Giotto: A painter for the masses

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SOCIALIST ACTION MAY 1992 119 Giotto's powerful frescoes in the Church of St. Francis at Assisi, Italy, painted at the end of the 13th century, establish Giotto as a painter for the masses. Their message was understood by the illiterate poor and undoubtedly helped to reinforce a growing rebellion against Church dogma and practice.

In his book, "Science in History," J.D. Bernal points out, "St. Francis reflected in his life and preaching the revolt of the poorer townsmen against worldliness and excessive wealth.

His message was popular, dangerously so, and all of papal diplomacy was needed to keep it from breaking out in heresy and civil strife."

One fresco in particular—-"St Francis Renounces His Father's Goods and Temporal Wealth"—illustrates the growing class consciousness of this turbulent period. . In the painting, St. Francis and his father, a wealthy merchant, confront each other on a street in Assisi. At issue is the saint's refusal to obey his father's repeated orders to stop squandering his inherited wealth by helping lepers and the poor. The father is threatening to disinherit him.

The father stands at the head of a group of well-dressed onlookers, while St. Francis is accompanied by friars and a few Church dignitaries. The saint has just discarded his clothing and is naked except for a cloak held around him by his bishop. His arms are raised in prayer.

The father, greatly incensed—his son's discarded garments draped over one arm— steps forward as though to strike Francis, but is restrained by a companion.

The two groups are separated by a dark space that some believe may initially have contained figures, perhaps painted by one of Giotto's assistants.

Sensing the crowding of too many figures, Giotto painted out the central ones, substituting for them the tantalizing dark space—a sort of wedge perhaps symbolic Giotto's "Lamentation," part of a fresco of the gulf that separates rich from poor.

There is an interesting parallel between the role of political art and that of class struggle in that both are to be seen as initiators of radical change—in the one case, change within the structure of society itself, and in the other, change within the arts of painting and sculpture.

First great political artist Towards the end of his life, Marx, along with Engels, wrote: "For almost 40 years we have stressed the class struggle as the immediate driving force of history and in particular the class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat as the great lever of the modern social revolution." Political art has played a similar role in art history, acting as the great lever of the modern aesthetic revolution.

Giotto was the first great political artist. His frescoes, particularly those depicting the life of St. Francis of Assisi and those of the Arena Chapel at Padua, had a profound effect on the subsequent development of painting. Albert Barnes claims in "The Art in Painting" (1937) that Giotto's frescoes "had in them the germs of most of what gives modern painting its value."

Many years earlier, Roger Fry, the English painter and art critic, wrote a magnificent article on Giotto, which was later reprinted in his book, "Vision and Design" (1910). Fry notes: "Here at last after so many centuries of copying the traditional forms handed down from a moribund Pagan art-centuries during which these abstractions had become entirely divorced from the life of the timehere at last was an artist who gave a scene as it must have happened, with every circumstance evidently and literally rendered..."

Subjects filled with life Giotto anticipated some of the more fruitful innovations of painting, including the rudiments of linear perspective, the use of foreshortening, and a feeling for deep space. But Giotto's greatest contribution to painting was his ability to breathe life into the human subjects represented in his frescoes.

His people, often of humble origin, seem real. There is the "poor knight" to whom Francis gives his cloak, and "the simple man," who honors the saint by providing him with a cloak to walk on. In both cases, Giotto reveals emotion by a combination of facial expression, gesture, and stance.

Then there are the nuns of St. Clare who "cry on the body of St. Francis" as it is carried to Assisi for burial. One has the strong sense of witnessing an actual scene. Each nun has a distinct personality, made tangible and real through Giotto's power to express individual feelings in paint. His hands are especially eloquent.

Two frescoes, "Joachim's Expulsion from the Temple" and "Joachim's Return to His Sheepfold," both in the Arena Chapel at Padua, reveal an "anguished old man" shattered by humiliation and shame-his "shame" being that he had given Israel no children! What is evident in Giotto's frescoes is that he was deeply in sympathy with the masses, that he gave them hope and reasons to fight for a better life.

Possessed of a powerful and inquiring mind, Giotto found in Bonaventura's life of St. Francis the real meaning of the saint's teaching. Its message was radical, having to do with the harsh realities of a class society and the ongoing struggle between rich and poor.

Fry calls Francis "the great orthodox heretic"-orthodox because Pope Innocent Ill finally "had the good sense to accept the one man through whom the Church could again become popular and democratic," and a heretic because he "established the idea of the equality of all men before God," as well as preaching a "primitive communistic Christianity."

Through these frescoes, Giotto was able to give forceful expression to the saint's ideas and moral message.

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