My column today in the Waco Tribune-Herald gives some thought to a revolutionary artist who, over 700 years ago, changed the way we think about painting. That it happened in the past doesn’t make it any less revolutionary…
My daughter came home from school one day last week especially thrilled. That day her teacher had handed out roles for the school’s annual History Fair in which the students in her third grade class would be portraying prominent people from the late Middle Ages through the Renaissance. Consequently her classmates learned they would be acting out roles ranging from Joan of Arc to Columbus to Galileo. One of her more intrepid classmates discovered he would be the lesser-known Ethelred the Unready, while another found he would be the universally-known Leonardo. When I picked her up from school she excitedly told me she was going to be the painter Giotto.
In the pantheon of great artists, Italian painter Giotto di Bondone, who was born around 1266, is perhaps the least known by the general public. But he was the first to pull painting away from its more Eastern or Byzantine forms in which people were depicted very flatly and almost entirely devoid of character and emotion. Such paintings (or more often mosaics) were intended to inspire devotion and reverence in the viewer, not to portray to him a fellow human with personality, struggles, or feelings.
Giotto changed all that. The characters that inhabit his frescoes move in their own space; they interact with one another and not simply face the viewer; they portray individual and identifiable emotions; and finally, they just look more realistic than any people his contemporaries had ever seen in a painting. One of the more striking changes he introduced was that some of his characters actually have their backs to the viewer, which for the first time in a flat medium created something approaching a three-dimensional scene.
Two hundred years after his death, his fellow Italian Giorgio Vasari wrote that it was Giotto who created painting as they—and we—now know it. Subsequent art historians through the following 400 years have agreed. In his acclaimed 1953 book about the theories and ideas that animate art entitled “Voices of Silence,” the French writer André Malraux states that Giotto “is at once the last great master-craftsman and the first artist,” indicating that through his work Giotto not only changed painting but transformed what a painter was. Malraux explains that Giotto replaced symbols with human psychology, demonstrating “that one of the most effective methods of suggesting an emotion is to picture its expression,” instead of providing symbolic clues embedded in a work of art that hint to the viewer how he should feel.
Despite his importance, you won’t see many of Giotto’s works in American museums. They’re simply not nearly as widespread as some of the artists who came after him. His masterpiece is a cycle of 37 frescoes, mostly depicting the life of Christ, in a chapel in Padua, Italy. Some of his other work is contested to some extent or another, but experts have largely agreed on many pieces attributed to him.
For their annual History Day, not only will my daughter tell people about an artist who changed the way we experience art, ranking with Picasso I would say in that regard, but she and her classmates will experience the connection that comes only through the performing arts. Why take the time to assemble a costume, learn lines to recite, and basically give an individual live performance to everyone who walks by? Why not just write a report? The answer is that by making history come alive these third-graders will experience more directly the life of the person they’re portraying. And that’s what Giotto first showed the world that art has the power to achieve.
