style="font-size:15px;"> Duccio di Buoninsegna
(1255–1319 Siena)
Duccio di Buoninsegna, originally a carpenter and manuscript illuminator, was influenced by Cimabue and the Sienese school of painting. With Giotto, he was one of the transitional artists between the Gothic and the Renaissance ages, showing Byzantine elements throughout. Also a profound innovator, he painted his figures with greater weight and solidity, and more characterisation than had been seen previously in Siena. He is considered as one of the seminal artists in the development of the Sienese school.
11. Anonymous, French, The Rheims Missal, c. 1285–1297. Manuscript illumination, Stolen from the Library St. Petersburg, St. Petersburg
12. Gautier de Coinci, 1177–1236, French, Life and Miracles of the Virgin, late 13th c.. Manuscript illumination, Stolen from the Library St. Petersburg, St. Petersburg
Illustration of the death of a money lender whose soul is taken away by the devil, and a beggar woman to whom the Virgin and the Holy virgins appear.
13. Giotto di Bondone, 1267–1337, Early Renaissance, Florentine School, Italian, The Demons are Cast out of Arezzo (detail), 1296–1297, Fresco, Upper Church of San Francesco, Assisi
14. Giotto di Bondone, 1267–1337, Early Renaissance, Florentine School, Italian, Legend of St Francis: St Francis Preaching before Pope Honorius III, 1296–1297, Fresco, Upper Church of San Francesco, Assisi
Giotto di Bondone
(1267 Vespignano – 1337 Florence)
His full name was Ambrogiotto di Bondone, but he is known today, as he was in his own time, by the contraction, Giotto, a word which has come to stand for almost all the great things that art has accomplished. In his own day Giotto’s fame as a painter was supreme; he had numerous followers, and these Giotteschi, as they were styled, perpetuated his methods for nearly a hundred years. In 1334, he designed the beautiful Campanile (bell tower), which stands beside the cathedral in Florence, and represents a perfect union of strength and elegance, and was partly erected in his lifetime. Moreover, the sculptured reliefs which decorate its lower part were all from his designs, though he lived to execute only two of them. Inspired by French Gothic sculpture, he abandoned the stiff presentations of the subjects as in Byzantine styles and advanced art towards more realistic presentation of contemporary figures and scenes so as to be more narrative. His breakthrough influenced subsequent development in Italian art. His significant departure from past presentations of the Maestà, starting around 1308 (in Madonna di Ognissanti), brought to it his knowledge of architecture and its perspectives. However, the disproportion of subjects in the presentation is a device intended to rank the subjects by their importance, as was done in Byzantine icons.
Thus, architect, sculptor, painter, friend of Dante and of other great men of his day, Giotto was the worthy forerunner of that galaxy of brilliant men who populated the later days of the Italian Renaissance.
14th Century
15. Giotto di Bondone, 1267–1337, Medieval, Florentine School, Italian, Flight into Egypt, 200 × 185 cm, 1303–05, Fresco, Cappella Scrovegni (Arena Chapel), Padua
The fourteenth century is viewed as a transitional period from the Medieval to the Renaissance. The Catholic Church experienced disruptions, contributing to social chaos. In 1305 a French Pope, Clement V, was elected. He settled in Avignon rather than Rome, as did subsequent popes, causing the election of two popes in 1378, one in Avignon and one in Rome. This became known as the Great Schism. Not until forty years later in 1417, was the crisis resolved with the election of a new Roman Pope, Martin V, whose authority was accepted by everyone.
At this time, Italy was a group of independent city-states and republics, ruled mostly by an aristocratic elite. Dominating the international trade that connected the Europe with Russia, Byzantium, as well as the lands of Islam and China, Italy expanded trade and commerce through highly organised economic activity. This prosperity was brutally disrupted by the Black Death, or bubonic plague, in the late 1340s. In just five years at least twenty-five percent of the population of Europe, and upwards of sixty percent in some areas, were killed. Economic turmoil and social disruption ensued in Europe, while the Ottoman Empire and the Islamic states were far too strong to notice the expansion or decline of the European economic initiatives of the fourteenth century.
In the secular sphere, a great shift occurred with the development of vernacular, or everyday, literature in Italy. Latin remained the official language of Church and state documents, but intellectual and philosophical ideas became more accessible in the common language, which was based on Tuscan dialects from the region near Florence. Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–75), and Francesco Petrarch (1304–74) all helped to establish the use of vernacular language. Dante’s Divine Comedy and Inferno, as well as Boccaccio’s Decameron enjoyed a wider audience because they were written in the vernacular.
Petrarch described ideas of individualism and humanism. Rather than a philosophical system, humanism referred to a civil code of conduct and ideas about education. The scholarly discipline humanists hoped to advance was based on human interests and values as separate from religion’s otherworldly values, but not opposed to religion. Humanism enveloped a separate set of concerns than religious scholarly disciplines based not on faith but on reason. Latin classics from Greco-Roman antiquity helped to develop a set of ethics governing civil society including service to the state, participation in government and in the defence of the state, as well as duty to the common good, rather than self interest. The humanists translated Greek and Roman texts that had been neglected in the Middle Ages, but they also composed new texts devoted to the humanist’s cult of fame. Just as sainthood was the reward for religious virtue, fame was the reward for civic virtue. Boccaccio wrote a collection of biographies of famous women and Petrarch wrote one of famous men who embodied humanist ideals.
16. Giotto di Bondone, c. 1267–1337, Early Renaissance, Florentine School, Italian, Scenes from the Life of Joachim: Meeting at the Golden Gate, 1303–05, Fresco, Cappella Scrovegni (Arena Chapel), Padua
17. Giotto di Bondone, c. 1267–1337, Early Renaissance, Florentine School, Italian, Scenes from the Life of the Virgin: Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple, 1303–05, Fresco, Cappella degli Scrovegni dell’ Arena, Padua
18. Master of St. Cecilia, Early Renaissance, Italian, Saint Cecilia Altarpiece, after 1304. Tempera on panel, 85 × 181 cm. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence
19. Duccio di Buoninsegna, 1255–1319, Early Renaissance, Sienese School, Italian, Christ Entering Jerusalem, 1308–11. Tempera on panel, 100 × 57 cm, Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Siena
20. Duccio di Buoninsegna, 1255–1319, Early Renaissance, Sienese School, Italian, The Maestà, (back panel), Stories of the Passion: Peter’s First Denial of Christ Before the High Priest Annas, 1308–11. Tempera
