The Rebirth of the Fine Arts and Franciscan Thought: II Giotto di Bondone

The Crucifixion THE REBIRTH OF THE FINE ARTS AND FRANCISCAN THOUGHT II GIOTTO DI BONDONE ON a colorful historical scene, and within surroundings where Franciscanism played a significant rôle, at the turn of the thirteenth and during the first decades of the fourteenth century, we see Giotto at work. He was a painter, a sculptor and an architect. He won praise and high respect in all these fields. Yet painting was the center of his artistic activities. According to Vasari,1 Giotto was born in 1276. Pucci2 informs us that he died in 1336, at the age of seventy, thus indicating his birth in 1266. The reference to his age might well be only approximate. In the face of these contradictory statements Giotto's date of birth remains an unsolved problem. There is an amazing discrepancy between the darkness and cruelty of the epoch in which Giotto lived and the purity and peacefulness emanating from his pictures. During Giotto's lifetime, the last of the great medieval Popes, Boniface VIII, was impetuously steering St. Peter's ship through the turbulent seas; the Papal Court was transferred from Rome to Avignon; Philip Le Bel of France pursued his power politics ruthlessly; the Hapsburgs entered history, and the emperors Henry of Luxembourg and Louis of Bavaria took up anew the policy oí intervention in Italian affairs as practiced by their Swabian predecessors. It was in the last year of Giotto's life that Edward III of England succeeded in winning the assistance of Louis of Bavaria and the Flanders cities against France and initiated the bloody and ruinous period of the Hundred Years' war. In Italy there were continuous conflicts. Venice fought Genoa, Boniface fought the Colonna, Florence struggled against 1.Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de' più eccelenti architetti, pittori e seultori Italiani . Con nuove annotazioni e commenti di Gaetano Milanesi, Firenze, 1878-1880, vol. I., Giotto di Bondone. 2.Antonio Pucci, "Centiloquio," in Delizie degli eruditi Toscan!, Firenze, 1772. 4 THE REBIRTH OF FINE ARTS Arezzo, Prato, Pistoia, Pisa, and Siena. Great captains like Uggocione di Faggiuola, Castruccio Castracani and the first Visconti battled in the field. The city of Florence was torn by civil wars between democrats and nobility, Guelphs and Ghibellines, Black and White Guelphs, Black Guelphs of the party of Corso Donati and Black Guelphs of the party of Rosso della Tosa. The democrats, under the leadership of Giano della Bella, proclaimed the right to liberty based upon self-determination as demanded by the laws of nature and forbade the sale of bondsmen. Among the enemies of freedom and democracy, the sinister figure of Corso Donati, the "worst of the culprits,"3 fascinates the imagination. Almost every page of Dino Compagni's contemporary chronicle is stained with violence, bloodshed and murder. It closes with this exclamation: "Thus our city is endangered! Thus, our citizens persevere in their misdeeds!... In this city, and by these citizens, nothing praiseworthy is done which would not be distorted and reviled. Men kill one another; crime is not punished according to law; he who has friends or can pay flaunts freely in spite of his crime. "Oh you godless citizens who have bribed all the world and demoralized it by your wickedness and unjust profit! It is you who have introduced in the world all that evil. Yet, the world is about again to be down upon you: The emperor with his mighty hand will lay hold of you and will bereave you by sea and by land." Over and over again, we meet the same bitterness in Dante's Divina Commedia: Florence From day to day of good is more depleted And into dismal ruin seems ordained* or: Rejoice, oh Florence ! Since thou art so great, That over sea and land thou beatest thy wings, And throughout hell thy name is spread abroad ! 5 Spirits of less high morality than Dante veer from extreme to extreme, from exalted piety to godlessness, from wild joys to 3.Dante, Divina Commedia, Purg. 24, 82. 4.Dante, Divina Commedia, Purg. 24, 79, translated by Longfellow. 5.Dante, Divina Commedia, Inf. 26, 1, translated by Longfellow. HARRY B. GUTMAN5 despair, cynicism and destructiveness. The well...