The Approval of the Franciscan Rule
by Giotto di Bondone
Title
The Approval of the Franciscan Rule
Artist
Giotto di Bondone
Medium
Painting - Painting
Description
The Approval of the Franciscan Rule by Giotto di Bondone 1267-1337
Very little is known about the biographical details of Giotto di Bondone's life. He is thought to have been the son of a peasant, born in the Mugello, a mountainous area to the north of Florence, which was also the home country of the Medici family who would later rise to power in the city. Giotto's birthplace has been attributed to a house in the small village of Vicchio and the date of his birth given as 1277 by the writer and artist Giorgio Vasari in his influential 1550 text The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. However, other sources suggest he was born in 1267, which seems more likely judging by the maturity of some of his early works.
Giotto was probably born in a hilltop farmhouse, perhaps at Colle di Romagnano or Romignano; since 1850 a tower house in nearby Colle Vespignano, a hamlet 35 kilometres north of Florence, has borne a plaque claiming the honour of his birthplace, an assertion commercially publicised. He was the son of a man named Bondone, described in surviving public records as "a person of good standing". Most authors accept that Giotto was his real name, but it may have been an abbreviation of Ambrogio (Ambrogiotto) or Angelo (Angelotto).
The year of his death is calculated from the fact that Antonio Pucci, the town crier of Florence, wrote a poem in Giotto's honour in which it is stated that he was 70 at the time of his death. However, the word "seventy" fits into the rhyme of the poem better than would have a longer and more complex age, so it is possible that Pucci used artistic license.
In his Lives of the Artists, Giorgio Vasari relates that Giotto was a shepherd boy, a merry and intelligent child who was loved by all who knew him. He was discovered by the great Florentine painter Cimabue, drawing pictures of his sheep on a rock. They were so lifelike that Cimabue approached Bondone and asked if he could take the boy as an apprentice. Many scholars today consider the story legendary and think it more probable that Giotto's family was well-off, and had moved to Florence where Giotto was sent to Cimabue's workshop as an apprentice.
Vasari recounts a number of such stories about Giotto's skill. He writes that when Cimabue was absent from the workshop, his young apprentice painted such a lifelike fly on the face of the painting that Cimabue was working on, that he tried several times to brush it off. Vasari also relates that when the Pope sent a messenger to Giotto, asking him to send a drawing to demonstrate his skill, Giotto drew, in red paint, a circle so perfect that it seemed as though it was drawn using a compass and instructed the messenger to give that to the Pope.
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January 31st, 2022
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