Vision and Design

by Roger Fry

We come now to the last great series of frescoes by Giotto which we possess, those of the Bardi and Peruzzi chapels of Sta. Croce, his maturest and most consummate works. From the very first Giotto had to the full the power of seizing upon whatever in the forms of nature expressed life and emotion, but the perfect understanding of the conditions of a suave and gracious style was only slowly acquired. In the Florentine frescoes it is the geniality, the persuasiveness of the style which first strikes us. They have, indeed, an almost academic perfection of design.

The comparison of the “Death of S. Francis” here with the early fresco of the subject at Assisi shows how far Giotto has moved from the literal realism of his first works. At Assisi crowds of people push round the bier, soldiers and citizens come in to see, there is all the shifting variety of the actual event. Here the composition is sublimated and refined, reduced to its purest elements. The scene is still vividly, intensely real, but it is apprehended in a more pensive and meditative vein. There is in the composition a feeling for space which imposes a new mood of placidity and repose. This composition became the typical formula for such subjects throughout the Renaissance, but it was never again equalled. In spite of its apparent ease and simplicity, it is really by the subtlest art that all these figures are grouped in such readily apprehended masses without any sense of crowding and with such variety of gesture in the figures. The fresco, which had remained for more than a century under a coat of whitewash, was discovered in 1841 and immediately disfigured by utter restoration. The artist,[35] with a vague idea that Giotto was a decorative artist, and that decoration meant something ugly and unnatural, surrounded the figures with hard inexpressive lines. We can, therefore, only guess, by our knowledge of Giotto elsewhere, and by the general idea of pose, how perfect was the characterisation of the actors in the scene, how each responded according to his temperament to the general sorrow, some in humble prostration, one with a more intimate and personal affection, and one, to whom the vision of the ascending soul is apparent, wrapt in mystic ecstasy.

An interesting characteristic of these late frescoes is the revival which they declare of Giotto’s early love for classical architecture. He may well have recognised the pictorial value of the large untroubled rectangular spaces which it allowed. In the “Salome” he has approached even more nearly to purely classic forms than in his earliest frescoes at Assisi. The building has an almost Palladian effect with its square parapets surmounted by statues, some of which are clearly derived from the antique. In the soldier who brings in the Baptist’s head he has reverted to the costume of the Roman soldier, whereas, in the allegory of Chastity, the soldiers wear mediæval winged helmets.

The fact that there is a free copy of this fresco by the Lorenzetti at Siena made in 1331 gives us the period before which this must have been finished. Here again the mood is singularly placid, but the intensity with which Giotto realised a particularly dramatic moment is shown by a curious detail in which this differs from the usual rendering of the scene. Most artists, wishing to express the essentials of the story, make Salome continue her dance while the head is brought in. But Giotto was too deep a psychologist to make such an error. At the tragic moment she stops dancing and makes sad music on her lyre, to show that she, too, is not wanting in proper sensibility.

There is evidence in these frescoes of an artistic quality which we could scarcely have believed possible, and yet, as it is most evident in those parts which are least damaged, it is impossible not to believe that Giotto possessed it; and that is the real feeling for chiaroscuro which these paintings show. It is not merely that the light falls in one direction, though even that was a conception which was scarcely grasped before Masaccio, but that Giotto actually composes by light and shade, subordinates figures or groups of figures by letting them recede into gloom and brings others into prominent light. This is particularly well seen in the “Ascension of S. John” where the shadow of the building is made use of to unify the composition and give depth and relief to the imagined space. It is also an example of that beautiful atmospheric tonality of which I have already spoken. In the figure of S. John himself, Giotto seems to have the freedom and ease which we associate with art of a much later date. There is scarcely a hint of archaism in this figure. The head, with its perfect fusion of tones, its atmospheric envelopment, seems already nearly as modern as a head by Titian. Even the colour scheme, the rich earthy reds, the intense sweet blues of the figures relieved against a broken green-grey, is a strange anticipation of Cinquecento art. It seems as though Giotto in these works had himself explored the whole of the promised land to which he led Italian painting.

It is true that we are conscious of a certain archaism here in the relations of the figures and the architecture. A certain violence is done to that demand for verisimilitude which, perhaps wrongly, we now invariably make. But in the “Raising of Drusiana,” even this demand is met. Here the figures all have their just proportions to one another, and to the buildings, and to the town wall which stretches behind them. The scene is imagined, not merely according to the conditions of the dramatic idea, but according to the possibilities and limitations of actual figures moving in a three dimensional space; even the perspective of the ground is understood. Such an imaginative construction of three dimensional space had its disadvantages as well as its advantages for art, but in any case it is an astonishing indication of Giotto’s genius that he thus foresaw the conditions which in the end would be accepted universally in European art. There is scarcely anything here that Raphael would have had to alter to adapt the composition to one of his tapestry cartoons.

Of the dramatic power of this I need add nothing to what has already been said, but as this is the last of his works which we shall examine it may afford an example of some of the characteristics of Giotto’s draughtsmanship. For Giotto was one of the greatest masters of line that the world has seen, and the fact that his knowledge of the forms of the figure was comparatively elementary in no way interferes with his greatness. It is not how many facts about an object an artist can record, but how incisive and how harmonious with itself the record is, that constitutes the essence of draughtsmanship.

In considering the qualities of line, three main elements are to be regarded: First, the decorative rhythm, our sense of sight being constructed like our sense of sound, so that certain relations, probably those which are capable of mathematical analysis, are pleasing, and others discordant. Secondly, the significance of line as enabling us imaginatively to reconstruct a real, not necessarily an actual, object from it. The greatest excellence of this quality will be the condensation of the greatest possible suggestion of real form into the simplest, most easily apprehended line; the absence of confusing superfluity on the one hand, and mechanical, and therefore meaningless simplicity, on the other. Finally, we may regard line as a gesture, which impresses us as a direct revelation of the artist’s personality in the same way that handwriting does.

Now, with Giotto, beautiful as his line undoubtedly is, it is not the first quality, the decorative rhythm, that most immediately impresses us. That is not the object of such deliberate and conscious research as with some artists. It is in its significance for the expression of form with the utmost lucidity, the most logical interrelation of parts that his line is so impressive. Here, for instance, in the figure of the kneeling woman, the form is expressed with perfect clearness; we feel at once the relation of the shoulders to one another, the relation of the torso to the pelvis, the main position of the thighs, and all this is conveyed by a curve of incredible simplicity capable of instant apprehension. To record so much with such economy requires not only a rare imaginative grasp of structure, but a manual dexterity which makes the story of Giotto’s O perfectly credible should one care to believe it.

Giotto’s line, regarded as an habitual gesture, is chiefly striking for its breadth and dignity. It has the directness, the absence of preciosity, which belongs to a generous and manly nature. The large sweeping curves of his loose and full draperies are in part the direct outcome of this attitude.