Getting to know the

masters …

Giotto

Giotto di Bondone

• The individual who most exemplified and in large part created the new developments.

• He was born in the Mugello Valley near Florence and lived mainly in that city, which was the center of the new Renaissance culture.

• According to Ghiberti, Giotto was skilled in all the arts, abandoned the Bysantine style and revived the genius of classical antiquity.

• The best preserved example of Giotto’s work are the paintings in the Arena Chapel in Padua, a small town about 25 mile (40 km) Southwest of Venice.

Other info:

• Giotto's masterwork is the decoration of the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, commonly called the Arena Chapel, completed around 1305.

• This fresco cycle depicts the life of the Virgin and the life of Christ. It is regarded as one of the supreme masterpieces of the Early Renaissance.

• Giotto painted the Arena Chapel and where he was chosen by the commune of Florence in 1334 to design the new campanile (bell tower) of the Florence Cathedral.

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Massaccio

Massaccio

• He is one of the artists of the Early Renaissance who laid the groundwork for reviving Roman classical types of architecture and the human figure.

• He is one who invented linear perspective and developed a painting style that emphasized the illumination of masses.

• According to Vasari, his fresco of The Tribute Money showing Jesus Christ instructing His disciples to give Caesar that which Caesar’s, “helps us to understand why it was that both painters and sculptors studied his work.”

• He died at the age of 27.• Became of his school’s most celebrated

sculptors and painters.

• The most important new element in art of this time was the third dimension in space and mass.

• Massaccio’s figures painted in very simple large areas of color, are given by their illumination, or as the Italian’s said, by chiaroscuro or light and shade.

Other info:

• Thommaso Cassai, also known as Masaccio, was another great Florentine artist who emerged at the beginning of the fifteenth century. He was born in 1401 and lived with his younger brother and his widowed mother. The family lived in great poverty but the financial situation seems to have eased on the remarriage of his mother.

Florence was under the control of Cosmo the Elder and the Medici had become the first family of the city both artistically and politically, and the city itself was enjoying a period of calm and prosperity. Masaccio was accepted into the guild of painters in Florence in 1422 he became friends with Donatello and Brunelleschi and was influenced by their work.

In 1427 Masaccio painted his Holly Trinity for the Santa Maria Novella church in Florence. This fresco is considered to be one of his finest masterpieces and was rediscovered in 1861 after being hidden by a stone altarpiece in the sixteenth century.

Masaccio's early demise has meant that very few works exist that are entirely attributed to him. Collaborations with other artists include the Madonna and Child with St Anne, painted in collaboration with Masolino, and Madonna and Child and Angels, painted with his brother Giovanni.

• In about 1428 the artist left Florence and travelled to Rome where he died at the age of 27.

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Fra Angelico

Fra Angelico

• He is a Dominican Friar in the monestery of San Marco, Florence.

• His art depicted the abiding faith of friars in scores of frescos. (Most of them showed serene saints and simple monks.

• When Fra Angelico’s fame spread, the Pope offered to make him Archbishop of Florence.

• He declined preferring the monks simple cowl to the Archbishop’s miter.

• He gets inspiration from an ancient poem describing Venus, the goddess of love, as being born from the sea, he painted The Birth of Venus.

• The result was the most famous nude of the period wherein the subject was seen in weightless, floating on her shell, and blown by the winds.

Other info:

• Florentine painter, a Dominican friar. Although in popular tradition he has been seen as `not an artist properly so-called but an inspired saint' (Ruskin), Angelico was in fact a highly professional artist, who was in touch with the most advanced developments in contemporary Florentine art and in later life travelled extensively for prestigious commissions. He probably began his career as a manuscript illuminator, and his early paintings are strongly influenced by International Gothic.

• The Annunciation in the Diocesan Museum in Cortona-- Masaccio's incluence is evident in the insistent perspective of the architecture.

• For most of his career Angelico was based in S. Domenico in Fiesole (he became Prior there in 1450), but his most famous works were painted at S. Marco in Florence (now an Angelico museum), a Sylvestrine monastry which was taken over by his Order in 1436.

• He and his assistants painted about fifty frescos in the friary that are at once the expression of and a guide to the spiritual life of the community. Many of the frescos are in the friars' cells and were intended as aids to devotion; with their immaculate coloring, their economy in drawing and composition, and their freedom from the accidents of time and place, they attain a sense of blissful serenity.

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Prepared by:

•Ma. Reina Niña B. Camano•Cecille Ramos•Baby Lyca Mendoza