Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
A Humanist View
Almost 200 years before da Vinci's
The Last Supper
came Giotto's Renaissance break-
through: the moving, modern 1303-05 frescoes in Padua's Capella degli Scrovegni. Medi-
eval churchgoers were accustomed to blank stares from flat, far-off saints perched on high
golden Gothic thrones, but Giotto introduced Biblical figures as characters in recognisable
settings, caught up in extraordinary circumstances. Onlookers gossip as middle-aged Anne
tenderly kisses Joachim, and then late in life gives birth to miracle-baby Mary, and Jesus
stares down Judas as the traitor puckers up with a fateful kiss.
Dante, da Vinci and Boccaccio all honour Giotto (1267-1337) as the artist who officially
ended the Dark Ages. His humane approach changed how people saw themselves; not as
lowly vassals but as vessels for the divine. This radical idea was the product of a new gen-
eration of Italian scholars who were rediscovering classical ideals. Poet Francesco Petrarch
(1304-74) was just such a man. Like Giotto, Petrarch was patronised by Azzone Visconti,
for whom he worked as an ambassador in Milan between 1353 and 1361, and where he
spent his time writing to Boccaccio extolling the glories of Pavia's well-endowed library.
A seat of humanist scholarship and debate, Pavia's library contained many richly illu-
minated manuscripts in the
ouvraige de lombardie
trad-ition, a highly decorative style that
emanated from Po valley workshops. At the time manuscript illumination led the visual arts
agenda in Italy and Europe and many proponents of the style like Giovannino de'Grassi (c
1340-1398), a pupil of Giotto whose Sketch Book is the prized possession of Bergamo's
Angelo Mai library, and the Zavattari brothers, who executed the frescoes in Theodolinda's
chapel in Monza in 1444, were extraordinary artisans.
These artist-artisans specialised in manuscript illumination, fresco, stained glass and
sculpture. In fact, Grassi was also a master builder on Milan's Duomo and a consultant on
the building of Pavia cathedral. In their work they emulated Giotto's richness of colour, an-
ecdotal representation of character and well-defined perspective. You can see the close con-
nections between the frescoes in the Mocchirolo Oratory (reconstructed wholesale in the
Pinacoteca di Brera) and the Oratory of Albizzate near Varese, and the exquisite detail in
Grassi's illuminated Tarocchi Brambilla (Brambilla tarot cards) also in Brera (Room XXI),
where the Lombard's greater decorative sensibility and attention to fashion are wonderfully
rendered in the costumes of Milanese nobles and St Catherine's ermine-tasselled gown.
