This book is a revisionist account of central Italian painting in the period 1260 - 1370.

This four-volume set provides the most comprehensive collection of modern scholarly literature on the artist and his work. Assembling writings that are as disparate as they are sometimes hard to retrieve, it permits readers to consider the state of scholarship on a variety of specific problems surround Giotto's life and sheds light on larger historical issue concerning early Italian art and culture. In doing so, the series lays bare the methodological preoccupations of scholars since the nineteenth century. Above all, matters of connoisseurship and the larger question of the nature of the matter's art have governed the study of Giotto. Perhaps in part because of the intractability of the problems involved in arriving at an agreed-upon catalogue and chronology for Giotto, the Arena Chapel has served the chief means of demonstrating Giotto's pictorial subtlety, his dramatic range, and his intellectual depth. Curiously, the Arena Chapel came to be regarded as the cornerstone of Giotto's genius only in the nineteenth century. The notion of the essentially sculptural character of Giotto's art, pervasive in modern scholarship, is likewise recent, acquiring canonical status thanks to Bernard Berenson's celebration of "tactile values" in the Ognissanti Madonna. The fourth volume includes essays concerned with works attributed to Giotto and workship in Assisi and Rome, paintings, which, no matter what one's view of their connection to Giotto, are now central to any interpretation of the master's career and his legacy.

Vol. 1: Life Giotto (1334) is the first European artist about whom it is possible to write following the schema of "life and work". The situation of the sources, however, is complicated: On Giotto's life, there are – on the one hand – biographical accounts from the mid-fourteenth century onwards that responded to various ideological requirements (patriotism, humanism, Renaissance ideology, cult of the artist); on the other, there is extensive documentary material from Giotto's lifetime, which seems to reflect less the biography of an artist than that of a bourgeois businessman resolutely climbing the social ladder. The present volume focuses on this second aspect of the Giotto figure's double life relating it to the form of existence of the pre-modern artist. Vol. 2: Works The paintings examined and contextualised in this volume are those secured for Giotto through early written sources. These sources also help to reconstruct the sequence of his works and artistic inventions as is plausible in the context of media culture in the decades around and after 1300: while Giotto was spiritually and intellectually formed in the sphere of the Florentine Dominicans, his artistic path began in Rome in the shadow of the Curia. The breakthrough to his own artistic concept came immediately before and during his work in Padua. In addition to prominent churchmen, ecclesiastical institutions, and the King of Naples, his clients were predominantly members of Italy's urban and financial elites. The adoption and further development of his inventions by other - especially Sienese - painters pressured him in his later years to try new approaches again. Vol. 3: Survival Giotto is considered by many to be the founder of modern painting. This thesis is discussed and modified in the present volume on an empirical basis. What emerges is that Giotto's impact cannot be reduced simply to the introduction of the study of nature. Rather, his art was involved in the development of pictorial idioms that were attuned to the skills and interests of their audiences. The new approaches in his painting contributed in particular to the possibility of examining and communicating psychological, narrative and allegorical content of great complexity outside the media of language and text, which not only changed the face of European art but certainly contributed to the intellectual opening of Western societies.

"Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio are the literary figures we associate with the transitional era between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in Italy. In art history, this time of artistic fertility is represented above all by the name Giotto, the great Florentine artist around whose work revolved the innovations in the visual arts in Italy, during the trecento, which shaped the course of Western art for centuries to follow. Italian cities flourished especially in the early decades of the century, as ambitious architectural projects were undertaken that demanded equally challenging decorative programs. Communal palaces and princely residences, new cathedrals and the spacious churches of the mendicant orders, all provided new tasks for painting, and especially for mural painting." "Italian Frescoes: The Age of Giotto, 1280-1400 illustrates in detail the inspired responses to this challenge by Giotto, his contemporaries, and his successors. They undertook a continuous artistic exploration of new ground - in terms of figurative and narrative style as well as in the shaping of pictorial space and use of color. After an introductory overview, the volume begins with an in-depth presentation of the frescoes at San Francesco in Assisi, which became, in the decades around 1300, the great school of Italian painting, where Giotto, Pietro Lorenzetti, and Simone Martini, among others, created a new kind of painted mural and a new style of pictorial narrative. Expansive treatment is given as well to Giotto's masterful Arena Chapel in Padua, a touchstone of European art for writers and artists from Dante to Marcel Proust and from Ghiberti to Henri Matisse. Among the many other highlights of the volume are the chapels painted by Giotto, Taddeo Gaddi, Maso di Banco, Giovanni da Milano, and Agnolo Gaddi in the church of Santa Croce, Florence; Ambrogio Lorenzetti's monumental allegories of good and bad government in the Palazzo Pubblico, Siena; Buffalmacco's Triumph of Death and Last Judgment in Pisa's Camposanto; and, toward the end of the century, Altichiero's frescoes for the Saint George Chapel in Padua."--BOOK JACKET.

The rebirth of realistic representation in Italy around 1300 led to the materialization of a pictorial language which dominates global visual culture even today. This book offers the first comprehensive study of Italian meta-painting in the age of Giotto and sheds new light on the early modern and modern history of the phenomenon. The analysis of pictorial illusionism and reality effect together with the liturgical, narrative and typological role of images-within-images makes this work a pioneering contribution to visual studies and premodern Italian culture.