Giotto: Two Problems in the Origin of His Style

Abstract

There is a notion still found in some writings on Italian art that Giotto began his artistic training in the matrix of a Greek, that is, Italo-Byzantine, style and content and that he changed these, virtually single-handedly, from Greek into Latin—into Italo-Gothic style and content. Few of us can believe that he emerged from the Italo-Byzantine chrysalis immediately into his developed Paduan style, but his early work, his artistic growth before the Paduan period, is very problematical. What I propose to investigate in this paper are two highly important sources of Giotto's development, namely late Roman and thirteenth century Italian sculpture, and by studying two very concrete instances of Giotto's use of sculptured reliefs to point out some of the processes by which Giotto created the new style; the examination is limited to one work, to the Pietà in the Arena Chapel at Padua (Detail: Fig. 2*).