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Giotto e compagni (musée du Louvre, 18 April–15 July 2013). Catalogue by DominiqueThiébaut, with essays by Donal Cooper and Andrea de Marchi, and contributions by Marianne Besseyere, Thomas Bohl, Sonia Chiodo, Marco Ciatti, Joanna Dunn, Myriam Eveno, Cecilia Frosinini, Giovanni Giura, Babette Hartwieg, Daniel Jaunard, Maire‐Claude Léonelli, Patrick Mandron, Rosaria Motta, Linda Pisani, Élisabeth Ravaud, Claudia Sindaco and Paolo Vitolo. Milan: Louvre/ Officina Libraria, 2013. 276 pp. with 200 …

2014; Wiley; Volume: 28; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/rest.12044

1477-4658

N. Clayton Silver,

Chapels are places of memory, spaces of commemoration and showcases of great art. On 18 February 1659, King Louis XIV attended the consecration of a new royal chapel in the Palais du Louvre. Dedicated to Notre-Dame de la Paix et Saint-Louis, it marked the close of the Thirty Years' War, celebrated French victory over Spain, and honoured the sovereign's patron saint. Three hundred and fifty years later, the palace had become a museum and the faithful were not Christian worshippers but devotees of Renaissance art who came to behold the accomplishments of the Florentine painter Giotto di Bondone (c. 1276–1337). ‘Giotto e compagni’, the Louvre's first ever exhibition of Trecento art, gathered in the Salle du chapelle thirty-one objects by the master, his workshop and followers. Easier said than done. Frescoes, like his world-famous cycles at Assisi and Padua, can only be experienced in person and the paintings on panel and vellum, drawings and sculpture displayed here, mostly from French public collections, rarely travel. Replete with images of God, Christ, the Virgin and the saints, these devotional works transformed the palace's defunct royal chapel into a shrine. It evoked on an intimate scale the kind of all-encompassing experience once enjoyed by Enrico Scrovegni and heeded the advice of Vasari, who opened his list of Giotto's works with a palace chapel, where readers were directed to seek out the Florentine master's revolutionary art in person.1 Originally conceived as a dossier show around the Louvre's Stigmatization of Saint Francis (cat. 3, Fig. 1), the exhibition was organized chronologically and divided into thematic sections. They began with Giotto's early years in Florence (1285–1303) and continued into his maturity (1303–25). They addressed sticky questions of the bottega (1320s), considered his employment at the Court of Naples (1328–32), and concluded with the reception of his art in France (1340s). Giotto travelled widely across the Italian peninsula and the outstanding group of paintings assembled here offered a snapshot of his peripatetic career. Florence, Naples, Pisa and even Padua, with a remarkable loan of the Scrovegni Chapel's God the Father in Majesty (cat. 5), were all represented under one roof. Beyond his painterly abilities, the astonishing variety of types on display – a crucifix, monumental gabled panels, a polyptych, reunited diptychs, and a variety of other small-scale works intended for private devotion – introduced the rich vein of facture into our understanding of Giotto's role as an innovator. Conservateur général Dominique Thiébaut delivered it to visitors with sensitively designed installations that highlighted construction, copious comparative images and carefully written labels. Giotto, Stigmatization of Saint Francis of Assisi, c. 1298, on poplar panel, 313.5 × 162.5 cm, Paris, musée du Louvre, département des Peintures (© RMN-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre)/ Michel Urtado) Softly lit behind clear glass entrance doors, like a gargantuan relic within its own monstrance, the Louvre's Stigmatization was the star of the show. Vasari (1568) described the painting hanging from a pillar in San Francesco in Pisa but its original function and location have long remained a mystery. New research by Donal Cooper and Linda Pisani, corroborated by the technical investigation of Élisabeth Ravaud, demonstrated that it was not intended for a chapel.2 Instead, as previously suggested by Bram Kempers, this giant image towered over the congregation of San Francesco atop its tramezzo, where it broadcast a powerful and highly visible statement of allegiance to the Franciscans who maintained this church. A tiny pair of imprese, perhaps added after the painting arrived in Pisa, link the commission to the Cinquini and, it is argued, to two women of the family who belonged to a Franciscan penitential confraternity. In the gallery and catalogue, a comparative image of the Verification of the Stigmata fresco at Assisi, depicting a crossbeam full of painted panels, helpfully evoked this painting's original altitude and angle of installation. Three original mounting rings, visible on the reverse thanks to its unprecedented display on a free-standing plinth, accepted chains and point to a degree of adjustability that could be exploited to achieve the maximum visual impact. Monumental gabled panels were hardly revolutionary by circa 1300 but the impressive image that Giotto crafted fully articulated the potential of this substantial tavola. Even on his knees, Saint Francis is an overwhelming figure, towering above a small oratory and dominating the penitential landscape which rises behind him but fits neatly within the frame. His Stigmatization is the grand finale of a constituent narrative beginning with the three small square compartments inscribed into the same gold ground and depicting The Dream of Pope Innocent III, The Approval of the Franciscan Rule and The Preaching of Saint Francis to the Birds. Kneeling before Innocent III, the little figure of Saint Francis echoes the position of his enormous counterpart receiving the stigmata above, dramatizing the Franciscan virtue of humility in monumental and miniature. But for whom? The looming Stigmatization projected the image of Francis as alter christus to the entire lay congregation but the saint's relationship with Christ's vicar on earth could only have been contemplated by devotees privileged (or interested) enough to get up close. Whether or not they understood that the artist's signature beneath was no less than homage to Praxiteles,3 its metal (silver?) foil, now oxidized, would have glistened in the candlelight (Fig. 2).4 Like that inscribed beneath the Virgin's feet on his Bologna polyptych, it visibly signalled Giotto's talents to a non-Florentine audience.5 Giotto, Stigmatization of Saint Francis of Assisi, detail of signature, c. 1298, on poplar panel, 313.5 × 162.5 cm, Paris, musée du Louvre, département des Peintures (© RMN-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre)/ Michel Urtado) Giotto's ability to exploit the natural environment is not often discussed in the literature but it was clearly on display in this painting. For example, he carefully differentiated between the grassy floodplain of Cannara where Francis preached to the birds and the wilderness of La Verna, isolated on the slopes of Mount Penna in the rugged Casentino. Just as the tiny oak tree appears to bend in salutation, offering up the birds that roost within it, the mountainside above embraces Francis, echoing in stone his bodily acceptance of the Stigmata and recalling a legendary rock face that provided him with shelter from the devil. Behind the saint, five trees of two different species, signal the wilderness location of his miraculous encounter and suggest its abundance with flourishing canopies constructed of the same individually depicted leaves found in the Louvre's monumental Crucifix (cat. 11). The rocky escarpment they cling to not only evokes the defining geographical feature of La Verna but invites the viewer to ascend its precipitous slopes by following a route signposted by the trees, virtually partaking in the climb that Francis himself made. Panel paintings both large and small encouraged the visitor to look beyond the artist's mastery of the natural world, and to think about how he used it. Giotto gave prominence to a rock ledge in the Stigmatization that situates the kneeling saint in a plausible space. As part of the landscape, it helps to locate Francis on La Verna and, like a parapet, this precipice functions as a threshold, opening up a reverent distance between miracle and the devotee. Yet Giotto revealed to the viewer a side of it that the saint cannot see. The ledge is not simply a familiar rock feature but a deliberately deceptive pictorial device, enjoining the thoughtful participant in a potentially efficacious tension between tangible world and virtuoso illusion, personalising our view of an image intended to aid in meditation or contemplation. It emerged as a signature feature in three versions of the Crucifixion (cat. 16, 17, and 18), all small-scale panel paintings of the same narrative, made for personal devotion, and reunited for the first time since 1937.6 Even the compromised Troyes panel (cat. 18) tentatively ascribed to ‘Giotto et Atelier?’ reveals a considerable fragment in the bottom right corner. The innate pictorial imagination that defines his surviving fresco cycles was unmissable in the panel paintings assembled in Paris. Giotto's exceptional ingegno was singled out by Boccaccio and Petrarch, and its dynamics have been the subject of much modern study and scholarly debate.7 As argued by Mary Pardo for his frescoes, the potentially recognizable gestures, expressions and material detail that constituted Giotto's visual vocabulary lent credibility to clever and original solutions developed in response to representational challenges.8 The result was a subtlety that was appreciated by knowledgeable viewers, enabling humanists like Petrarch to discriminate between informed and uninformed publics.9 Julian Gardner has carefully observed that in the Stigmatization of Saint Francis fresco outside the Bardi Chapel at Santa Croce, Giotto deliberately cut off the seraph's upper wings, conveying the speed of this divine vision for the first time.10 Several years earlier, however, he had already achieved it in the Pisa version. Giotto cropped the hastening seraph's wing tip with all of the subtly befitting a panel painting, enhancing the impression of an accelerated descent implicit in the fluttering drapery. On bended knee, Francis beholds his vision and Giotto offers a view up his sleeves. This saint has just dropped to the ground and thrown both hands up in bewilderment, but so suddenly that the sleeve of his habit has not yet begun to slide down his arms (unlike the Bardi fresco or even his companion's habit in the narrative scene below.) What we interpret as immediacy might equally be described, in a devotional context, as a sense of the divine made present. Even before he left Florence, it was already evident in Giotto's paintings. Tassels at the tips of a cylindrical bulging pillow beneath The Virgin of San Giorgio alla Costa (cat. 2, Fig. 3) stand on end, conveying the heft of her massive body. Weight need not mean inactivity – the Virgin's cloth of honour swings from the throne's top edge attached by four delicate rings. While such embellishments led Andrea de Marchi to argue for Giotto's overlooked genius of ‘ornato’ (Roberto Longhi's word), focusing on details alone overlooks the bigger picture.11 Its conspicuous mounting hardware emphasizes the portability and empherality of this tapestry, implying that the two angels have just hung it up for her. Wings poised, they are not in flight but only recently arrived. Red ribbons that secure their flowing locks terminate in loose ends, all of which are still perched precariously aloft as if filled with air from a sudden landing. Giotto seems to signal the Virgin's recent enthronement with angels like attentive courtiers heralding the arrival of their monarch by duly preparing her honourable seat. It is a pity that the Louvre's own Maestà by Cimabue could not be part of the exhibition, where the monumental panel would have underscored their contrasting approaches to heavenly presence – one indicated by awe-inspiring physical size and the other dramatized by the devotee's active participation. Giotto, The Virgin of San Giorgio alla Costa, c. 1288–90, on panel, 180 × 900 cm, Florence, Museo diocesano di Santo Stefano al Ponte (© Studio Quattrone) God the Father in Majesty (cat. 5, Fig. 4), albeit damaged, conveyed a similar impression. Painted on a hinged wooden panel whose function remains in dispute and executed with a subtly matte finish that imitated fresco technique, it was located at the pinnacle of the triumphal arch, surmounting the Scrovegni Chapel's altar.12 High above, God presides in heaven and over earth, initiating the narrative cycle. Gazing at a crowd of angels through the right aperture of his throne, he raises his right hand to command Gabriel who waits on the step below it. God's fingers are still unfolding, a combined act of dispatch and blessing rapidly approaching but not yet fully realized. Imminence achieved through multiple pictorial effects was the operative principle in Giotto's capacity to orchestrate a heavenly encounter for the devotee or, as John Shearman might have put it, to connect with the beholder. Shearman called attention to the remarkable way in which the Saint Francis cycle at Assisi defines and locates the viewer, making him present at the saint's miracles, but attributed this brilliant conceit to one of three anonymous masters.13 Giotto, God the Father in Majesty, c. 1303–05, on panel, 150 × 95 cm, Padua, Musei Civici, Scrovegni Chapel The title ‘Giotto e compagni’ signalled that there was more than one hand at work in this room too. Authorship is the paramount of Giotto questions and the exhibition confronted it head-on. Ever since Richard Offner dismantled the master's oeuvre by removing the Assisi frescoes, casting into doubt the three paintings that bear his signature, attributions to the giotteschi have been a growth industry.14 Clouds of scholarly confusion subsequently obscured Giotto's achievements. Following the lead of art historians including Luciano Bellosi and Miklós Boskovits, to whom the catalogue is dedicated, Thièbaut sought to remedy the situation by re-examining the artist's panel paintings and situating them within the wider context of his workshop practices.15 Almost half of the objects on display were identified as Giotto: nine were either attributed to or signed by him and three more were described as ‘Giotto et atelier’. This moniker denoted a work of art that revealed Giotto's conception at the design stage and execution by painters working directly under his supervision, implicitly identifying the work as a commission from the master.16 By way of comparison, they were displayed with paintings by unaffiliated artists who copied his motifs (Maestro di Cesi, cat. 4) and style (Bernardo Daddi, cat. 7 and 8; imitators in Naples and Avignon, cat. 23–31), as well as those who resisted it (Lippo di Beniveni, cat. 9 and 10). The catalogue, accessible to novices but written for specialists, nuanced this picture. Essays by Donal Cooper and Andrea de Marchi focused on his relationship with the Franciscans – who emerge as a driving force behind the pan-peninsular success of Giotto's firm – and his role in the development of canonical types like the monumental crucifix or polyptych. The Badia pentaptych, for example, is the earliest known altarpiece whose compartments are internally articulated by architectural features – a trilobe arch resting on two pilasters.17 That it is constructed of vertical boards even though Giotto subsequently returned to polyptychs carpentered with the more traditional horizontal-plank dossal structure may have surprised De Marchi, but should remind the reader that progress is not a steady march forward.18 Substantial catalogue entries on each object featured the results of new technical analyses in the words of the conservators who performed them, proffering not just discoveries – such as the revelation through infrared reflectography that the terminal of a tiny crucifix in the Stigmatization of Saint Francis once depicted Saint John the Evangelist rather than the Virgin – but more importantly the building blocks for future scholarship. All of the contributors tackled a vast literature and each object bibliography is annotated with previous attributions, useful for still contentious debates on Giotto and non-Giotto that will inevitably continue long after this exhibition closes. Instead of seeking to identify his talented assistants,19 the catalogue invited us to rethink the painter's business. Both curator and contributors pictured the operation of Giotto's workshop as a large and multifaceted corporation with many overlapping responsibilities whose director delegated extensively to a highly capable staff. Giotto's ‘compagni’, a tribute to the 1985 exhibition, ‘Simone Martini e “chompagni” ’, held at Siena's Pinacoteca Nazionale, were designated as a close associates in the bottega who rigorously worked from the master's designs.20 Confusingly, however, this is not its period meaning. Compagno derives from the word compagnia, the legal designation for a profit-sharing partnership. It was applied in Florentine and Sienese legal statutes regulating painters' guilds by the mid-1330s.21 Artists contracted compagnie to create financial stability by pooling their resources, either for fixed periods of time or individual projects.22 Long-term arrangements protected participants from bankruptcy in times of hardship. Although their talents were often complementary, the compagnia was strictly a professional arrangement – contracts signed by one compagno did not entail the joint participation of all partners.23 Admittedly, most of the documented evidence post-dates Giotto, and the fact that Vasari later described collaborative works as executed ‘in compagnia’ leaves open the possibility that it may have been used differently circa 1300.24 Whatever the case may have been in Giotto's time, ‘compagno’ was never a pejorative term. Painters of the next generation, however, were quickly cast in his shadow and the fact that they are today identified as his comrades continues to reinforce an ahistorical definition of the word in modern scholarship.25 Despite its apparently anachronistic application, the word compagno invited visitors to rethink the workshop as a positive place of enterprise rather than as a marker of inferior craftsmanship. Some compagni became highly successful independent artists, like Taddeo Gaddi, who was represented by one scene from a predella (cat. 20) – still a novelty at this time – and one of two drawings in the exhibition, the Presentation in the Temple (cat. 19). The opportunity to compare it with Two men holding swords, attributed to Giotto (cat. 6), was instructive. Both almost certainly relate to fresco cycles and each illustrated a different goal – a full composition and a design for figures. Whether or not these extraordinarily rare survivals from the Trecento were intended as preparatory or contract drawings (we know next to nothing about the use of drawings in this period), they revealed the kinds of information communicated on paper by two highly successful painters of different generations who had once worked together – for example, a profound concern with bold modelling in the design stages that is borne out in underdrawing of paintings executed by Giotto and his workshop.26 If the breadth of Giotto's delegation posited in the catalogue is correct, then, as proposed by Roberto Bellucci and Cecilia Frosinini, easily portable designs certainly played a pivotal role in the transmission of ideas from a master to employees, who realized them in fresco.27 Works by or attributed to Giotto differ widely in style and the catalogue was concerned with why the corpus appears heterogenous. Modern criteria of authorship privilege the master's physical touch and lack the flexibility to accommodate synthetic commissions undertaken by a Trecento bottega often executed in multiple campaigns. At Santa Croce, for example, Andrea de Marchi argued that Giotto (with the Franciscans) masterminded a single unified decorative program for the ten transept chapels executed by several independent firms over the course of twenty years.28 Equally, Donal Cooper proposed that Giotto conceived and began to paint the fresco cycle for the Lower Church at Assisi, establishing the programme and setting the stylistic tone for his squadra of talented compagni to complete.29 If their hypotheses are correct, or even on the right track, then pictorial ingenuity was the principal value at stake and delegation was a skill more important to Giotto's success than the physical act of painting itself. When it comes to authorship, perhaps art historians should worry less about subtle stylistic variation within an individual commission and focus more on the overall unity of its component parts. Stylistic harmony in panel paintings too is not always what art historians expect, and this exhibition was a welcome addition to the recent trend in scholarship that brings technical evidence to bear on questions of workshop practice. Take, for instance, the four attributed to Giotto – Saint John the Evangelist (cat. 13), Saint Stephen (cat. 15), the Virgin and Child (cat. 12) and Saint Lawrence (cat. 14), first proposed by Roberto Longhi as fragments of the same pentaptych and reunited in Paris for the first time since 1937. Differences of style and incision motifs (a useful reference for which is available in Appendix 1) in addition to factual confusion over dimensions and preparation techniques, not to mention the dismal condition of Saint Lawrence, led many scholars to doubt their common provenance, let alone their collective attribution to Giotto. New scientific examination of each one confirmed Longhi's hypothesis, even if it could not determine their original order.30 Furthermore, the results of the collaborative technical study pointed to a single mind at work during the initial stages – microscopic examination revealed the shared preparation of a double bol layer in two different colours and infrared reflectography demonstrated a common underdrawing technique. The attribution of this altarpiece to Giotto, sometimes thought to come from the Pulci-Berardi Chapel,31 is complicated by the authorship of individual panels. The same problem plagues the Raleigh polyptych, typically identified as the Peruzzi Chapel altarpiece and recently on display at the J. Paul Getty Museum.32 Thièbaut hypothesized a prolonged completion by Giotto to explain the appearance of the fragmentary pentaptych assembled at the Louvre, but the intervention of more than one painter could equally account for its stylistic diversity. To extend the principles of delegation typically reserved for frescoes to multi-compartment commissions on panel is not to imply that it was any less a signature product.33 Both altarpieces have been proposed as two of Giotto's four ‘tavole’ recorded by Ghiberti at Santa Croce.34 If each one was in fact commissioned from him, then it must be recognized that the narrow stylistic contours of ‘artistic personalities’ are poorly adapted to accommodate the production dynamics of frescoes or panel paintings created in the Trecento bottega. Instead, ideas come to the forefront when we are asked to imagine the corporate Giotto, founding director of an industrious firm whose products bear the hallmark of his ingegno. Like his frescoes, the magnificent panel paintings assembled in the Louvre's own chapel offered an opportunity for quiet contemplation of Giotto's remarkable pictorial achievements and reflection on how much we have to learn about his business.