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Reviewed by:
  • The Cambridge Companion to Giotto
  • Paul Barolsky
Anne Derbes and Mark Sandona , eds. The Cambridge Companion to Giotto. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. xxii + 313 pp. + 46 b/w pls. index. illus. bibl. $95. ISBN: 0–521–77007–6.

The approach of this valuable, well-edited book is, as the title suggests, essentially biographical. The great Giotto is understood as a person who flourished in relation to the artistic conventions, practices, and religious sensibilities of his day. In essays by a number of highly accomplished experts we find helpful information and ideas about the technique of fresco painting, about Giotto's sense of pictorial space, about the painter's critical response to classical sources, about the painter's patrons, both lay and clerical, about the typology and meaning of the painter's frescoes in Padua, about the artist's response to St. Francis, and even about the painter's wit. The contributions to this volume by Anne Derbes, Mark [End Page 195] Sandona, Hayden B. J. Maginnis, Bruno Zanardi, William Tronzo, Gary M. Radke, Joanna Cannon, William R. Cook, Julia I. Miller, Laurie Taylor-Mitchell, Benjamin G. Kohl, and Andrew Ladis are all well written by scholarly standards and of consistently high quality. Many of the essays are probing, highly original, and suggestive, if not radical.

Although this volume is described as an introduction, we might well ask: for whom is this book written? Like the other excellent volumes in the Cambridge companion series, it is well beyond the grasp of students in introductory or survey courses of Italian art. It is a book, however, from which scholars and advanced students of Italian art who are not experts in its subject can learn a great deal. Similarly, it is a work that scholars of history, literature, and religion can read with profit. In short, this volume is an introduction to the current status of Giotto studies, an introduction to the various problems specialists encounter as they try to understand the artist's work.

All of the contributions to this book are presented in the shadow of Hayden Maginnis's characteristically eloquent, provocative, indeed challenging essay, "In Search of Giotto," which raises serious questions about the identity of the artist. Although Giotto existed in fact and although we know many things about him, he cannot easily be separated from his myth. The quest for Giotto is not altogether different from the search for the real Homer. The art of Giotto is a web of apparent contradictions, if not paradoxes, a skein of uncertainties that prompt conjecture. Be that as it may, the Giotto who emerges in this book is for the most part not the artist who inspired exalted celebratory writing from Vasari to Ruskin, an artist who inspired beautiful, appreciative prose. Such writing cannot and should not be dismissed as merely "romantic." One has no reason to doubt that all of the contributors have been deeply moved by Giotto's art, but the painter presented in most of the essays in this book is not so much celebrated as conceived of as a historical problem. No wonder John Ruskin's classic, scene-by-scene analysis of the aesthetics and theology of Giotto's Padua frescoes is nowhere referred to in this companion to Giotto, not even in the bibliography. It can be argued, however, that Ruskin's still-unsurpassed understanding of Giotto is one of the most penetrating and sensitive meditations in the entire literature on the artist. Ruskin's huge absence here tells us ever so much about the study of Giotto today, about the character of professional art history, where the study of problems is far more important than what one might call the power of art.

Paul Barolsky
University of Virginia
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