We’re going old school in this Christmas episode as we look at Madonna and Child by Giotto di Bondone, a guy who got so famous he goes by one name, Giotto! Kind of like Cher!
We’ll find out how he revolutionized religious art in Florence by looking to the past in order to move forward. And you’ll find out the lengths I go to for you, my listeners!
To see how Giotto’s teacher Ciambue handled the same subject, take a look at his Santa Trinita Maestà painting at the Uffizi Gallery
SHOW NOTES (TRANSCRIPT BELOW)
“A Long Look” theme is “Ascension” by Ron Gelinas
Episode theme is “Angels We Have Heard on High” by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3368-angels-we-have-heard-on-high
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
Artwork information https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.397.html
Cecilia Frosini lecture
Giotto information (The Art Story)
Cimabue information (Wikimedia)
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“The Decameron” (Internet Archive link)
Post comments or questions at alonglookpodcast.com
TRANSCRIPT
Hello and welcome to A Long Look! I’m your host, Karen Jackson
Did you know most people spend only a few seconds looking at works of art? But what happens if you slow down and take a long look?
Join me at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC and let’s find out!
MUSIC
For this year’s Christmas episode, I’m looking at Madonna and Child by Giotto.
If you want to follow along, you can find it at alonglookpodcast.com/madonna.. When you get there, just click on the image and you’ll be able to zoom in and pan around!
So what do you first notice?
The white flower the Virgin Mary holds so delicately between the thumb and forefinger of one hand. It’s round, with white petals stacked in layers and a pea green stem and leaves. Mary faces us and is turned a little to our right with her head slightly tilted and she gazes off somewhere over our right shoulder. We see her from the waist up and she’s wrapped in a cobalt blue mantle that’s pulled up to cover her head.
Her voluminous mantle is trimmed with a delicate gold pattern that’s also on the neckline of the matching gown underneath it. Right above her brow is a rectangular shape with a pointed top, filled with a gold and ruby red pattern. The mantle is turned back a little at the neck and wrist so we see its pea green lining highlighted with streaks of lime green and burnt orange. Curved strokes of dark blue create long folds cascading down her front. And there’s a kind of stylized gold starburst on her right shoulder.
She bends her right arm, on our left, to hold the flower up to her chest. Baby Jesus sits upright in the curve of her left arm, on our right. He faces our left and is wrapped from the waist down in a sheer fabric with the same gold trim as his mom’s garments. His left hand grabs the index finger of her hand that’s supporting him as he turns his head to look at the flower she holds and reaches with his other hand to touch it.
They’re both fair-skinned with flushes of soft pink on their faces and necks and have almond-shaped, hazel eyes, a long nose and their mouths are slightly open. We can’t see Mary’s hair because she’s wearing an orange hair covering that’s peeking out from under the mantle but Jesus has short, dark blonde hair.
After several minutes, I noticed something odd about his hair. His short bangs seem to be floating on his head, like they’re three dimensional! His hair is brushed forward on top, so when you look closely, you can see the individual strands. But Giotto layered darker strokes over lighter strokes, creating a drop shadow effect. I wasn’t sure I was seeing this right, so I started bobbing and weaving, like a boxer, trying to look from different angles. I know I looked ridiculous but this is what I do for you, my friends, to make sure my description is accurate!
And that’s not the only odd thing about Jesus. He doesn’t really look like a child, more like a small man. He’s not round and chubby, he’s pretty tall and has chest muscles, defined by soft shadows, and a full head of hair.
Anyway, they’re painted on a wood panel that’s about 3 ft tall by 2 ft wide that’s filled with a gleaming gold background. It starts out rectangular at the bottom but merges with a rounded, pointed arch on top. It’s in a architectural frame of gilded wood with an arch and pointed gable on the top that kinda reminds me of the doorways you’d see at a big cathedral.
They both have halos inscribed into the gold background. Mary’s is pretty wide and filled with a pattern of interlocking ovals. Jesus’s halo is smaller and is divided into three sections, one on top and on each side filled with a simplified ruby red star or flower. A dotted border outlines the shape of the panel and their halos.
The two of them take up most of the width of the panel and Mary with her large halo takes most of the height.
MUSIC
Giotto di Bondone lived and worked in Florence, Italy from the mid-1200 to the early 1300s. He got his training from an artist named Ciambue who was one of the top artists at the time. He worked with Ciambue for years but eventually started getting his own commissions all over Italy.
What made him so popular was how he brought humanity into religious paintings. Giotto painted this sometime between 1310 and 1315 and for years before then, people in these kinds of religious paintings were always painted with flat, elongated bodies and faces. So for example, when Mary was portrayed, the folds of her gown were painted in stiff angled gold lines. They look like paper dolls, not humans. This was on purpose. The church didn’t want them to look real, because they were meant to be symbols of Mary or Jesus or whatever saint, not portraits. But Giotto changed all that by giving their bodies weight and natural features. He made things look more realistic, like how soft shadows define their features and how using darker and lighter blues to make shadows and highlights created those convincing soft folds in Mary’s garment. This is because he and other Florentines had been looking back at classical writings and art from Ancient Greece and Rome and began to embrace the idea that depicting religious figures as flesh-and-blood human beings was really ok.
Giotto went even further with this image. In a video on the gallery’s site, art historian Cecilia Frosinini explains that he wanted to create an emotional connection between Mary and the congregation by using, in her words, “the language of the family…the language of a mother and the child that interact towards each other.” She says, “They have a true and actual relationship, a mother child relationship” which you see in the way he’s holding her finger the way a baby would. And their mouths are slightly open as if they’re having a conversation. The idea was that Mary was a mother, like so who’d see this, so people could connect with her on an emotional level.
The flower is another connection. It represents the Church but also the city of Florence. And Giotto was hired late in his career to make this panel as part of an altarpiece for a church in the city. Like we talked about in the Calling of the Apostles episode, an altarpiece is an architectural framework divided into sections that would hold panel paintings depicting scenes of the life of Jesus or Mary or whoever the cathedral or church was devoted to. The gold background represents heaven.
Like so many religious symbols, the flower, which turns out to be a white rose, has multiple meanings. It also represents Mary’s purity and the innocence lost through original sin.
The starburst on her mantle identifies her as the Star of the Sea. The idea behind that started in the Middle Ages and basically it means that she is a guidestar, leading followers to Christ.
By the time he painted this, Giotto had become the top artist. He even had two famous writers talking him up. One was Boccaccio who wrote a book called the Decameron. In it, he basically says, Giotto is so good at this realistic style, there wasn’t anything he painted that didn’t look like the real thing! And Dante thought he was great too, calling Giotto a “new wave” who now overshadowed his teacher, Ciambue! He got so famous, we just call him by one name, like Cher!
Giotto was way ahead of his time in trying to create flesh and blood religious figures and putting human emotion front and center in his work. He was a bridge from a spiritual medieval age to a more human-centered Renaissance.
If you want to see more of his work, check out his frescoes in the Arena Chapel, I’ll include a video link in the show notes. They are amazing and really show how cutting edge his work was.
OUTRO:
I hope you’ll try out a long look on your next museum visit! Just take a little time and let the art reveal itself.
You can find links to today’s information in the show notes at alonglookpodcast.com and in most podcast apps. If you don’t want to miss an episode, you can find player links on the site or just hit the subscribe or follow button wherever you listen to podcasts!
I want to thank all of you who continued to listen this year and to welcome all my new listeners, I’m so glad you joined us! A Long Look will be on hiatus for a while as I figure out what’s in store for Year 5!
Here’s wishing you a safe and healthy Christmas and hope for the New Year. As always, thanks for joining me!
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