Giotto di bondone education
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The fact that Giotto painted the Arena Chapel and that he was chosen by the Commune of Florence in 1334 to design the new campanile (bell tower) of the Florence Cathedral are among the few certainties about his life.
The bones of the neck indicated that the man spent a lot of time with his head tilted backwards. He writes that when Cimabue was absent from the workshop, his young apprentice painted such a lifelike fly on the face of the painting that Cimabue was working on, that he tried several times to brush it off. Vasari also relates that when the Pope sent a messenger to Giotto, asking him to send a drawing to demonstrate his skill, Giotto drew, in red paint, a circle so perfect that it seemed as though it was drawn using a compass and instructed the messenger to give that to the Pope.
Early career
Giotto's master, Cimabue, was one of the two most highly renowned painters of Tuscany, the other being Duccio, who worked mainly in Siena.
However, the style demonstrates developments from Giotto's work at Padua.
In 1311 Giotto returned to Florence, A document from 1313 shows his presence in Rome, where he executed a mosaic for the façade of the old St. Peter's Basilica, commissioned by Cardinal Jacopo Stefaneschi and now lost except for some fragments. These apparently contradictory reports are explained by the fact that the remains of Santa Reparata lie directly beneath the Cathedral and the church continued in use while the construction of the cathedral was proceeding in the early 14th century.
During an excavation in the 1970s bones were discovered beneath the paving of Santa Reparata at a spot close to the location given by Vasari, but unmarked on either level.
According to other sources, he was buried in the Church of Santa Reparata. In this period he also painted the Badia Polyptych, now in the Uffizi, Florence.
Giotto's fame as a painter spread. In The Divine Comedy, Dante acknowledged the greatness of his living contemporary through the words of a painter in Purgatorio (XI, 94–96): "Cimabue believed that he held the field/In painting, and now Giotto has the cry,/ So the fame of the former is obscure."
Giotto's remains
Giotto died in January of 1337.
There are many differences between them and the Arena Chapel frescoes which can not be accounted for by the stylistic development of an individual artist. (From wikipedia)
Giotto di Bondone Paintings
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Giotto di Bondone would use bold paint in order to deliver weighty figures in his compositions and preferred a realist approach to his portraits, unlike much of what had gone before
Use of Architecture within his Paintings
The artist's understanding of architecture would aid his background detail, allowing him to produce believable scenes that would support the main focus of each painting.
The artist was also an accomplished architect, appointed to work on the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore, (The Duomo of Florence).
Dante (1265 – 1321) praised Giotto in the Divine Comedy, saying, “Once Cimabue thought to hold the field as painter; Giotto now is all the rage, dimming the luster of the other’s fame.”
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About
The Florentine painter, sculptor, and architect Giotto di Bondone was the most famous artist of his time.
The facial expressions of the figures in his paintings are also depicted in a realistic way. Their work redirected the path of European art and paved the way for the likes of Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael and then all art movements that followed on from that. He was the son of a man named Bondone, described in surviving public records as "a person of good standing".
In Naples few of his works have survived: a fragment of a fresco portraying the Lamentation of Christ in the church of Santa Chiara, and the Illustrious Men painted on the windows of the Santa Barbara Chapel of Castel Nuovo (which are usually attributed to his pupils). Most authors accept that Giotto was his real name, but it may have been an abbreviation of Ambrogio (Ambrogiotto) or Angelo (Angelotto).
The year of his death is calculated from the fact that Antonio Pucci, the town crier of Florence, wrote a poem in Giotto's honour in which it is stated that he was 70 at the time of his death.
This work influenced the rise of the Riminese school of Giovanni and Pietro da Rimini. Though largely restored, the decoration displays clearly Giotto's capabilities in chiaroscuro and his study of perspective in the ancient buildings. The Basilica of San Giovanni in Laterano houses a small portion of a fresco cycle, painted for the Jubilee of 1300 called by Boniface VIII.
The Last Judgment fills the entire pictorial space of the counter-façade.
While Giotto's master Cimabue painted in a manner that is clearly Medieval, having aspects of both the Byzantine and the Gothic, Giotto's style draws on the solid and classicising sculpture of Arnolfo di Cambio.