Book Description
This four-volume set provides the most comprehensive collection of modern scholarly literature on the artist and his work. Assembling writings that are as disparate as they are sometimes hard to retrieve, it permits readers to consider the state of scholarship on a variety of specific problems surround Giotto's life and sheds light on larger historical issue concerning early Italian art and culture. In doing so, the series lays bare the methodological preoccupations of scholars since the nineteenth century. Above all, matters of connoisseurship and the larger question of the nature of the matter's art have governed the study of Giotto. Perhaps in part because of the intractability of the problems involved in arriving at an agreed-upon catalogue and chronology for Giotto, the Arena Chapel has served the chief means of demonstrating Giotto's pictorial subtlety, his dramatic range, and his intellectual depth. Curiously, the Arena Chapel came to be regarded as the cornerstone of Giotto's genius only in the nineteenth century. The notion of the essentially sculptural character of Giotto's art, pervasive in modern scholarship, is likewise recent, acquiring canonical status thanks to Bernard Berenson's celebration of "tactile values" in the Ognissanti Madonna.
The series begins with an overview of writing about Giotto. These general accounts show how scholars' construction of Giotto as a historical figure and as a painter changed in the face of new information about his life and about the way thirteenth- and fourteenth-century artists worked. Moreover, they reflect the way in which new historical perspectives on fourteenth-century Italian society opened new vistas on the art of the day. The first volume also includes a group of studies concerning various points in Giotto's biography and a second group concerning the painter's literary legend. Both biography and legend are intertwined in the case of so remote and so notable a figure as Giotto, but both are crucial to a judicious assessment of his career. The volume concludes with a miscellany of essays examining, among other things, Giotto's relationship to contemporary sculpture, his works in Milan and Naples, his workshop, and the application of such concepts as proportion and gravity to his work.


Language Notes
Text: English, German, Italian


About the Author
Andrew Ladis is Franklin Professor of Art History at the University of Georgia. A specialist in early Italian painting, he has published extensively on Giotto and Florentine painting. His books include Taddeo Gaddi, The Brancacci Chapel, Florence, and The Craft of Art: Originality and Industry in the Italian Renaissance and Baroque Workshop.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

This four-volume set provides the most comprehensive collection of modern scholarly literature on the artist and his work. Assembling writings that are as disparate as they are sometimes hard to retrieve, it permits readers to consider the state of scholarship on a variety of specific problems surround Giotto's life and sheds light on larger historical issue concerning early Italian art and culture. In doing so, the series lays bare the methodological preoccupations of scholars since the nineteenth century. Above all, matters of connoisseurship and the larger question of the nature of the matter's art have governed the study of Giotto. Perhaps in part because of the intractability of the problems involved in arriving at an agreed-upon catalogue and chronology for Giotto, the Arena Chapel has served the chief means of demonstrating Giotto's pictorial subtlety, his dramatic range, and his intellectual depth. Curiously, the Arena Chapel came to be regarded as the cornerstone of Giotto's genius only in the nineteenth century. The notion of the essentially sculptural character of Giotto's art, pervasive in modern scholarship, is likewise recent, acquiring canonical status thanks to Bernard Berenson's celebration of "tactile values" in the Ognissanti Madonna.

The series begins with an overview of writing about Giotto. These general accounts show how scholars' construction of Giotto as a historical figure and as a painter changed in the face of new information about his life and about the way thirteenth- and fourteenth-century artists worked. Moreover, they reflect the way in which new historical perspectives on fourteenth-century Italian society opened new vistas on the art of the day. The first volume also includes a group of studies concerning various points in Giotto's biography and a second group concerning the painter's literary legend. Both biography and legend are intertwined in the case of so remote and so notable a figure as Giotto, but both are crucial to a judicious assessment of his career. The volume concludes with a miscellany of essays examining, among other things, Giotto's relationship to contemporary sculpture, his works in Milan and Naples, his workshop, and the application of such concepts as proportion and gravity to his work.