Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 14, 2025
The subjects of the "Annunciation," the "Nativity," the "Marriage of the Virgin," and the "Adoration of the Three Kings," framed in octagonal mouldings at the base of the tabernacle, illustrate the domination of a spirit distinct both from the neo-Romanism of Niccola and the Gothicism of Giovanni Pisano. That spirit is Florentine in a general sense, and specifically Giottesque.
Like the child, the Giottesque painter wished to show a situation or express a story, and for this purpose the absolute realization of objects was unnecessary. Giottesque art is not incorrect art, it is generalized art; it is an art of mere outline.
Charity, again, with a flaming heart in her hand, crowned with a flaming brazier, and suckling a child, is Giottesque not only in allegorical conception but also in choice of type and treatment of drapery. While admiring the tabernacle of Orsammichele, we are reminded that Orcagna was a goldsmith to begin with, and a painter. Sculpture he practised as an accessory.
Through the communion of mind, not less than through his writings, he infused into religious art that mingled theology, poetry, and mysticism, which ruled in the Giottesque school during the following century, and went hand in hand with the development of the power and practice of imitation. Now, the theology of Dante was the theology of his age.
Before long Browning amused himself in picking up for a few pauls this or that picture, on seeing which an accomplished connoisseur, like Kirkup, would even hazard the name of Cimabue or Ghirlandaio, or if not that of Giotto, then the safer adjective Giottesque.
Not so with the Giottesque frescoes: the wall, the vault, the triumphant masonry is always present and felt, beneath the straight, flat bands of uniform colour; the symmetrical compartments, the pentacles, triangles, and segments, and borders of histories, whose figures never project, whose colours are separate as those in a mosaic.
All important matters to be known of Giotto you may know from this fresco. 'But we can't see it, even with our opera-glasses, but all foreshortened and spoiled. What is the use of lecturing us on this? That is precisely the first point which is essentially Giottesque in it; its being so out of the way! It is this which makes it a perfect specimen of the master.
Those Giottesque workers, who were not content with a kind of Gothic Byzantinism; those who really handed over something vital to their successors of the fifteenth century, while repeating the old idealistical decorations; were studying with extraordinary crudeness of realism.
One scene represents the meeting of S. Joachim and S. Anna outside a mediaeval city's walls, and it has some pretty Giottesque touches, such as the man carrying doves to the Temple and the angel uniting the two saints in friendliness; and the other is the Birth of the Virgin, which Ruskin was so pleased to pit against Ghirlandaio's treatment of the same incident.
The problems of anatomy, relief, muscular action, and perspective which engrossed and in many cases harassed the Florentines of the Renaissance, turned their attention away from the habit of beautiful general composition which had become traditional even in the dullest and most effete of their Giottesque predecessors, and left them neither time nor inclination for wonderful new invention in figure distribution like that of their contemporary Umbrians.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking