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Updated: May 14, 2025
The Giottesque frescoes, with their tiers and compartments of dark blue, their vague figures dressed in simple ultramarines, greens, dull reds, and purples; their geometrical borders and pearlings and dog-tooths; cover the walls, the ribbed and arched ceilings, the pointed raftering almost like some beautiful brown, blue, and tarnished gold leather-hangings; the figures, outlined in dark paint, have almost the appearance of being stencilled, or even stamped on the wall.
From this Giottesque treadmill, painting was released by the intervention of another art. The painters were hopelessly mediocre; their art was snatched from them by the sculptors.
This is not disputed; it is only disputed that the sea façade is earlier; of which, however, the proofs are as simple as they are incontrovertible: for not only the masonry, but the sculpture, changes at the ninth lower shaft, and that in the capitals of the shafts both of the upper and lower arcade: the costumes of the figures introduced in the sea façade being purely Giottesque, correspondent with Giotto's work in the Arena Chapel at Padua, while the costume on the other capitals is Renaissance-Classic: and the lions' heads between the arches change at the same point.
Between the constrained attitudinizing of Byzantine and Giottesque tradition, and the imitation of the movements of clodhoppers and ragamuffins, the realist of the fifteenth century would wander hopelessly were it not for the antique.
All we feel for certain is that Masolino had not yet escaped from the traditional Giottesque mannerism. Only a group of Jews stoning Stephen and Lawrence before the tribunal remind us by dramatic energy of the Brancacci chapel. The baptistery frescos, dealing with the legend of St. John, show a remarkable advance; and they are luckily in better preservation.
Distribution of Artistic Gifts in Italy Florence and Venice Classification by Schools Stages in the Evolution of Painting Cimabue The Rucellai Madonna Giotto His widespread Activity The Scope of his Art Vitality Composition Colour Naturalism Healthiness Frescoes at Assisi and Padua Legend of S. Francis The Giotteschi Pictures of the Last Judgment Orcagna in the Strozzi Chapel Ambrogio Lorenzetti at Pisa Dogmatic Theology Cappella degli Spagnuoli Traini's "Triumph, of S. Thomas Aquinas" Political Doctrine expressed in Fresco Sala della Pace at Siena Religious Art in Siena and Perugia The Relation of the Giottesque Painters to the Renaissance.
Like Niccola Pisano, Giotto not only founded a school in his native city, but spread his manner far and wide over Italy, so that the first period of the history of painting is the Giottesque.
The Tuscans of the early Renaissance developed up to the utmost, assisted by the goldsmiths and sculptors, who taught them modelling and anatomy, that realistic element of Giottesque painting. Its ideal decorative part had become impossible.
To find its analogue, we must betake ourselves to the frescoes of Spinello Aretino, a master more decidedly Giottesque than his contemporary Taddeo di Bartolo. A Gabriel, rushing down from heaven to salute Madonna, with all the whirr of arch-angelic pinions and the glory of Paradise around him, is a fine specimen of Spinello's vehemence.
And now, the Giottesque programme being fulfilled, art may go abroad and seek for new methods and effects, for new dramatic conceptions.
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