Giotto: the man, the artist, his world

Giotto was not only a great painter, but a revolutionary. He was the first artist of the Middle Ages to give a soul to the characters of his paintings and frescoes. With Giotto , for the first time in medieval art, the religious theme fell into a historical, earthly dimension, which allows us to talk about the humanization of the sacred theme. With his figures, with his so realistic and carnal bodies he brought the sky to earth and paved the way for the great artistic season of the Renaissance. The paradox, however, is that we know, if not all, a lot about the paintings and frescoes of this master. We know very little about the man Giotto, given that many events linked to his existence are cloaked in legend.

Thanks to an accurate excavation work in the archives and a careful reading of contemporary chronicles to the great painter Alessandro Masi , art historian and journalist, he then offers us a well-documented biography of the man who revolutionized painting at the turn of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In his recent “The artist of the soul” (Neri Pozza, 2022, pp. 176, also e-book) Masi narrates Giotto's life with the rhythm of a novel, or rather of a medieval chronicle. He manages to construct a vivid, engaging story that prompts the reader to share the amazement and wonder of the first who were able to observe works that had no comparison with what was painted before. So we enter with the great artist in the Upper Basilica of Assisi, in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua and we sit next to him while he paints in his workshop the masterpieces destined to make him immortal.

Together with the ability to fully restore Giotto's genius to us, Masi wants to reconstruct the social and historical climate in which Giotto's genius emerged. And he makes us know almost personally who were the painter's extraordinary traveling companions. Thus emerged relations with Cimabue, the great teacher of the previous generation, and those with the intellectuals of the time, first of all Dante Alighieri. The author of the Divine Comedy, in fact, had a portrait made by Giotto in 1302 and met the painter again in Padua, many years later while he was intent on painting the Scrovegni Chapel. Above all Dante celebrated Giotto's talent in famous verses from Purgatory when he wrote: "Cimabue believed in painting to keep the field, and now Giotto has the cry, so that his fame is dark" ... a few words to let us know that contemporaries they considered Giotto's art unattainable for those who preceded him! And again: Boccaccio made Giotto a character of his Decameron. In short, Giotto was the protagonist of an era in which talents were not lacking in many fields of culture and art.

At the same time Masi does not hide from us how that great painter was a man who was not without shadows and contradictions. From a pictorial point of view, certainly the best interpreter ever of the ideals and life of Francis of Assisi, but he lived in the anguish of becoming poor and not being able to accommodate his numerous offspring. Probably once enriched he also became a usurer and, invited by intellectuals to take sides in the political arena of the time, he proved anything but inclined to courageous actions.

He was therefore a human being not free from pettiness, but precisely because man was not exceptional, what he knew how to do with his art must appear more extraordinary to us. And he did something unique as Masi himself writes when presenting his book: “Narrative of Giotto, Francesco and Dante as three bearers of a new message, depicted as the vertices of an equilateral triangle that still remains fundamental in the progress of the human species. Son of a new century, the Florentine painter acted with the other two in that epochal climate that marked the end of the Middle Ages, opening up the modern era, the progenitor of that universalistic Humanism that was the Italian Renaissance ".