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MANET WAS FIRST CALLED an iconoclast by his contemporaries; history has more than agreed. In fact, on that high road to what is popularly called modernism, Manet’s name is written first. He earned this position almost entirely on the basis of his formal innovations. Who is unfamiliar with the Manet…

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Overview

When Edouard Manet began to study painting in 1850, Paris' familiar, broad, tree-lined streets did not yet exist, and the life of the city was not a subject artists explored. Young artists could expect to succeed only through the official Academy exhibitions known as Salons, whose conservative juries favored biblical and mythological themes and a polished technique. Within twenty-five years, however, both Paris and painting had new looks. Renovations had opened the wide avenues and parks we know today, and painting was transformed when artists abandoned the transparent glazes and blended brushstrokes of the past and turned their attention to new techniques and to life around them. Contemporary urban subjects and a bold style, which offered paint on the canvas as something to be admired in itself, gave their art a strong, new sense of the present.

More than in his teacher's studio, Manet learned to paint in the Louvre by studying old masters. He was particularly impressed by the seventeenth-century Spanish artist Diego Velázquez, contrasting his vivid brushwork with the "stews and gravies" of academic style. Manet began to develop a freer manner, creating form not through a gradual blending of tones, but with discrete areas of color side by side. He drew on the old masters for structure, often incorporating their motifs, but giving them a modern cast.

Several artists had already begun to challenge the stale conventions of the Academy when Manet's Olympia (today in the collection of the Musée d'Orsay, Paris) was accepted for the Salon in 1865. It caused a scandal. Critics advised pregnant women to avoid the picture, and it was re-hung to thwart vandals. Viewers were not used to flat space and shallow volumes in painting. To many, Manet's "color patches" appeared unfinished. Even more shocking was the frank honesty of the courtesan: her boldness-not nudity-offended. Her languid pose copied a painting of Venus by the Italian artist Titian, but Manet did not cloak her with mythology.

Manet's succès de scandale made him a leader of the avant-garde. In the evenings at the Café Guerbois, near his studio, he was joined by writers and artists, including Claude Monet, Frédéric Bazille, and others who would go on to organize the first impressionist exhibition. Manet's embrace of what Charles Baudelaire termed the "heroism of modern life" and his bold manner with paint inspired the future impressionists, though Manet never exhibited with them.

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Overview When Edouard Manet began to study painting in 1850, Paris' familiar, broad, tree-lined streets did not yet exist, and the life of the city was not a subject artists explored. Young artists could expect to succeed only through the official Academy exhibitions known as Salons, whose conservative juries favored biblical and mythological themes and a polished technique.

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Leonardo Da Vinci-arguably one of history's most resourceful geniuses-was the unwanted result of casual sex between a local peasant girl and a young man from a prosperous family. Both were from Vinci, a small hill town not far from Florence with winding cobblestoned streets, wooden shutters, and spindling trees. It was in this village that Leonardo was conceived and surrendered by his mother as an infant to his father's family.

In an era referred to as "the age of bastards," Leonardo's illegitimate birth would not have involved any injury to his future: his eighty-year-old paternal grandfather set down a few basic details unapologetically.

"A grandson of mine was born, son of Ser Piero, my son... his name was Leonardo."

The entry of birth, through brief, was followed with the name of the priest who baptized the newborn and a list of the people present at the ceremony.

Leonardo's grandfather had been a notary of repute, as had his great-grandfather. Leonardo's father also entered the profession and married the daughter of another notary family. While the couple established their residence in Florence, Leonardo remained in Vinci with his grandparents, whose stolidly middle-class household provided a stability of routine but no formal education. The lack of structured schooling makes the abundant body of Leonardo's entirely self-taught knowledge almost unfathomable.

He was an irrepressible force of nature and fortunate enough to have been nurtured in a time that was daring his country further and further. Revolutions in the sciences and the humanities tend to occur in clusters of extraordinary individuals: Giotto, Michelangelo, Galileo, Dante, Machiavelli, Marco Polo, and Columbus-all were Italians, each with a key role in paving the way for the future.
He was an irrepressible force of nature and fortunate enough to have been nurtured in a time that was daring his country further and further.
Leonardo's artistic creativity was irrefutable against the generational backdrop of the family's conventional profession. It's alleged that when, as a boy, he was asked by a local former to design a wooden sign, he set about capturing snakes, bats, and lizards found near the house-all to be obsessively studied, for he had already conceived the sign to be a dragon-like creature wriggling out of dark craggy rocks. Decades later, his notes would suggest that "if you wish to make an imaginary animal invented by you appear natural, let us say a dragon, take for the head that of a mastiff or hound, for the eyes a cat, and for the ears a porcupine, and for the nose a greyhound, and the brows of a lion, and the temple of an old cock, the neck of a terrapin."

Assuming the story of the sign is even vaguely accurate, it hinted at the often-extravagant preparations Leonardo made later in life that were grander than his original assignments. It also spoke to the genuinely joyful spirit of inquiry he would always possess.

*

The death of Leonardo's grandfather came the same year that his father's wife dead in childbirth. Leonardo joined his father in Florence, where, at the age of twelve, he began to prepare for a trade as apprentice to Andrea del Verrocchio.

Trained as a goldsmith, unsurpassed in his skill of rendering ornamental detail, and known for his industry and perseverance, Verrocchio, with his rigorous craftsmanship, cut a path toward a number of artistic pursuits. His studio was not just a workshop devoted to paintings and statuary: it was a factory of sorts. Nothing about the work environment might have suggested glamour. The space was probably dirty and noisy-more utilitarian than inspired-and it likely consisted of a large, open ground floor separated from the outside with an awning, under which were samples of the studio's wares.

Inside, Verrocchio, along with sometimes up to a dozen of his employees and pupils at various levels of apprenticeships, could be found toiling on a wide variety of deliverables that ranged from paintings, sculptures, mechanical contrivances, musical instruments, theatrical costumes and stage sets, tombstones, and metalwork, including suits of armor.

In our mind's eye, we tend to see Leonardo as he appears in the iconic, red-chalked Turin drawing that surfaced in the early 19th century: an old man with deep lines crisscrossing his face, winged eyebrows, and wispy hair. Earlier images of him testify that he stayed handsome into middle age, and it is said that as an adolescent he epitomized youthful male beauty: a number of art experts believe him to have been the model for Verrocchio's 1466 bronze statue of David, the biblical hero who felled a giant with a well-thrown stone.
His stubborn resistance to finishing the work he began was due to an incessant curiosity.
While the apprentices who assisted Verrocchio would not have ventured to sign their names to the studio work, Leonardo often did just that by placing tangles of vinchi in the pictures; Vinci, Leonardo's town of birth, comes from the word vinchi, the reeds woven in the countryside of Tuscany. His other method could be seen in the L and V shapes of his subjects' bent arms in a picture's composition. At a later time, he would devise a deaf alphabet and position the fingers of the pictures' subjects in such a way as to signal his initials. One of the more obvious traces that survive from this stage of his life was what he scrawled on the back of a drawing. Dated 1473, it declares in a fleeting moment of contentment, "I am happy."

Patronage of the arts was responsible for a large part of the beauty during the Renaissance, but no illusions should be had about the status of the artists. They were treated little better than workmen, bound hand and foot to deeds that, when signed, often provided just enough payment to cover the costs of purchasing materials, with the balance paid once the client approved of the completed commission.

Leonardo was-and always would be-hopeless with money. Only when he was at a temporary loss for it did he consider it at all, and even then he resented his intrusion on his creativity. He didn't like deadlines either but had no choice but to adhere to them while working in Verrocchio's studio, where the first paining he conceived and painted entirely on his own is likely to be Madonna and Child with Flowers. It went missing for centuries before reappearing in Russia.

At twenty-one, Leonardo enrolled as a member of the city's Painters' Guild. By the time he was awarded independent commissions, he had become an instinctive procrastinator. He began no more than twenty pictures in a career that lasted nearly half a century; of the twenty, fifteen are agreed to be entirely his; of those fifteen, four are, to some degree, incomplete. His stubborn resistance to finishing the work he began was due to an incessant curiosity. This overriding characteristic would have led to the career failure of any other artist, but Leonardo was something more, and it defied summary.

His personal life was elusive. Working alongside his fellow artists should have given Leonardo a sense of camaraderie and fellowship; instead, he became a master at concealing his personal thoughts. Little is known of his attachment to any one human being; if, as has been suggested, he found satisfaction of an intimate nature in the company of men, it wouldn't have been considered unusual in 15th-century Florence: the word Florenzer, or Florentine, came to mean "sodomite" in German.

Despite the city's far-from-secret reputation, sex between two or more men was illegal, and a dedicated force, nefariously named "Office of the Night," encouraged citizens to place anonymous denunciations in a box, or tamburo, located in Palazzo Vecchio, the town hall. Leonardo was in his mid-twenties when he was identified by an unnamed accuser for immoral practices. After being summoned and interrogated, he was acquitted.
Working alongside his fellow artists should have given Leonardo a sense of camaraderie and fellowship; instead, he became a master at concealing his personal thoughts.
In his relentless pursuit of id, ego, and superego, Sigmund Freud was eager at one time to analyze Leonardo's life in homoerotic terms. True, Leonardo spent his working days with other male assistants and apprentices. True, the figures in his paintings are of fungible gender. And, yes, his notebooks provide a few accidental glimpses; scattered throughout them are obscured images suggesting that Leonardo might not have been sexually binary. Regardless of whether he was emphatically gay by the standards of later centuries, evidence that he was self-aware appeared as a notation in his journal: "It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end."

Obvious, as well, is that he was one of love's victims, for another of his entries reads, "If liberty is dear to you, may you never discover that my face is love's prison." What is also certain is that Leonardo didn't separate his artistic life from his scientific or personal life, and, like so many of his plural interests, he could have been boundary crossing within the landscape of sex, detaching himself from the pursuit of it in order to focus on his wider curiosity of what he considered the mysterious workings of the human body. No one would endeavor to argue his gender-neutral take on the penis, which he noted "follows its own course... and sometimes moves without permission or any thought by its owner."

Regardless of his proclivities, Leonardo's true nature revealed itself in his accumulation of knowledge. "The acquisition of any sort of knowledge is always useful to the intellect, because it will be able to dispense with useless things and preserve the good," he wrote, which explains why the commissions he received were waylaid by his convoluted campaigns of trying out other things that had little or nothing to do with the commissions per se.

His analytical vision came from a constant questioning of the world, and determined to offset his lack of classical learning, he located books in a time when printing was still in its infancy. His private library would come to include the Bible, the Psalms, Aesop's fables, and Dante, along with various books on natural history and mathematics, anatomy, astronomy, and botany.

His impressive collection of books notwithstanding, Latin remained the hallmark of social status at the time, and Leonardo's lack of it kept him from the inner circles of the Florentine courts he served. He must have felt the sting of being judged when he wrote, "I am well-aware that certain presumptuous people think they can slight me because I am not learned, but through I cannot, like them, quote from all the best authors, it is better and more praiseworthy to be well-read in the book of experience, the teacher of the teachers. These men strut about, puffed up and pompous, clothed and ornamented with the result of other people's work, not their own."

Despite the resentment Leonardo expressed toward the Florentine courts, his experiences within them provided a working knowledge of the mechanics of great palaces-a knowledge that would serve him with what was next.

A next there had to be, for despite the immense talent shown in his youthful paintings, Leonardo had failed to establish a lucrative position for himself in his native city.

___________________________________

Excerpted from What the Ermine Saw: The Extraordinary Journey of Leonardo da Vinci's Most Mysterious Portrait by Eden Collinsworth. Copyright © 2022. Available from Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.

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How Leonardo Da Vinci Became the Ultimate Renaissance Man

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Leonardo Da Vinci-arguably one of history's most resourceful geniuses-was the unwanted result of casual sex between a local peasant girl and a young man from a prosperous family. Both were from Vinci, a small hill town not far from Florence with winding cobblestoned streets, wooden shutters, and spindling trees.

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The Met's Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History

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Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) is one of the most intriguing personalities in the history of Western art. Trained in Florence as a painter and sculptor in the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio (1435-1488), Leonardo is also celebrated for his scientific contributions. His curiosity and insatiable hunger for knowledge never left him. He was constantly observing, experimenting, and inventing, and drawing was, for him, a tool for recording his investigation of nature. Although completed works by Leonardo are few, he left a large body of drawings (almost 2,500) that record his ideas, most still gathered into notebooks. He was principally active in Florence (1472-ca. 1482, 1500-1508) and Milan (ca. 1482-99, 1508-13), but spent the last years of his life in Rome (1513-16) and France (1516/17-1519), where he died. His genius as an artist and inventor continues to inspire artists and scientists alike centuries after his death.

Drawings
Outside of Italy, Leonardo's work can be studied most readily in drawings. He recorded his constant flow of ideas for paintings on paper. In his Studies for the Nativity ( 17.142.1), he studied different poses and gestures of the mother and her infant, probably in preparation for the main panel in his famous altarpiece known as the Virgin of the Rocks (Musée du Louvre, Paris). Similarly, in a sheet of designs for a stage setting ( 17.142.2), prepared for a staging of a masque (or musical comedy) in Milan in 1496, he made notes on the actors' positions on stage alongside his sketches, translating images and ideas from his imagination onto paper. Leonardo also drew what he observed from the world around him, including human anatomy, animal and plant life, the motion of water, and the flight of birds. He also investigated the mechanisms of machines used in his day, inventing many devices like a modern-day engineer. His drawing techniques range from rather rapid pen sketches, in The Head of a Man in Profile Facing to The Left ( 10.45.1), to carefully finished drawings in red and black chalks, as in The Head of the Virgin ( 51.90). These works also demonstrate his fascination with physiognomy, and contrasts between youth and old age, beauty and ugliness.

The Last Supper (ca. 1492/94-1498)
Leonardo's Last Supper, on the end wall of the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, is one of the most renowned paintings of the High Renaissance. Recently restored, The Last Supper had already begun to flake during the artist's lifetime due to his failed attempt to paint on the walls in layers (not unlike the technique of tempera on panel), rather than in a true fresco technique. Even in its current state, it is a masterpiece of dramatic narrative and subtle pictorial illusionism.

Leonardo chose to capture the moment just after Christ tells his apostles that one of them will betray him, and at the institution of the Eucharist. The effect of his statement causes a visible response, in the form of a wave of emotion among the apostles. These reactions are quite specific to each apostle, expressing what Leonardo called the "motions of the mind." Despite the dramatic reaction of the apostles, Leonardo imposes a sense of order on the scene. Christ's head is at the center of the composition, framed by a halo-like architectural opening. His head is also the vanishing point toward which all lines of the perspectival projection of the architectural setting converge. The apostles are arranged around him in four groups of three united by their posture and gesture. Judas, who was traditionally placed on the opposite side of the table, is here set apart from the other apostles by his shadowed face.

Mona Lisa (ca. 1503-6 and later)
Leonardo may also be credited with the most famous portrait of all time, that of Lisa, wife of Francesco del Giocondo, and known as the (Musée du Louvre, Paris). An aura of mystery surrounds this painting, which is veiled in a soft light, creating an atmosphere of enchantment. There are no hard lines or contours here (a technique of painting known as sfumato- fumo in Italian means "smoke"), only seamless transitions between light and dark. Perhaps the most striking feature of the painting is the sitter's ambiguous half smile. She looks directly at the viewer, but her arms, torso, and head each twist subtly in a different direction, conveying an arrested sense of movement. Leonardo explores the possibilities of oil paint in the soft folds of the drapery, texture of skin, and contrasting light and dark (chiaroscuro). The deeply receding background, with its winding rivers and rock formations, is an example of Leonardo's personal view of the natural world: one in which everything is liquid, in flux, and filled with movement and energy.

Bambach, Carmen. "Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)." In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000-. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/leon/hd_leon.htm (October 2002)

Bambach, Carmen C., ed. Leonardo da Vinci, Master Draftsman. Exhibition catalogue.. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.

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Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) | Essay | The Metropolitan Museum of Art | Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History

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Leonardo's curiosity and insatiable hunger for knowledge never left him. He was constantly observing, experimenting, and inventing, and drawing was, for him, a tool for recording his investigation of nature.

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Taylor Echolls is an award-winning writer whose expertise includes health, environmental and LGBT journalism. He has written for the "Valley Citizen" newspaper, where his work won first- and second-place awards in sports and outdoor features from the Idaho Press Club. Echolls holds a B.A. from Mount Holyoke College.

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The Religious Importance of Gothic Cathedrals | Synonym

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Taylor Echolls is an award-winning writer whose expertise includes health, environmental and LGBT journalism. He has written for the "Valley Citizen" newspaper, where his work won first- and second-place awards in sports and outdoor features from the Idaho Press Club. Echolls holds a B.A. from Mount Holyoke College.

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http://www.travelingintuscany.com/art/giotto.htm

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Much of Giotto's biography and artistic development must be deduced from the evidence of surviving works (a large portion of which cannot be attributed to him with certainty) and stories that originate for the most part from the late 14th century on.
Vasari, the historian of Florence, tells the touching story of how the renowned Cimabue, strolling out into the country, came upon the youngster scraping upon a rock the outlines of one of the sheep which he had been set to watch, and how the master had been so delighted with the boy's talent that he had immediately arranged to bring him to Florence as his pupil. But more accurate historians, with no cause to be overpatriotic for beloved Florence, have rejected this story as fable. In view of the innovations in painting effected by Giotto and his completely different point of view, it seems more reasonable to suppose that his talents were unspoiled by his celebrated predecessor.

Born in 1267, Giotto must have been active before the last decade of thirteenth century. The date of Giotto's birth can be taken as either 1266/67 or 1276, and the 10 years' difference is of fundamental importance in assessing his early developmentand is crucial to the problem of the attribution of the frescoes in the Church of San Francesco, in Assisi, which, if indeed by Giotto, are his great early works. It is known that Giotto died on Jan. 8, 1337 (1336, Old Style); this was recorded at the time in the Villani chronicle.[2]

Giotto has always been assumed to have been the pupil of Cimabue.Two independent traditions, each differing on the particular circumstances, assert this, and it is probably correct. Furthermore, Cimabue's style was, in certain respects, so similar to Giotto's in intention that a connection seems inescapable. Cimabue was the most outstanding painter in Italy at the end of the 13th century.

it seems almost certain that Giotto began his remarkable development with Cimabue, inspired by his strength of drawing and his ability to incorporate dramatic tension into his works. On the other hand, whatever Giotto may have learned from Cimabue, it is clear that, even more than the sculptor Nicola Pisano about 30 years earlier, he succeeded in an astonishing innovation that originated in his own genius-a true revival of classical ideals and an expression in art of the new humanity that St. Francis had in the early 13th century brought to religion.

Giotto is regarded as the founder of the central tradition of Western painting because his work broke free from the stylizations of Byzantine art, introducing new ideals of naturalism and creating a convincing sense of pictorial space. His momentous achievement was recognized by his contemporaries. "He converted the art of painting from Greek to Latin and brought in the modern era" - this is Cennino Cennini's synthesis fifty years after Giotto's death, underscoring the revolutionary character of Giotto's painting, and Dante praised him in a famous passage of The Divine Comedy, where he said he had surpassed his master Cimabue.' The late-16th century biographer Giorgio Vasari says of him: "[H]e made a decisive break with the crude traditional Byzantine style, and brought to life the great art of painting as we know it today, introducing the technique of drawing accurately from life, which had been neglected for more than two hundred years."[2]

The decoration of the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua (between 1303-1305) has been universally recognized as the most significant and most paradigmatic creation of Giotto and one of the capital events in the history of the European painting. If we look at the contents of his artistic revolution, we have to agree that the first manifestations are present in the decoration of the Assisi Upper Basilica.
Completed in 1305 for the Enrico Scrovegni family in Padua, Italy, the frescoes adorning the walls and ceiling of the chapel relate a complex, emotional narrative on the lives of Mary and Jesus.

Dividing his time between his job as chief architect of the Duomo of Florence (the design of the belltower belongs to Giotto) and the many prestigious commissions (the Peruzzi Chapel, the Bardi Chapel (after 1317) also illustrate Giotto's radical innovations.

Cappella degli Scrovegni all'Arena, Padua

Giotto di Bondone, Scenes from the Life of Christ, Resurrection (detail), Cappella degli Scrovegni all'Arena, Padua

The decoration of the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua (between 1303-1305) has been universally recognized as the most significant and most paradigmatic creation of Giotto and one of the capital events in the history of the European painting. If we look at the contents of his artistic revolution, we have to agree that the first manifestations are present in the decoration of the Assisi Upper Basilica.
It is very probable that Giotto has worked in Assisi about ten years earlier than in Padua, that is to say, around 1290 or a little later.
The concept of space formulated for the first time in Assisi was already known to the ancient Greeks and Romans, but had been lost in Medieval times. This is not just a new way of painting. The idea of an illusionary reconstruction of a three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface also implies that the reality perceived through one's senses acquires a new artistic meaning.

Dividing his time between his job as chief architect of the Duomo of Florence (the design of the belltower belongs to Giotto) and the many prestigious commissions (the Peruzzi Chapel, the Bardi Chapel (after 1317) also illustrate Giotto's radical innovations.

Giotto di Bondone | Scrovegni Chapel

Lamentation, 1164

One of Giotto's frescos from his series on the life and passion of Jesus, in the Arena Chapel in Padua.
After his death Jesus is mourned over by a small group of followers, among whom his mother. After that, they lay him in his grave. With varied gestures, indicating individual degrees of sorrow, the women and John approach the body of Christ. Their gestures seem to pave the way for the most intense impression of grief, the embrace and gaze of the mother. At the same time, the gestures of the women and of the disciples, which are reflected once more by the angels, appear like a development of the mother's sorrow, which is concentrated on the moment of the most intimate encounter.

A comparison between two paintings of th e same subject (by Giotto and the Master of Nerezi) may clarify the novelty represented by the paintings of Giotto and justify the importance of his contribution to the Early Renaissance.
The first painting is by an anonymous Byzantine artist, referred to as the Master of Nerezi: a fresco on the Lamentation over the Dead Christ in the Church of St. Pantaleimon, created in 1164 (Middle Byzantine period) located in Nerezi, Macedonia. The other represents the same subject as depicted by Giotto in 1304-1306, in the Capella degli Scrovegni, in Padua, Italy.
The influence of Byzantine art in western Europe, particularly Italy was seen in ecclesiastical architecture, through the development of the Romanesque style in the 10th century and 11th centuries. The Master of Nerezi is undeniably able to transmit something of the pathos, the emotional dimension, of his subject, within the constraints of the Byzantine formal rules. In comparison to the early, strictly hieratic and solemn expression of the royal or Imperial-Christian art of Byzantium, there is here a more dynamic visual concept and action indeed: The Virgin Mary embracing the deposed Christ, the curved body of the disciple holding the hand of Christ, within a very briefly indicated location and schematic spatial setting.
As Gombrich (The Story of Art) observed about the Byzantine style, within this basically two-dimensional formal concept in painting, we distinguish also the heritage of Greek and Hellenistic art, largely transformed but still recognizable. For example: skiagraphia, or "shadow painting", was a system of tonal and color modulation employing mainly, according to some specialists, graphic elements such as cross-hatching. Its initial development was attributed to the Athenian painter Apollodorus (430-400 BCE). Skiagraphia aimed at optical effects, the creation the impression of solid and round bodies in space taking into account a subjective point of view. It survives in Byzantine painting as a conventionalized linear system of "patterned" anatomical representation.
In contrast to the Pieta by the Master of Nerezi, Giotto's figures are solidly articulated in themselves and among each other within a unified and coherent spatial setting. They not simply rest as patterns upon a surface, but occupy their own space and interact within the virtual space of the painted setting: the pictorially constructed box or stage. Two are the main sources, according to Gombrich, of Giotto's accomplishment: classic (Roman) sculpture and the Christian plays publicly staged on different occasions in front of the churches, the theater as a traditional instrument of mass education and indoctrination in the Christian Church. In Giotto's Lamentation we recognize a tableau vivant or "staged picture" of representations of sacred narratives.

Art in Tuscany | Byzantine Art

Roman period

Three principal works are attributed to Giotto in Rome. They are the great mosaic of Christ Walking on the Water (the "Navicella"), over the entrance to St. Peter's; the altarpiece painted for Cardinal Stefaneschi (Vatican Museum); and the fresco fragment of "Boniface VIII Proclaiming the Jubilee," in San Giovanni in Laterano (St. John Lateran). Giotto is also known to have painted some frescoes in the choir of old St. Peter's, but these are lost.

These Roman works also pose problems in attribution and criticism. The attribution of the "Navicella" is certain; it is known that Cardinal Stefaneschi commissioned Giotto to doit. The mosaic, however, was almost entirely remade in the 17th century except for two fragmentary heads of angels, so that old copies must be used for all stylistic deductions. The fresco fragment in San Giovanni in Laterano was cleaned in the 20th century and was tentatively reattributed to Giotto on the basis of its likeness to the Assisi frescoes, but the original attribution can be traced only as far back as the 17thcentury. The "Stefaneschi Altarpiece," with its portrait of the Cardinal himself, must be one of the works commissioned by him. The fact that he commissioned Giotto to do the "Navicella" might suggest that this work is by Giotto as well, but the altarpiece is so poor in quality that it cannot be by Giotto's own hand. It may be observed that several works bearing Giotto's signature, notably the "St. Francis of Assisi" (Louvre, Paris) and the altarpieces in Bologna and Florence (Santa Croce), are generally regarded as school pieces bearing his trademark, whereas the "Ognissanti Madonna," unsigned and virtually undocumented, is so superlative in quality that it is accepted as entirely by his hand.

During this period Giotto may also have done the Crucifix in Santa Maria Novella and the "Madonna" in San Giorgio e Massimiliano dello Spirito Santo (both in Florence). These works may be possibly identifiable with works mentioned in very early sources, and if so they throw light on Giotto's early style (before 1300). It is also possible that, about 1305, Giotto went to Avignon, in France, but the evidence for this is slender.

In contrast to earlier representations of Christ on the Cross, such as those by his teacher Cimabue, Giotto emphasizes the earthly heaviness of the body: the head sinks deeply forward and the almost plump body sags. The human side of the Son of God is made clear. Mary and John look down sorrowfully from the horizontal ends of the cross at the dead Lord.

This, probably Giotto's earliest surviving work, is the largest and most ambitious of the shaped panels of Christ on the cross painted by Giotto. Although his limited anatomical knowledge prevented him attaining the realism of his later crucifixes (In Padua and Rimini), Giotto's break with Byzantine tradition is clear. This can be seen from the natural pose, the sense of real weight in the way Christ's body so painfully hangs, the basic simplicity of the loin-cloth, and the realism of the two feet fixed with a single nail.

Art in Tuscany | Santa Maria Novella | The Crucifix by Giotto

At the end of the thirteenth and during the first years of the fourteenth century, a debate was going on in religious and theological circles between those who emphasized Christ's humanity, favored images of his suffering and death, and those - especially the Dominicans - who wanted to return to the more ancient theological tradition that emphasized the divinity of Christ and thus favored images of glory. For the latter group, death and the cross signify not only the moment of suffering, but the concept of resurrection. Giotto's panel, not by chance executed for a Dominican convent, is connected with this new theological and spiritual movement, and reveals a seldom noticed aspect of Giotto's personality. Even in his first works, and then throughout his long and finely articulated artistic career, he was an attentive and sensitive interpreter of the most gripping theological and spiritual problems of his day [Art in Tuscany | 5].

In the painting, the Virgin Mary is sitting on a marble throne. The painting has a three-dimensional feel. Here, Giotto distances himself from the Byzantine style of painting which characterized art in those years. Indeed, the Virgin Mary is wearing the traditional red cap, but a few locks of hair are falling onto her shoulders. The gold engraved decorations are of particular relevance: some say this aspect was inspired by a mix of both Arabic writings and the French gothic style. Giotto's early style is evident in this work, and can be linked to his frescos in Assisi, the Crucifix in Santa Maria Novella and the fragment in Borgo San Lorenzo. The date of its execution, therefore, cannot be far from the date of the frescos in Assisi. Many believe it was completed in the late-1200s.

Giotto, Madonna of San Giorgio alla Costa

Giotto, Madonna and Child, 1295-1300, tempera on wood, 180 x 90 cm, San Giorgio alla Costa, Florence

Madonna Enthroned, also known as the Art in Tuscany | Giotto di Bondone | Ognissanti Madonna, is a painting by the Italian late medieval artist Giotto di Bondone, housed in the Uffizi Gallery of Florence. It is generally dated to around 1310. The panel from 1306-10, ca. was originally placed on the old partition wall of the church of Ognissanti, officiated by the Umiliati friars before it was moved to their convent, at least by the end of the 17th century. In 1810, following the French suppression of convents, it was placed in the Accademia. It has been in the Uffizi since 1919.
The painting has a traditional Christian subject, representing the Virgin Mary and the Christ Child seated on her lap, with saints surrounding the two. It is celebrated often as the first painting of the Renaissance, due to its newfound naturalism and escape from the constraints of Gothic art.

Ognissanti Madonna (Madonna in Maestà)

Giotto Di Bondone | The Massacre of the Innocents 1310s

Frescoes on the ceiling of the north transept of the Lower Church in Assisi.
A new decoration of the lower church in Assisi was undertaken connected to the first centenary of the death of St Francis. Franciscan authors attribute the fresco cycle on the ceiling of the north transept to Giotto. However, this attribution is not accepted by the majority of critics, they are thought to have been executed by collaborators and followers.

The fresco cycle on one side consists of large scenes from the life of the Virgin and the childhood of Christ separated by decorative bands with busts of Prophets, while the other side represents scenes from the Passion of Christ. The west wall is occupied by scenes representing the Miracle of St Francis in Sessa (in two parts) and the Annunciation.
Giotto's impressionistic technique seems to show the angels in flight

Giotto's revolutionary style influenced later painters - those infants' bodies look forward to Mantegna and Picasso.

The Santa Croce Chapels | The Bardi Chapel and the Peruzzi Chapel in Santa Croce, Florence

At the end of 1313, Giotto was back in Florence and was once more working in a Franciscan church, in the great Minorite church of The Art in Tuscany | Giotto di Bondone | Santa Croce, for which he was to continue creating works right up until the end of his life. According to a statement made by the Florentine artist Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378-1455), Giotto painted four of the chapels here. Several noble Florentine families are also said to have commissioned panel paintings from him, with which they endowed the altars in Santa Croce. But only two chapels and one altarpiece which can confidently be attributed to Giotto have survived the ravages of time - the Peruzzi and Bardi chapels.
The two chapels, which Giotto decorated for the two Florentine banking dynasties, lies next to one another in the Franciscan church. On the left, we can see into the Bardi Chapel and can make out the vault with its representations of the Franciscan virtues; to the right, in the Peruzzi chapel we can see the scenes from the life of St John the Evangelist. It is clear that Giotto composed these latter paintings in relation to the view from outside the chapel. Giotto painted a fresco of the Stigmatization of St Francis on the outside wall of the Bardi Chapel over the arch, which identifies the dedication of the chapel from a distance and at the same time provides the Franciscans with a large-scale image within the church itself of a defining moment in the life of their patron and founder.

Bardi family of Florence founded one of Europe's first international banks in the 12th century. In addition to making loans to nobles, they also collected taxes and financed various manufacturing activities in Florence, especially wool processing. The Bardi bank opened branches in other places including England, and made large loans to Edward III for his wars against Scotland and France. That led to the failure of the Bardi bank in 1344 when Edward defaulted on his obligations.

The Bardi Chapel and the Peruzzi Chapel in Santa Croce, Florence

The Bardi Chapel and the Peruzzi Chapel
in Santa Croce, Florence

'At first glance the small painting of The Presentation of the Christ Child in the Temple looks like a self-contained object. It has a balanced composition: two pairs of standing figures flank a dainty ciborium that symbolizes the Temple of Jerusalem. Following the gospel of Luke, the artist has illustrated the dramatic moment when Simeon and the prophetess Anna recognize the Christ Child as the savior.
Ever since the early nineteenth century, the Presentation has been known to be one of a series of seven paintings of the life of Christ (the others are in Munich, London, and New York). Although some scholars have questioned the traditional attribution of the series to Giotto, all the scenes are devised with such imagination and executed with such depth of feeling that only he could have painted them. There is nothing stereotyped about the compositions: each action is expressive, each face is individual. Thus, in the Presentation, the child struggles to get back in his mother's arms. None of Giotto's followers made such telling observations of human behavior.'

Source: Everett Fahy (1978), "The Presentation of the Christ Child in the Temple," in Eye of the Beholder, edited by Alan Chong et al. (Boston: ISGM and Beacon Press, 2003): 39.
See also Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, The Presentation of the Christ Child in the Temple

In 2010 Anna-Marie Hilling, a British art restorer uncovers a lost Giotto masterpiece,

The Ognissanti Crucifix.
The Ognissanti Crucifix was a neglected Italian treasure which a team of experts have now repaired and identified. After cleaning the work painstakingly over several years, whenever funding allowed, Hilling and the other four members of the paint restoration team found strong evidence to suggest the crucifix was a genuine Giotto. Further studies, including infrared photography and X-rays, conducted last year inside the Florentine laboratory Opificio delle Pietre Dure, unearthed clear proof. Visible beneath the paintwork were preparatory sketches which allowed Giotto specialists to attribute the work as the 14th-century artist's own. It is now thought the crucifix must have been painted around 20 years after Giotto finished his other well-known monumental crucifix in Florence's Santa Maria Novella church.
The restoration of Giotto's Ognissanti Crucifix was started by Paola Bracco in 2002. The majestic tempera on panel realised by Giotto and his workshop around 1310-1320 had been sadly neglected for centuries. Kept in the sacristy of the church of Ognissanti, it was rarely seen and the vigorous modelling of the flesh tones of the figures, and the many precious details of the pictorial surface, were hidden by a severely altered layer due to a treatment of the past and century-old grime.
Anna-Marie Hilling, painting restorer, has lived in Florence since 1986.

[5] Francesca Flores D'Arcais, Giotto, Abbeville Press, (October 1, 1995), New York, London, Paris, pp. 105-107.
[1] This painting, formerly attributed to Paolo Uccello, portrays five famous men, Giotto (representing painting), Uccello (representing the principles of perspective and animal painting), Donatello (representing sculpture), Manetti (representing mathematics), and Brunelleschi (representing architecture). The work is belived to be begun by Uccello, but finished later by another painter.
Paolo Uccello (1397 - 1475) was a painter (and also a creator of mosaics) in the employ and patronage of the powerful Florentine Renaissance family, the House of Medicis. Paolo Ucello is considered the father of the art of the perspective. Ucello worked in the Late Gothic tradition, and emphasized color and pageantry rather than the Classical realism that other artists were pioneering. His style is best described as idiosyncratic, and he left no school of followers. He had some influence on twentieth century art and literary criticism.

[2] About 1373, a rhymed version of the Villani chronicle was produced by Antonio Pucci, town crier of Florence and amateur poet, in which it is stated that Giotto was 70 when he died. This fact would imply that he was born in 1266/67, and it is clear that there was 14th-century authority for the statement (possibly Giotto's original tombstone, now lost). But Giorgio Vasari, in his important biography (1550) of Giotto, gives 1276 as the year of Giotto's birth, and it may be that he was copying one of the two known versions of the Libro di Antonio Billi, a 16th-century collection of notes on Florentine artists. In the Codex Petrei version, a statement that Giotto was born in 1276 at Vespignano, the son of a peasant, occurs at the very end of the "Life" and may have been added much later, even, conceivably, from Vasari. In any case, whether Vasari or "Antonio Billi" first made the statement, it cannot have the same authority as that attached to Antonio Pucci, who was about 27 when Giotto died. Certainty of the date of Giotto's birth, if settled by new documents, could help to solve the problem of his work at Assisi, as well as the question of the origins of his style.

[3] Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Artists, trans. George Bull, 1965, London,Penguin Classics.
Since the Renaissance, Giotto has been credited with reviving the illusionistic painting of antiquity through his use of light, shadow, and perspective to imitate natural appearances. According to the Florentine writer Filarete, Giotto surreptitiously painted flies on a figure in such a convincing manner that his master Cimabue tried to brush them away. The painting does not survive, and may never have existed. This anecdote may simply have been a rhetorical metaphor for artistic excellence, modelled on the ancient stories of Zeuxis' grapes and Parrhasios' curtain. The story of Giotto's flies, already in circulation when told by Filarete in the 1460s, was repeated by the early art historians Giorgio Vasari in 1550 and Karl van Mander in 1604, and alluded to by numerous artists in their paintings.

[4]

Francesca Flores D'Arcais, Giotto, Abbeville Press; 1st edition (October 1, 1995)
Giotto (1266-1337) is considered one of the founders of modern painting, having broken away from the rigid, stereotyped figures of Byzantine and medieval art to give his characters natural expression and solid three-dimensionality. D'Arcais leads readers on a chronological survey of Giotto's life and works.

Ciatti, Marco / Seidel, Max (Hg.): Giotto. The Crucifix in Santa Maria Novella. München: Deutscher Kunstverlag 2004. Abb. 4° Br.

Art in Tuscany | Italian Renaissance painting
Art in Tuscany | Giotto di Bondone | Scrovegni Chapel

Stubblebine, James (ed.), Giotto: The Arena Chapel Frescoes, New York, 1969.

Basile, Giuseppe. Giotto: The Arena Chapel Frescoes, London, 1993.

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Giotto and his works in Padua, by John Ruskin

Art in Tuscany | Giorgio Vasari | Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects | Giotto

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Giotto di Bondone | Art in Tuscany | Podere Santa Pia, Holiday house in the south of Tuscany

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Much of Giotto's biography and artistic development must be deduced from the evidence of surviving works (a large portion of which cannot be attributed to him with certainty) and stories that originate for the most part from the late 14th century on.

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Frida Kahlo - using art to portray female sexuality, pain and, feminine beauty standards, by Catherine Cunningham

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Despite selling few paintings during her lifetime, feminist icon Frida Kahlo continues to be widely celebrated for her boundary-pushing work. Through her art, most notably her self-portraits, Kahlo created images of female beauty which diverged from early twentieth century ideals.

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Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo Calderón, was a Mexican painter and one of the most famous and remembered women artists.

Her artistic work used to be about her own life and experiences. She painted more or less 200 works, most of them was self-portraits where she exposed her own suffering and the difficulties she had to face to live. It's evident the importance of Mexican culture in her work, especially Mexican folk art and indigenous tradition had influenced many of her paintings. She is celebrated internationally as a symbol of Mexican and indigenous traditions.

But Frida is not only remembered by her artistic work, many people have her as a feminist icon. But why Frida is considered by many an icon of feminism?

As the concept of feminism is about freedom and acceptance of individuality, things that Frida had stood for. However, she never called herself a feminist. She influenced feminism through the art she produced and by setting an example for modern women (artists or not). She was a strong woman that dared to express her genuine personality regardless of judgments. To our modern understanding of feminism, her example is inspirational to the movement.

Here are some examples of how Frida's life inspire many modern women:

Public bisexuality: She took pride on her sexuality. Throughout her marriage to Rivera she had multiple affairs with both men and women. She never made any apologies or excuses for her sexual choices, a bold act for her time. Josephine Baker, Paulette Goddard and Leon Trotsky are some of her affairs.

Defying gender stereotypes: during the 1900s women were expected to be housewives. Frida attended a co-educational school, what was unusual in those days. Frida was a rebel, she appeared for family photos wearing men's clothes contrasting with her sisters and mother who wore dresses. She also smoked, boxed and challenged men drinking tequila.

Defying female beauty standards: she didn't care to fit the norm. she kept her "masculine" features untouched (she didn't pluck her eyebrows and moustaches). she also exaggerated these features in self-portraits. However, she embraced her femininity by wearing colourful dresses and decorating her hair with braids and flowers.

Exploring real intimate female experiences in her artwork: female experiences like miscarriage, pregnancy, menstruation, breastfeeding, infertility, sexual organs were private, but Frida publicized them in her paintings. She chose to paint raw and real experiences of women's life. Frida takes the viewer inside a woman's mind and let them examine the fears, suffering, and passions that were secretly hidden inside.

Defying destiny: Frida experienced an enormous amount of suffering throughout her life (contracting polio at age six, suffering from spina bifida, at the age of 18 suffering a car accident that left her unable to bear children). She started to paint when she was bedridden for months after the accident. She changed the pain and suffering into passion on the canvas. Even though a sense of despair is always present in her self-portraits, we can see that her glance remains strong. What her example demonstrates is that pain is part of life, but we decide if it will define us or not, it's our choice.

Embracing her weirdness: one of the reasons why her work is so important in art history, is because it is completely different from everything that preceded it. Her work, just like her, is unique.

Atheism: Although she was born in a country with strong Catholic traditions she was an atheist.

References:

Writer/Art Blogger and Cultural Manager interested in Museum Education. Dreamer of improbable dreams. View all posts by natashamoura

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Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo Calderón, was a Mexican painter and one of the most famous and remembered women artists. Her artistic work used to be about her own life and experiences. She painted more or less 200 works, most of them was self-portraits where she exposed her own suffering and the difficulties she had to...

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In March 2014, Banksy reworked the, by then, extremely high-profile stencil to mark the third anniversary of the civil war in Syria. The redesigned image was used to promote #withsyria, a campaign to raise awareness and rally support for the victims of the three-year-long conflict. The campaign denounces 'years of brutality and bloodshed that have turned Syria into the epicentre of a massive humanitarian crisis'. In this version, Girl With Balloon appeared with a headscarf to depict a Syrian refugee.

Besides Banksy, other celebrities joined forces in the campaign to raise awareness, among them Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Edith Bowman, Peter Gabriel and David Milliband, who all posted pictures of themselves holding a red balloon on their Twitter or Instagram accounts.

Photographs of Syrian children holding red balloons in the style of Banksy's famous balloon girl also went viral. As part of the same campaign, the refugee version of Girl With Balloon was projected on Nelson's Column and the Eiffel Tower.

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Girl With Balloon by Banksy Background & Meaning | MyArtBroker

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Find out more about Banksy's 'Girl With Balloon' series, browse prints & editions for sale & view the works wanted now by active buyers. Free to Sell.

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The Banksy Effect | How Banksy Legitimised Street Art

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O nce relegated to subway trains, abandoned buildings, and seemingly inaccessible areas of the urban landscape, street art has emerged...

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How did Manet get his source of inspiration and what makes him unique from other artists during the 19th century?

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How is the monarchy represented during the renaissance and what were artists views on them such as Leonardo De Vinci?

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How does Gothic Art portray religion in Italy during Medieval times by Giotto Di Bondone?

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How has Frida Kahlo contributed to the depiction of women in art during the 19th century?

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How has Banksy redefined the art world, how does his message in his piece, “Balloon Girl” contribute to that in the 21st century?