Gothic Art
 

PAINTING
 

Giotto and the Sienese Artists

The convincing three-dimensional style and illusion of space that Giotto created in his painting through the use of receding planes produced a naturalism in which dramatic themes predominated. The composition and the actions and emotions of the human figure were given full value. His work reveals an intellect open to all the factors of reality, in search of a unifying meaning. The new pictorial realism and its increasingly soft nuances of colour owed much to the support of the monastic orders of the Dominicans and Franciscans. Their attachment to city life explains the great wealth of private commissions (in such buildings as Santa Croce in Florence), which enhanced the success of the Giottesque school, and that of its leading figures: Stefano, Maso di Banco, and Taddeo Gaddi. The Gothic influences that penetrated the Giottesque tradition had already marked Sienese painting. This is evident in the refined linear and chromatic sensitivity of Duccio di Buoninsegna, who transformed Sienese painting from the Byzantine tradition to the Gothic. Due to the work of certain of its artists, Siena was launched into a fruitful exchange of ideas with French Gothic art, and, in particular, with the exiled papal court at Avignon. Such work included the refined painting of Simone Martini (c. 1284-1344), which quickly appealed to the humanistic taste of Petrarch; and the warm expressiveness of Pietro Lorenzetti (c. 1280-1348). The long survival of the Giottesque school has been interpreted as a symptom of artistic fatigue and indecision, especially in Florence. In this respect, the Black Death of 1348 is considered by some as a watershed between an age of progressive renewal and a period of pessimistic contraction.

CENNINO CENNINI AND THE GIOTTESQUE ARTISTS

Probably written in the Veneto at the end of the 13th century, Cennini's Il Libro dell'Arte is one of the last examples of medieval artistic repositories, a technical manual containing the secrets of the artist's studio and the traditions of the artisan. Moreover, Cennini, who was a pupil of Agnolo Gaddi, confirms in his praise for good fresco technique the greatness of the Giottesque school. During the 14th century, it had influenced important figures, such as Taddeo Gaddi, who painted the Life of the Virgin in the Baroncelli Chapel in Santa Croce, Florence (finished 1336), and Maso di Banco, whose Legend of St Sylvester (1341-45) is in the Bardi Chapel, also in Santa Croce. These were pupils of Giotto, who developed his artistic precepts in the 13th century. Cennini records the long and hard apprenticeship in the Florentine studios, where artists learned how to paint frescos with subtle effects of light and shadow, works that would withstand the test of time. Cennini explained how the imaginative use of line and colour helped to create a more natural realism in painting.

Maso di Banco

( fl 1335–50).
Italian painter. He was first identified (as Maso) by Ghiberti, who claimed he was a pupil of Giotto and a great master of painting, but the issue was complicated for many centuries by Vasari, who confused Maso with an artist he called Tommaso di Stefano, nicknamed GIOTTINO. Maso di Banco is mentioned in several Florentine documents: in 1341 some of his paintings and equipment were seized against an uncompleted commission; in 1346 he joined the Arte de’ Medici e Speziali. Although none of the output attributed to him is signed or dated, a major fresco cycle, other more fragmentary frescoes and some panels of the 1330s and 1340s can be firmly attributed to him on stylistic grounds.
         

Maso Di Banco (1320-1350)
Legend of St Sylvester
Fresco, 1340