By Julian Gardner

This probing research of 3 works via Giotto and the consumers who commissioned them is going a ways past the clichés of Giotto because the founding determine of Western portray. It lines the interactions among Franciscan friars and robust bankers, illuminating the complicated interaction among mercantile wealth and the iconography of poverty.

Political strife and non secular faction lacerated fourteenth-century Italy. Giotto’s commissions are most sensible understood opposed to the history of this social turmoil. They mirrored the calls for of his buyers, the necessities of the Franciscan Order, and the restlessly creative genius of the painter. Julian Gardner examines this crucial interval of Giotto’s path-breaking profession via works initially created for Franciscan church buildings: Stigmatization of Saint Francis from San Francesco at Pisa, now within the Louvre, the Bardi Chapel cycle of the Life of St. Francis in Santa Croce at Florence, and the frescoes of the crossing vault above the tomb of Saint Francis within the decrease Church of San Francesco at Assisi.

those work of art have been performed in the course of a twenty-year interval whilst inner tensions divided the friars themselves and while the Order used to be faced by means of a thorough swap of papal coverage towards its defining vow of poverty. The Order had accrued nice wealth and outfitted ostentatious church buildings, alienating many Franciscans within the method and incurring the hostility of different Orders. Many components in Giotto’s frescoes, together with references to St. Peter, Florentine politics, and church structure, have been integrated to fulfill consumers, redefine the determine of Francis, and have fun the dominant crew in the Franciscan brotherhood.