely as much a matter of a painter’s vision as to appreciate the relative “values” of a tree and cloud so as to convey the mood proper to a particular landscape.

Before leaving the Paduan frescoes, I must allude to those allegorical figures of the virtues and vices in which Giotto has, as it were, distilled the essence of his understanding of human nature. These personified virtues and vices were the rhetorical commonplaces of the day, but Giotto’s intuitive understanding of the expression of emotion enabled him to give them a profound significance. He has in some succeeded in giving not merely a person under the influence of a given passion, but the abstract passion itself, not merely an angry woman, but anger. To conceive thus a figure possessed absolutely by a single passion implied, an excursion beyond the regions of experience; no merely scientific observation of the effects of emotion would have enabled him to conceive the figure of Anger. It required an imagination that could range the remotest spaces thus to condense in visible form the bestial madness of the passion, to depict what Blake would have called the “diabolical abstract” of anger.