Giotto in the Wall Street Journal!
I wrote a 'Masterpiece' column about Giotto for the WSJ
“When I first saw Giotto’s fresco cycle ‘The Legend of St. Francis’ in the upper church of the Basilica of St. Francis in Assisi—a small Italian town two hours from Rome by train—I thought: Is this really what I traveled halfway around the world to see? The colors have faded into ghosts of what they once were. The figures are as boxy as the houses that surround them. Their stiff faces look like those of cadavers that have been stretched into place.
But spending more time with these huddled masses of earnest zealots slowly reveals the complex inner lives behind their static masks. If we set aside our modern biases and 800 years of artistic advancement, we can start to understand why medieval viewers thought these images were the most lifelike they had ever seen—and why the founding father of art history, Giorgio Vasari, stated in his ‘Lives of the Artists’ that Giotto alone rescued painting from ‘an evil state and brought it back to such a form that it could be called good.’
Although dating these paintings can be tricky (as can the attribution of authorship, since many scholars doubt whether Giotto played any role), most guesses place their creation within a few generations of Francis’s life. Soon after he took a vow of poverty to live in Christ’s footsteps, Francis received the pope’s approval to start a new religious order. He amassed hundreds of followers, who later rose in the ranks of papal institutions. He was canonized on July 16, 1228, two years after his death, and construction on the basilica began the next day—making an organization bent on embracing poverty the unlikely sponsor of a revolution in decorative art…”