Giotto the Painter. Volume 1: Life

Download or read book Giotto the Painter. Volume 1: Life written by Michael Viktor Schwarz and published by Böhlau Wien. This book was released on 2023-04-17 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Giotto (1334) is the first European artist about whom it is possible to write following the schema of "life and work". The situation of the sources, however, is complicated: On Giotto's life, there are – on the one hand – biographical accounts from the mid-fourteenth century onwards that responded to various ideological requirements (patriotism, humanism, Renaissance ideology, cult of the artist); on the other, there is extensive documentary material from Giotto's lifetime, which seems to reflect less the biography of an artist than that of a bourgeois businessman resolutely climbing the social ladder. The present volume focuses on this second aspect of the Giotto figure's double life relating it to the form of existence of the pre-modern artist.