Giotto (1266-1337): The Saint Francis Frescoes and Duomo; Brunelleschi (1377-1446): Architecture as Controlled Space of Man
Presented on: Thursday, October 13, 1983
Presented by: Roger Weir
Italian Renaissance
Presentation 2 of 13
Giotto (1266-1337): The Saint Francis Frescoes and Duomo; Brunelleschi (1377-1446): Architecture as Controlled Space of Man
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, October 13, 1983
Transcript:
The date is October 13, 1983. This is the second lecture of Roger Weir on the subject of Italian Renaissance. Tonight's lecture is entitled Giotto, G-I-O-T-T-O, who lived 1266-1337. The Saint Francis frescoes and duomo. And the second person he's talking about is Brunelleschi, B-R-U-N-E-L-L-E-S-C-H-I, who lived 1377-1446. Architecture as controlled space of man.
We have, we have the beginnings of the delightfulness in the Italian Renaissance tonight. And it is due in its elegance and meaningfulness to us to the great personality of Dante, who we covered last week. And the lecture last week was a follow-up to a lecture on Dante that I had done earlier in the year. So that those two lectures on Dante go together and make a four-hour sequence. Covering at least the full extent of Dante's life and work. There is a third lecture that goes with them and that's the lecture I did on Saint Francis of Assisi. So those three lectures go together with the one today. And together the four of them with about eight hours of lecturing, if reviewed in an order should give you some idea of at least why there was a sudden flowering human ingenuity.
At the core of the feelings of love and kindliness. And the feelings of love and kindliness are integral to the impetus to have exactness, precision, excellence, outstanding capacities and so forth. The image that usually resides at the focal point of any strong feeling or emotion. The image of the flower of the angels in Paradise was portrayed by Dante in the Divine Comedy at the end in The Paradisio. And it is this image that holds together the early flowing of loving-kindness that we find in Florence.
And just as the progression of guides in Dante's Divine Comedy it yielded to deeper and deeper mysteries. The first guide being Virgil, the great poet. The great poet in the sense of a civilized poet. As distinct from Homer who had been a natural poet. Who had used the, the forces of nature for his intuitive massing of poetic genius. Virgil on the other hand had been the poet of the city, the Eternal City. The great collecting of metaphysical and political powers under Augustus in one place. And one poet was the capstone and one epic, the Aeneid, was the flowering of this. This had been Dante's guide through The Inferno and The Purgatorio.
But we saw how such a guide, comprehensiveness he was in human civilization, was unable to enter into paradise. Here again the mystery somewhat akin to the mystery of Moses not being allowed to enter into the Promised Land. He had been a prophet but could not participate in the Promised Land. Virgil was all but a Christian, but he had lived too soon. And even though his fourth eclogue had, according to antiquity in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance up into our own time, the fourth eclogue of Virgil had prophesied the coming of Christ. And so, he was held to be right on the verge of being a Christian.
The guide for Dante into paradise was instead the poignant Beatrice who had been the image of the Divine anima. The inner quality of the feminine excellence of Dante's soul had ushered him across a river, instead of coming to the river of Letha where one could drink and find forgetfulness. One instead came to another river and their remembrance came. The river Eunoe. And with remembrance and Beatrice as his guide Dante was able to leave the metaphysical plane of time-space and enter into the eternal, into paradise.
And as he progressed through the various levels of paradise which we saw were the celestial developments according to the old Ptolemaic system. The moon, mercury, the Sun, Mars on up into the period of the fixed stars. At this point as he was nearing the Godhead, Dante realized that Beatrice also could not take him to the face of God. That Beatrice disappears at the ninth heaven. And just as he notes this, he turns the other direction and finds a third guide for him. And the third and final, the ultimate guide for Dante in the Divine Comedy, he is Saint Bernard of Clairvaux. The great master mystic of humility, of inner humility. This positioning of a master mistake as the ultimate real inner guide, beyond the civilized capacities of man. Beyond his own psychological and spiritual endeavors. Outside of his capacities there is another. Another force, another power. And Saint Bernard of Clairvaux for Dante in The Paradisio was this ultimate beatific transcendence of a guide who came not of his own but simply ushering in the movement towards the final Godhead.
Saint Bernard of Clairvaux was chosen by Dante as that ultimate guide but in fact for most of the Italian Renaissance the guide for the civilization as a whole to these beatific realms of transcendence was not Saint Bernard but Saint Francis. And Saint Francis of Assisi will figure very prominently tonight because Dante's great contemporary and friend, Giotto was to be the first man since classical antiquity to discover, or as Vasari says recover totally, the lost art of painting. Not that there had not been painting. But that the qualities of painting had tended to be a flatted, static presentation. Hoping that the individual would intuit through a just position of clumsy levels, ala the Byzantine icon graphic space to, to intuit transcendent qualities.
But it was Giotto 650 years ago, who was the first artist to portray through exact personality and humane gestures and motions. And the exquisite withdrawing of the qualities of volume and color and paint into a focus which we could
recognize as humane, our own. But one which radiated out them in familiar expressions of the hands, of the positions of the head, of the body. Riveted by the eyes. And in Giotto we find for the first time this incredible intensity and power of the human face. In particularly of the eyes, to concentrate the attentiveness of all pictorial space upon a motion a thrust, a dynamic. So that in Giotto for the first time probably since early classical antiquity, we have composition and personality coming together in his works to present us with a whole new realm of possibility. And this happened in northern Italy towards the end of the 1200s and the beginning of the 1300s.
Giotto, in fact, very curious individual in many respects. He was the first artist. He is the first man, figure, human, by whom we mean when we say his name and think of his presence, that he was a person. He was not just a school. He was not a collection or an aggregate of styles, or forces. He was a man who was a human being, and his origins are almost mythical, a pristine. He was born about 15 miles outside of Florence. A little farming area. And as a youngster he was seen to be extraordinarily prompt and exact in his character. So that as a youngster of about nine or ten he was given charge of a flock of sheep, so recounts Vasari in his life of Giotto in The Lives of the Artists. It
happened by wonderful circumstance that one day the great Florentine artist Cimabue was traveling outside of Florence and happened upon the young lad Giotto drawing with a rock on a smooth piece of rock the outlines of the sheep and the trees. And he was stunned by the fact of the control of the line of the young lad. And so, approaching the boy and talking with him and approaching his family he secured permission from the family to take the young Giotto to Florence.
In Florence would be the home base of Giotto. He would travel many places and many distances from there. Always returning back to Florence. So that the city of Florence, probably about 45,000 people at the birth of Giotto and not much more than double that 90,000 or so at the death of Giotto, began to be considered the hub. Not only of the travels of Giotto and the exiled travels of Dante but began to be the focus of an energy.
Now we've talked several times in many lectures, on the way in which spiritual energy manifests itself. That it doesn't come out in fragments. It doesn't come out in a sequence. But it comes whole so that the pattern of its dynamic is transmitted whole. The ultimate mysterious Christian version of how this happens is in fact the very core of the mystery of Saint Francis of Assisi. That is to say in the way in which he received the stigmata. If you recall, some of you in that lecture on Saint Francis. It was the appearance not of an image of Christ but of a transcendental presentation of Christ somewhere in between what we would know as natural time space. Between this space and a celestial space beyond which is unknowable. Somewhere in between there, there was a vibrant pattern of wholeness encapsulated in the capacity to endure suffering for others upon oneself. So that this mystery was given to Saint Francis, and he bore at the end of his life the marks of this stigmata. And the marks appeared simultaneously, not in any particular order. So it is in this way that spiritual energy gives its dynamic patterns whole. We know today and nuclear physics it's a phenomenon known as the soliton. Where certain energy forces when they are in a dynamically balanced pattern, give of themselves a direct impress of the totality. It's much like a smoke ring that comes out and comes out whole. This capacity of Saint Francis then to impart from himself the mystery of this wholeness of this capacity to others was the essential prototype in mystery that began to surround the figure of Saint Francis of Assisi. And within two years of his death in 1226, a great Cathedral and church was raised in Assisi.
Now Giotto had drawn a lot of attention in Florence. And in fact, he was he was finally noticed by several prominent individuals and given small commissions to do paintings and so forth. Giotto was contacted by his teacher Cimabue, who had gone to Assisi to begin decorating with a series of frescoes, 32 frescoes in the chapel in Assisi. But was unable to continue with it and the assignment the Commission was given to the young Giotto. He travelled to Assisi and with him came the increasing responsibility and recognition that somehow in his life pattern, Giotto's life pattern, that he was following a concourse which he recognized in Saint Francis's life. So, there was a parallel somewhat between Giotto and Saint Francis. And in this respect, since Saint Francis had lived the divine life to the extent that he had participated in this exchange mystery with Christ, Giotto realized that there was an ongoing reoccurring effect of wholeness. And he began to seriously devote himself after arriving in Assisi to becoming a religious great man. Using his art and his talents to declare the possibilities in painting of spiritual realization. And we have slides later on for this and we will see some of the details of this.
Giotto having had some fame in Florence when he finished the Assisi murals was well-known all over Italy. And in fact, the Pope, there is some question whether it was Boniface the eighth or whether it was Benedict the eleventh, summoned Giotto to Rome to meet with him. And there's an apocryphal story in Vasari that the Pope had sent a series of envoys out to canvass the countryside Siena and all of Tuscany and so forth to find painters to come and decorate the great Saint Peter's in Rome. Not the one that Michelangelo finally rebuilt but the original Saint Peter's. So, the messenger was collecting sheets of drawings and presentations from various artists. And when he came to Giotto's workshop in Florence, Giotto took a single sheet of paper. It's almost like a Zen master story. He took a single sheet of paper, and he dipped a brush into red paint and took his arm and without moving his upper part drew a perfect circle and handed the sheet to him and said give this to his holiness he will know what it means. The messenger balked and for several days tried to get something else from the nascently famous Giotto, nothing else forth coming he retired to Rome. And his eminence going through the various sheets came to this and a summoning several of his trusted advisors they decided that this precocious and excellent craftsman was just the sort of person for the job. So, they brought him to Rome, and he was immediately given a series of commissions.
When he finished these commissions in Rome, after six years he was given 600 gold ducats which is very large sum. And at that time present enormous sum. But also, I had made the fame of Giotto and it had brought clearly home to him that he was living a very particular style of life that had a pattern of wholeness in it. And that his work, his art, was all to express and carry the seeds of this manifestation throughout northern Italy. That is to say just as Saint Francis had been able to convey the mystery of the transposition of inner personality through the stigmata of the crucifixion, Giotto in his art was bringing through the capacity for the audience's to view themselves in their human mode. In a mirror-like motion in the paintings so exact were they Vasari says that over one of the porticos in Saint Peter's that Giotto had made a mosaic, very large mosaic, some 15 feet high. And it was the Apostles with the storm on the Sea of Galilee and the ship. And that the sail of this ship was so excellently done that anyone coming in would immediately think that they had stuck a sail up there and that was fluttering in the wind.
Giotto threw his art felt that he was able to bring the person from their lives where they were into this work. And his work tended to be always of a religious nature. And in fact, his great works were always of a sequence of religious works, building up to a culmination. So that when one reviewed the cycle of religious paintings, one had the experience of lifting yourself out of your humdrum life coming into this very high jet stream level of exquisite art in religious insight. And having the experience as long as you came back to it of a real inter pilgrimage.
And for 650 years Giotto has been the master of Western art. He's the granddaddy. He's the founder. He is the first to convey exactly our belief in our civilization that art has a very real spiritual function. It conveys to us, momentarily as it were, the possibility of learning how to be in a higher world. Any possibility of moving through that threshold to that higher world. It is a convection which we have to this day. Giotto was the author, the originator. The man who made this happen.
He of course was extraordinarily close to Dante. Dante and Giotto were blood brothers in a real sense, in a real way. Giotto, like Dante, moved around the countryside. He was accepting commissions in many other cities. He was in Pisa then he was in Ferrara, in Padua and Verona. And when the Pope's moved to Avignon in southern France they also summoned Giotto and he went there and painted a series of pictures there in southern France. When the kingdom of Naples with the powerful King Robert, the father of Charles, decided to redo his chapels and his churches in Naples, he summoned Giotto. Who immediately went down there.
So, Giotto, like a Johnny Appleseed, was carrying to all the major centers of Italy and even southern France, this spark that was to be fanned into the Renaissance. That is to say it was not just a revival of classical learning, but it was a revival of the epitome of the fulcrum of the spiritual experience of classical antiquity. Which was not Augustus but was Christ. That there is a core to classical antiquity. That it drew its mysterious and occult powers together at the time of Augustus.
We gave a lecture on this I think two years ago, of how Augustus realizing that he had inherited not only the Roman history but all the various histories of the known world at that time. And that the capitulation of Cleopatra to him in Alexandria gave him the whole Egyptian lineage. So that Augustus felt that he had control of the world. Not only at that time but in all of its destinies. And so, he summoned all of the ocular writings. They're called the Sibylline Oracles. We have several books in the P.R.S. library on these. Augustus assembled all of the Sibylline Oracles in the classical world and collected them together just at about the time that Christ was being born.
So that for Giotto, for Dante, for these individuals at the beginning of the Renaissance there was an unmistakable tone that the revival of classical learning meant the revival of the context within which the mystery of Christ's incarnation had manifested itself. So that one studied classical authors like Virgil or Horace not simply to learn the elegance of their meter but to build the crucible of understanding within which could transpire again that most sublime of incarnations. So that the beginning of the Renaissance was instead of an exercise in pedantic academicians, read covering dusty books from the shelf, it was a series of extraordinarily talented individuals concerted to reconstruct. To recreate perhaps is a better term. To recreate the classical antiquity again. Because was there not a possibility but if the context were there. If the ritual sacrifice of civilization was made again. What could one not expect.
So, Giotto and Dante were in that generation of individuals who were extraordinarily talented. 700 years later we puzzle over libraries of information on Dante. You can go for decades and
Study Giotto and their excellence just reoccurs again and again. Study does not reduce them down. It only leads you into that kind of appreciation which comes through intelligent judgment that this indeed was a core development. And it's no surprise that the whole Italian Renaissance comes from this beginning.
Giotto in his travels had done a number of large paintings. A number of large commissions. Vasari says in his own time almost every place in Italy would have some little thing made by Giotto. Some little crucifix. Some little painting. So that he says, "if one were to sum up all the known works of Giotto it would be an ocean of art." That he covered all of Italy with his genius. But in his capacity as a fresco painter of sequences of paintings that added up to a mystical cycle of initiation for the viewer.
The greatest cycle was done in Padua, and it was begun the end 1305. Dante was still very much alive, in fact composing The Paradisio. Giotto was commissioned by a man, a financier, named Enrico Scrovegni. Now Scrovegni had not been a reasonable man all his life. In fact, Dante had written the first about him in hell, positioning him very uncomplimentary. So Scrovegni in order to balance this verse by Dante dedicated a chapel by Giotto. Hoping that when he got to the gates of paradise somehow this would balance.
Giotto worked on this it's called the Arena Chapel. And I don't know if we have a slide of it or not. But the inside has a series of 40 frescoes, 40. And they take they whole transmission. The whole pattern, spiritual pattern, and it's transmission and how it came into human civilization. Into humane time. Into artistic perceptible capacity. So that in the Arena Chapel when Giotto is presenting the wholeness of the pattern, he doesn't begin with the birth of Christ he begins instead with the parents of Mary. And with Joaquin and Ana, he presents in 12 paintings the development of how this motion of annunciation and participation comes into manifestation. And only with the thirteenth painting does he then interpose one of these great artistic works which act as a transcendental gap between one sequence and another. And then this gap, God is dispatching the angel Gabriel to go and announce to Mary the birth of Christ. And then the rest of the series of frescoes are the birth and life of Christ. And on the back wall of the Arena Chapel as the 40th painting, Giotto brought all of this to bear in one massive final work, which is on the Last Judgement. I think we might have a slide of it. So that from the Annunciation to Joaquin and Ana to the final judgment that to Giotto's mind was the wholeness of the pattern. That was the, if we may use that phrase, the soliton operating in this cosmos.
Giotto in completing the Arena Chapel, he had worked on it over a series of many years, returned to Florence. And he was now an old man in his 60s. And the city of Florence realizing that its two most famous sons, one had been exiled and died in Ravenna the other had done his most famous works in Rome and Assisi and Padua, Avignon, sought to have something made in Florence by the great Giotto. And so, they commissioned him to build in the very center of Florence a campanile. And this was to be a campanile to end all campaniles. It's almost 270 feet high.
So, Giotto thought this campanile through, and he began one of the most massive projects ever undertaken. They came, dug a pit about 40 feet deep. And they placed in sequence series of rocks making a bed rock strata. There was about two thirds of this pit. And then on top of that up to the ground level they put in a series of massive masonry ramparts, and this was the base, the pad upon which this huge campanile was raised. And Giotto designed everything, and he left sketches for the sculptures that would go into the niches and the whole situation. And today the guide for Florence has on its front covers Giotto's Campanile. It's still there, still at the center. Across from the campanile down below he has the baptistry. The patron saint of Florence Saint John the Baptist is featured there in the baptistry. And once they had this campanile, and it had to be finished long after Giotto passed on. He died about three years after beginning work in the campanile.
It was his final work and his bid to locate in terms of architecture rather than painting or sculpture. Located in terms of architecture in Florence the epitome of a religious cycle that was of a different quality from painting. One can do a series of frescoes like the Assisi frescoes. One can even do the Arena Chapel and have 40 frescoes all together leading to the Last Judgement. But this is a visual excursion. This is a use of color and form, but it has some limitations because there is a master art. A mother art architecture which brings in all of the other arts, painting, sculpture, its own qualities and creates a living space so that architecture becomes what it was for the ancient classical world, the core mother art which creates a civilization. And while of series of frescoes may create a personal cycle of transcendent journeying. A work of architecture on this scale creates a civilization. And several hundred years later we can see that Giotto was quite right, that in fact this did happen. He created the center of Florence and Florence created the center of the Renaissance.
It was of course a difficult undertaking but when the campanile was finished, and the main chapel was projected and begun they came upon a problem. That Giotto like Dante had been a mastermind and had in fact created an almost insuperable problem. Because the cathedral proper was of such a structure it was 8 sided and it was such a massive undertaking that no one could dome it. And so, for decades the vision and the center of Florence lay uncompleted. Impaired by the feebleness of the mind of man.
Were the Florentines in the first rush of their energy to be defeated by this greatest of all possible triumphs seemingly so. Until another great genius came along, an architect named Filippo Brunelleschi. And he paced the streets as young men thinking about this very thing. It galled him that it couldn't be done, and it enthused him that he could do it if he could just find out how. And so, with this wonderful situation Vasari described as Brunelleschi, as well he begins his life, he says he was a small man. He puts it with a little more tack. He says," there are many men who though formed by nature with small persons and insignificant features." That's enough right there. "And yet endowed with such greatness of soul and force of character that unless they can occupy themselves with difficult, nay almost impossible undertakings, "We all know people like this. "They are incapable of finding peace for their lives." Well Brunelleschi was exceedingly small had exceedingly ill-defined and undefined features and was possessed with this greatest of desires to put the dome upon Santa Maria del Fiore. He formed a friendship as a young man with another young artist. A man named Donatello who will get to.
And Donatello and Brunelleschi decided that they would journey to Rome. They would go back to the core. Back to the center of the antique civilization which was coming alive again in Florence. Coming alive again. They would go and they would study. And so, while they were there they went around and Vasari says that art students at that time in Rome looked like treasure hunters, vagabonds. They were ill-kempt as art students seem to be perpetually. And they went around digging up old antique pillars in the ground and antique sculptures and taking them to their apartments and sketching down. And not eating and doing all of these things that art students should do.
And while Donatello, and we will get to him in a lecture, began becoming one of the really great sculptures of the Renaissance, exquisite for the fluidity of form. Brunelleschi built nothing but pondered upon this one overwhelming problem. It galled him, there must be a solution. And one day walking in Rome he came into the great rotunda. Rotunda as they say, the Pantheon. And he eyed this structure with greedy apperception, and he realized that the problem of the dome in Florence was that it was not a circle. That in fact all of his thinking, all of his preparation was on the wrong track, and everyone had been thinking of doing this. And that it was not really a dome but that it was an eight-sided arching structure. One that had never been built before. And this of course just urged him on because he realized, as he would say later to the town council in Florence in a great speech before them, he would say nobody in classical antiquity even attempted such a thing as this. Because it is an impossible shape and therefore only, I can do this.
So, Brunelleschi we have a portrait of him. I found this volume too late. He was a toughie. This is a death mask of Brunelleschi. About 5' 1". Brunelleschi decided upon a solution that has become classic solution. That instead of building one cupola he would build two in parallel, in sync. And that he would have stairwells running in between the two...
...who had been a chum of Donatello and Brunelleschi in younger days decided that he knew how this could be done. He had talked to Brunelleschi enough he had a general idea. Hadn't he done the gates of paradise, well perhaps when it got going why he would just take over this project because there was an awful lot of fame involved. And it really didn't matter if he would elbow his friend just a little bit to get his name up in lights. Well Brunelleschi when you're only 5'1" you're always sizing everyone else up. Brunelleschi at a very poignant moment of the construction came down with a very bad cold. He bandaged himself up. He was absent from the sight for days on end and slowly construction ground to a halt. And the workmen kept asking Ghiberti what do we knew next, and Ghiberti would say well I know but we have to wait for my friend. It's unfair to complete this with him off the scene.
And after several weeks it became apparent to everyone, especially Ghiberti that he did not know how to do this. And there was in fact only one mind capable of conceiving the structure and carrying it out. Not only an art and not only in engineering, but in terms of spiritual attainment of manifesting a new cosmic form. A form that would fit in with Giotto's great bell tower and make the center of the Renaissance. And of course, with Dante in literature, Giotto in painting, Brunelleschi in architecture and Donatello in sculpture you had a very nice base upon which to build a civilization. Not bad for a city of 90 thousand people.
So, the great dome went up and as the guidebook of Florence shows us it is the pride of the city. And the great il duomo was completed and Brunelleschi became the rage of Florence. He was simply lionized. A later great individual who Leon Battista Alberti, who will come to a little later, felt that this was indeed the way a man should be. He should be able to have a mind of precision, a heart with the enormity, the responsibility of running a whole civilization and the character to see it through.
And all this while, that these great artists were coming in to play the commercial importance of Florence rose just as the art did. Very early on the Florentine merchants who were specializing in trading between different areas that had different currencies seized upon the fact that if you had an international currency which could be dependent upon people would use your currency. And so, the silver Florin was minted. And in 1452 the gold Florin was minted. And this
became the standard of international commerce. The, the silver Florin was twelve silver pennies, and the gold was 240 silver pennies. This became the standard currency and on one side of the Florin was Saint John the Baptist, the patron saint of the city. And on the other side was this gorgeous presentation of the symbolic flowering of Florence. That the city itself was a new Rome, a new Athens. That we had something new coming. In fact, this whole capacity is mirrored in the fact that later on in the high Renaissance, the inheritors directly, several generations later five or six generations later. Of these gigantic artists in capacity, look back upon them with pride and conferred upon them the laurel wreaths which those individuals had claimed for themselves.
And I read to you the inscription by Poliziano commissioned by Lorenzo Il Magnifico de Medici in 1490 when they put a plaque illustrating the wonderful, forged features of Giotto. And he didn't look like that at all. And these are the words that Poliziano under Lorenzo wrote expressing the tone that had been brought in by Giotto and then brought into completion flowering by Brunelleschi. Giotto is supposed to have said, "I am he through whose merit the lost art of painting was revived. Whose hand was as faultless as it was compliant. What my art lacked, nature herself lacked. To none other was it given to paint more or better. But what need is there for words. I am Giotto and my name alone tells more than a lengthy ode."
Let's have a break. And I'm sorry I didn't have this wonderful volume on Brunelleschi when we were doing slides. So, we don't have any slides of this. I'll rectify that and in some subsequent lecture perhaps when we get to Donatello, I'll bring the slides of Brunelleschi here.
This is his few sentences from his speech before the wonderful council in Florence. "Gentlemen superintendent's there is no doubt that great undertakings always present difficulties in their execution. And if none ever did so before this of yours, does it to an extent of which you are not perhaps even yet fully aware. For I do not know that even the ancients ever raised so enormous a vault as this will be." Notice the will be. "I who have many times reflected on the scaffoldings required both within and without. And on the method to be pursued for working securely at this erection." Brunelleschi was very proud of his track record as a field architect. He was there constantly except for illnesses that were strategic. And there was very little loss of life in building this. And later on, he made a great claim to the public in Florence that he was not only perhaps the greatest arch, architect since antiquity but certainly the safest. And that his crew would work with him anywhere.
He says, "we cannot follow a circle yet here we must follow eight sides of the building in dovetailing. And so, to speak in chaining the stones which will be a very difficult thing. Yet remembering that this is a temple consecrated to God and the Virgin, I confidently trust that for a work executed in their honor they will not fail to infuse knowledge where it is now wanting and will bestow strength, wisdom, and genius on him who shall be the author of such a project." So, with a resource pool of that nature how can you fail.
It's a wonderful shot of the interior of the stairway going up the cupola towards the top and the book has many wonderful of photographs and slides. It is a labyrinth of information. This is the best book ever done in Brunelleschi. It was just published, and it gives us a feeling of sort of the arcane spaces almost like the interior passages of the Great Pyramid.
And so, Brunelleschi very conscious of his capacities. Also conscious of the fact that he was carrying to completion, in terms of architecture what Giotto had started in terms of art. And so, because Giotto was intimately linked with Dante, Brunelleschi was linking himself and his friend Donatello with Giotto and Dante. And they were creating that first sense that there was a linking together. And just as the stones of the dome were to be inchanged (sp?) stones leading to a new structure, this interlinking of personalities was to produce a new civilization. One greater than antiquity. One that had never been seen before. A new world dawning.
So, we have slides on Giotto, and I must say that some of these little monographs, like Giotto and Assisi, where they spend many pages trying to decide whether Giotto had done these works or not or some school or what date. I'll just pass them by. They exist. You can note them down for yourself. I'll just assume that Giotto painted what we have. It looks like him.
So, let's have these slides and I'm not sure what order they're in. This is the man himself. That's a, that medallion is about 15 feet above eye-level inside the cathedral. It was struck of course in the time of Lorenzo de Medici, several hundred years later. This is now from the series of frescoes after Assisi. And here is Annunciation. Notice the mountains, the hills of Giotto. Think now of the landscape think of hills, of mountains. How expansive they are and their natural curves. And now look how Giotto has brought nature almost into a crystalline form. Intensified its essential structure and form and made it almost into a white crystalline vine. This is what he is doing with the human figure. If we show contemporary paintings say some Madonna done in 1305 next to a Madonna that Giotto did in 1305 you immediately notice the incredible genius of Giotto to condense and intensify the form. And to locate that form in a grounded pictorial space, which gives a sense of solidity can entire composition in terms of aesthetics. But also links us up to where we now stand as a viewer. That we are somewhere, this is somewhere, and we can bridge between the two places. So, the sense of a crystalline pictorial space as a firm secure place within which to see. All this is due to Giotto's great genius.
We should go through these and I think a little more rapidly. These are our out-of-order. This is Walking Manana the bridge to the next one. The capacity of Giotto to focus on the human face and in particular the eye. The intensity of concentration also begins to manifest itself in lines of force in the paintings. One of the labors it will go through it. The eyes are looking directly down this line of fabric to this hand, and it sweeps up to this person who is looking directly across here at mouth level to her eyes. So, this ecology of force again it's like Giotto's crystalline structure. Go on from there.
Notice the line of heads almost like it fries (?) going straight across here. And at the apex of the motion just as we pass the fulcrum of the halo, we come into music. So that our eye and sweeping across begins to create a composition but its movement across and as we sweep the pair of situations leads to here. And then another pair after that experience, after these jumps, these quantum jumps comes into a focus of the entire direction of this time to the music. And then complementing that another motion here. And of course, the pipes here, the hands raised in a payoff of celebration lead to this line directly across the top of the halo. Giotto was masterful in this way. Just in this way. And you can see how an architectural engineering genius like Brunelleschi would particularly relish completing the work of an artist like Giotto. Because he was dealing with lines of force. And in fact, the cupola as an architectural, engineering problem in Florence was a problem in distributing force. And the solution of that gave Brunelleschi the right to consider himself crowned by this achievement. And in a respect then having crowned the work of Giotto who had made it possible. Who had set the artistic perception into this mode, into this possibility. And of course, behind this visual part was Dante's great transcendental mountain range of insight. And his geometry and the structure of the Divine Comedy.
Go to the next one. Again, you notice the sweep. The interchange of the hands and the sweep of this line put, the donkey, the ears and cock in the ears the moonlight face looking up at the angel here. His hand here is circulating and coming back down here and the whole movement of the eye begins to be structured. So, with Giotto the eye moves across the pictorial space and begins to compose as it moves. So, the notion of the viewer helping to create the work as an experience comes into play. In just the same way Brunelleschi by inviting the persons coming into the great Cathedral of Florence to not only walk across the floor but to walk up through the walls to the apex of it, invites the person to circulate their own experience into the entirety of the Cathedral. All the way to its summit in Apex. And so, Giotto moves the eye, Brunelleschi moves the whole person.
The Raising of Lazarus, you see that entombed figure coming up. Notice the interplay of hands in the space. The famed Sistine Chapel of Michelangelo, the great creation of man also has its roots in origins. Michelangelo long growth many times about Giotto and about the intensity of Giotto's influence upon him. And we'll see that while we get to Michelangelo.
Next slide. Notice here the cluster. It's almost like a bouquet. A bouquet of holy people with their flowers of spiritual insight and achievement. Here crown being made from nature almost like the American Indians using evergreens to consecrate a KBJ crease (?). Here this cluster of force brought to bear in this figure and conveyed by the benediction. Hold across this space, this arc here. Here's another person in another tree with the foot in the hand and the foot every relationship here. And that line comes down to this face and this benediction sweeps like this massive rock across stood here. And the motion of the center line at this bouquet moves along the donkey and like a wave laps up. And just at this space for that line and this force and this movement come together is the base of Jerusalem. So that Giotto extremely intelligent artistically about presenting exactly they metaphysical and religious presence that he wishes to establish. And this is new. This is totally new.
Next slide. Judas and next line. Yeah, and the next one. Look at the cut façade. This face of the crystal of nature as it makes its way in a broad lightning jagged down to here. And like an exclamation mark as a coda to this volume angling like blunt lightning down to this interchange, a hooded cowl figure makes it carrier (?) to that home movement. And this one great block diagram Giotto sets up with tremendous resonance between this pictorial space and this pictorial space. It's floating capacity the chain says heaven suspended emblem. Giotto suspended his preaching and the mast almost geologic layered structure of the cloth underneath this blunt lighting.
And immediately now we begin to see lines of course everywhere in Giotto and the lines of force are given impetus. They're recycled. They're pumped. They're initiative. Especially by the intense glances of the human beings in the composition. And the glances between human beings establish these great coordinates. They're almost like vortices of energy geometry being interplay together. So that the Giotto fresco has this composition to it much like a sacred geometry. That the moving eye creates.
Look at the clustering of forces there. Look at the realism of not a leap from the ground, but a pull from the sky. It's a totally different aspect.
And the next one please. Saint Francis offering his cloak. Here again Giotto is just as dramatic as the great Zen artist Sesshu Toyo. He makes a great X down the middle of the painting. At the very center [is] Saint Francis with a circle and if we have the sense of the elevation of Saint Francis with the halo and his form. With this X you get almost a Kairo symbol of Christ. So, you have all of us working in the painting. Giotto was also the first to present nature with this kind of detailing. The vegetation, the chasms, the ravines. But again, it's always a chiseled crystalline line of forest development.
Saint Francis of course in presenting himself before the Pope at the time. And the Pope having had a dream of him holding up the crumbling Church **(inaudible 2-3 words)**
Miracle at the Spring Rock. This particular presentation of Francis penetrates through the whole history of art. In San Francisco at the De Young Museum as you enter the door at the far end of the museum all the way through the hall is a great El Greco painting of Saint Francis venerating the crucifix. Very similar to this then at the center part of this Giotto composition.
And the next one please. Preaching to the Birds. Preaching to the earthly birds. And they are aligned like a free-form speckle composition down here, but they're unified. Those birds are unifying, how so? They're unified by this coordinate of the two hands of Saint Francis preaching and that break of the scent of the dogs. And the bird of the Spirit unifies and gives substance to this seemingly random collection of birds. And here the Great Tree of Life rising out of it into its grand foliage bursts into blossom here. And the other treatment (?) here. That is that there is a return to paradise possible Dante went to the Paradisio. And through following the life of Christ, Saint Francis engenders a paradise in the sense that spiritual presence can be manifested. It's not a speculation. It's not a hope. It's an actuality.
This was of course the center, oh let's go back. No
Another speaker: You want to go to the...
Yeah. That's the next one. This one. This is the interior of the Arena chapel in Padua. Scrovegni's revenge. Wonderful sense of proportion and you can see that the chapel was left completely open for Giotto to work in. When he came into this it was barren in the 19th - 18th and 19th centuries.
It's interesting about the ecology of art and where these things happened. Many of Giotto's works were whitewashed to let in more light, in various churches and cathedrals throughout Italy. They would whitewash the Giotto paintings. As the 20th century came along and people realized what they had done they would painstakingly clean off the level of whitewash and restore these paintings. And interesting because Giotto is constantly then being reborn out of the original whitewash that there.
That's the Last Judgement, supported panel on the back wall. So, we look at the Arena Chapel you can see that this is a templated prototype for the Sistine Chapel for Michelangelo. You can see what a tremendous chain of interlocking spiritual giants stretching from Giotto and Dante to Michelangelo and Leonardo intact. A brotherhood. A fraternity throughout time-space. A golden chain of **(inaudible)** as someone once put it.
The sequences are all numbered and **(inaudible 2 words)** And here's some details, I guess we are at the end of the series. **(inaudible a sentence or two)** I couldn't tell
Notice how in this sequence we're missing 34, 35, and 36 which are further over, and we'll see. But we don't end with the crucifixion. We've come here to the angel of the tomb. We come to the accension. We come to the Pentagon. Then we come to the Final Judgment. You see how Giotto is very precise that he begins with the parents of Mary and carries it all the way through the resurrection to the final judgment. He's saying all of this is of 1 pattern that if we stop in the midst of it, we destroy that pattern. We don't have the unity. We don't have that energy wave form complete, so we don't know what it is. Only by seeing it unified in its fullness does this pattern then bring to us. And what does this pattern do? This pattern in its entirety creates a chapel where we can worship. Where we can sacrifice. We sacrifice our mundaneness, and we worship our capacity to enter into this transcendent flow. And this is exactly the tone with which Giotto and Brunelleschi were working in.
We're running out of time to **(inaudible)** The life of Mary. And the next one please. All of these exist in that Chapel, the
Arena Chapel. Next please.
You can see what a tremendous task of pictorial composition. Individuals have examined this in terms of just every capacity and they have found that in painting the Arena Chapel there were two hundred and seventy-two different painting days. That is aside from all the sketches and all the preliminary work. The actual execution took place on 272 different days. And what they would do was they would replaster the day before the area that was to be worked on, so it was absolutely new, pristine. And then the next day Giotto would come in with his materials and sketches and go to work. So, you can just think to yourself what a tremendous concentration of hand and mind. The coordination of the hand and mind making this crystalline presentation of pictorial space over years of time. This is a real **(inaudible)** This would take some discipline to do. **(inaudible for several sentences)** On the other wall coming over. **(inaudible for several sentences)**
If you look at the, you can see the concentration. Look how the figures are energized because of the lines of relationality. And look how the face expresses that energy. And the eyes convey that energy out. We're talking about manifestation. Not a theory but a pictorial presentation of how the mysticism of Saint Francis of Assisi and the great insight of Dante and the great artist of Giotto all working in **(inaudible)**. It's like a harmony, all these elements there. And where did that place exist? What kind of pictorial space does that exist in? Firmly grounded in this first **(inaudible)** but it exists in this **(inaudible 2 words)** coming in. Suspended (?) from unified. Giotto is always working like this.
**(inaudible a few sentences)** We've seen that, so we'll go on.
Look here how instead of a line of the ray of light how it explodes from a central **(inaudible)** The angel is at the center, man (?) is maybe suspended in the way, the dynamic self-manifestation. Some emanation but the Angelic orders are the **(inaudible)**. You can already see some of the concerns of Michelangelo already operating (?) in Giotto.
That's the beginning **(inaudible several words)**Let's go on from that. We can talk about all of these for a long time.
The details of The Last Judgement. Look at the way Giotto **(inaudible)** here the sky and moon, the celestial realm peels back to reveal something else. Look at the expression on the faces of the **(inaudible a few words)** a keeper of mystery. He's not a magician he's a keeper of mystery. Giotto.
Here the back wall of the Arena Chapel of Padua, the Last Judgement and here you can see the star and here the sun and the moon. **(inaudible a few words)** just like **(inaudible)** Giotto is an incredible artist and is worth every bit of interest that we are able to bestow upon him. Look at the hierarchy. Look at the ordering. Look at the way at which force(?) represents in fullness by but peeling off in **(inaudible)** and structurally there at the very apex of this whole composition something not **(inaudible 2-3 words)** window and the campanile in Florence you'll see the double windows all the way at the very top where the **(inaudible)** begins. Just like this. This is trying to **(inaudible several sentences)**
So next week is **(inaudible several words)**the Saturday classes that I'm teaching at **(inaudible)** 2029 **(inaudible several words)** One class starts at 9:00 and the other class starts at 11:00 and this is the development of symbolic consciousness. **(inaudible few words)**
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