Normal View Dyslexic View
Research Article
Giotto the mosaicist
,
Carol Hydes‡
Abstract
This article uses the monument to Giotto in Florence Cathedral, which shows him setting a mosaic, as the entry point into a discussion of Giotto as a mosaicist. It asks why his activity as a mosaicist has tended to be sidelined in the art-historical literature, despite the significance of the mosaic of the Navicella, much celebrated between the 14th and 17th centuries. It argues that mosaic-making was a significant art in 14th-century Rome and that Vasari’s Lives of the Artists traces an overlooked story of mosaics alongside that of painting.
Keywords
mosaicartGiottoVasariNavicella In Florence Cathedral, a monument to Giotto created in 1490, over 100 years after the artist’s death, depicts him as a mosaicist. In a tondo, perhaps a graceful tribute to Giotto’s O, the artist is shown at half-length, manually inserting tesserae into a small panel depicting a mosaic of the head of Christ. Below it, on a large tablet (Figure 1), is a nine-line epigram by Angelo Poliziano, written in the first person, as if Giotto himself were speaking.1
Figure 1.
The monument to Giotto, Florence Cathedral, Benedetto da Maiano, 1490 (photograph: author).
A roundel showing a man setting a mosaic. Below is a marble slab with an inscription.
ILLE EGO SVM PER QVEM PICTVRA EXTINCTA REVIXIT
CVI QVAM RECTA MANVS TAM FVIT ET FACILIS
NATVRAE DEERAT NOSTRAE QVOD DEFVIT ARTI
PLVS LICVIT NVLLI PINGERE NEC MELIVS
MIRARIS TVRRIM EGREGIAM SACRO AERE SONANTEM
HAEC QVOQVE DEMODVLO CREVIT ADASTRA MEO
DENIQVE SVM IOTTVS QVID OPVS FVIT ILLA REFERRE
HOC NOMEN LONGI CARMINIS INSTAR ERAT
OB AN MCCCXXXVI CIVES POS B M MCCCCLXXXX
I am he through whom dead painting revived
Whose hand was straight and sure
Nature lacked what my art lacked
To none was it permitted to paint more or better
Do you wonder at the marvellous tower sounding with sacred bronze?
This too rose to the stars from my model
In short, I am Giotto, was there need to relate these things?
This name is as good as a long poem
Died 1336. Put up by the citizens 1490.
Most of what has been written about the monument plays down, ignores or finds excuses for its use of mosaic and the depiction of Giotto as a mosaicist. For example, it has been said that in the monument, ‘the archetypical artist works in the archaic medium of mosaic on the archetypical image’ (Nagel 2008: 143). Giotto has been described as making a ‘famously prototypically nonauthored image [the face of Christ found on the Mandylion of Edessa, the holy cloth bearing an imprint of Christ’s face] in a notoriously nonauthorial medium’ (Hamburger 1998: 321). The image and its inscription has formed a focus for debates about the relationships of authorship, image-making and attitudes towards the historicity of art. It has been interpreted as the image of a master still in touch with the mosaic art of antiquity and as an originator of the current revival of the medium. The Giotto celebrated in the monument and its inscription is understood as the consummate innovator and promoter of naturalism, all the things that mosaic as a medium is said not to do.2 What has not really been discussed is Giotto the mosaicist. Why not?
A deliberate choice was made in the commemorative monument in Florence to depict Giotto as a mosaicist. It was neither an accident nor a mistake to depict or think of him like this, rather than as a panel painter or fresco artist.3 What does this say? Whatever else the role of the monument might be in debates around the Mandylion and its relation to the mosaic of Christ in the monument, authorship, images and archetypes, it is likely that the monument to Giotto is exactly what it appears to be, a celebration of Giotto as a mosaicist because he was remembered as a famous one. He was depicted making a mosaic because his work as a mosaicist was recognised and valued, perhaps even ahead of his work in other media. However, that is not how he is usually considered.
I will argue here that Giotto was shown as a mosaicist because that was how he was remembered and celebrated in his own time, and indeed into the late 15th century, and that his work in mosaic was hugely significant in terms of his artistic practice and reputation. I will also suggest that the writing-out of Giotto the mosaicist relates to the writing-out of mosaic as a medium.
Giotto’s only surviving mosaic is Navicella, an image of Christ walking on water to his disciples, stilling the storm around them. The mosaic was originally made in the early 14th century for Old St Peter’s where it was positioned externally on the reverse façade of Sta Maria in Turri (attached to the outside atrium of St Peter’s), where anyone leaving St Peter’s and crossing the courtyard would have seen it.4 It was very large, about 16 metres in width (Gardner 2013: 292–6). Parri Spinelli’s drawing of c.1420 (Figure 2) gives a sense of what it may have looked like.5 What survives now, much mangled, inside the porch of New St Peter’s is what was saved or removed after the demolition of Sta Maria in Turri in 1610 (Figure 3). It contains extensive areas of 17th-century material and is, in its current form, not a good reflection of Giotto’s skills as a mosaicist.6
Figure 2.
Pari Spinelli, pen and ink drawing of Giotto’s Navicella, c.1420. Metropolitan Museum, New York, object number 19.76.2 (photograph: Metropolitan Museum, Open Access, Creative Commons Zero).
A pen and brown ink drawing of (left to right) a castle and a man seated fishing from a rock; a boat containing ten figures with a billowing sail, blown by a small winged figure. On the right, St Peter kneels at the feet of Christ.
Figure 3.
The Navicella as it now is, portico, St Peter’s Rome (photograph: author).
A mosaic high up. A fisherman sits on the left; ten figures are in a boat; St Peter kneels at the feet of Christ. In the sky, six figures encourage the wind to blow.
Such a commission as the Navicella—associated with the Pope through his deputy, in Rome, in St Peter’s itself—was surely one of the, if not the, most important commissions of Giotto’s career. No others of his works match up to the Navicella in importance and none were as celebrated, not even the Scrovegni or Peruzzi chapels.7 Reflecting this, the Navicella was consistently celebrated as Giotto’s most significant masterpiece. It inspired deep emotional responses: in 1380, St Catherine of Siena was praying before the mosaic when she fell to the floor, feeling the weight of the ship on her shoulders.8 Over and over, it was praised as a great work of art. In his chronicle written in 1381, Villani described how Giotto ‘represented most skilfully in mosaic the Apostles in peril in the boat, so as to make a public demonstration of his skill and power to the whole world that flocks to the city’.9 It is repeatedly the key work of art, and the medium, associated with Giotto. The Navicella is the only non-ancient—non-Classical—work cited in Alberti’s On Painting (1435), where it appears as an example of a great ‘istoria’, or narrative composition, because of its representation of emotion (Alberti 1966: Book 2, Ch. 42, 8). Alberti may indeed have chosen to include it because it was among the very few works of art that he could count on as being familiar to many people, since it was a commonplace in pattern books (Baxandall 1974: 144).10 Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Commentaries of the 1440s mention Giotto’s work in mosaic at St. Peter’s.11 The physician Michele Savonarola described him as ‘the Florentine painter who first modernised mosaic and ancient figures’.12 In his Zibaldone of around 1450, Giovanni Rucellai, Florentine patron and intimate of the Medici family, noted that ‘on one facade of the courtyard (of St Peter’s) the ship of the Apostles, with sail and rudder, in mosaic; a thing so fine it is said to be by the hand of Giotto’.13 Antonio Filarete, for his part, in his treatise on architecture (dated to c.1464), noted Giotto the mosaicist: ‘This art [mosaic] as is said is lost and from Giotto until now has been rarely used. He [Giotto] did some..’, specifically the Navicella.14 Giorgio Vasari, writing in the mid-16th century, described it as ‘a miraculous work’ in his Life of Giotto, because of the excellence of the drawing, the grouping of the Apostles and the skill in making the sail appear in high relief in its lights and shadows: ‘even a painter working deftly with a brush would have found the task challenging’ (Vasari 1906a [1998]: Giotto, 386–7; de Vere 1912: 105). Indeed, it is in the story of the commissioning of the Navicella that Vasari tells the story of Giotto’s O, the freehand drawing of the perfect circle, and the obtuse papal official, proverbial demonstrations of the artist’s skill and wit (Vasari 1906a [1998]: Giotto, 386–7; de Vere 1912: 105; Ladis 2008). Even in the early 17th century, Giotto’s mosaics were ranked higher than his painting.15 Amidst all this writing, perhaps the greatest accolade for the Navicella was that it was thought worth saving in 1610. And all of this indicates a level of consistency in how Giotto was perceived: an artist involved with mosaic and as an artist who made mosaics.
Giotto, as artist of the Navicella, establishes his relationship with the medium, but what exactly was that relationship? If the Navicella had been a wall painting or a panel painting, then (as with the Scrovegni Chapel), the assumptions would be that Giotto worked on it himself, probably with a team, and that his ‘hand’, the bits he actually painted, would be detectable (Jacobus 2008). But with the Navicella, it has been said that ‘No one would dare suggest that Giotto himself, in the flesh, would have made the mosaic’; and that ‘few today would argue that Giotto executed the mosaic himself’, this last statement being followed by an argument that it is clear that the craftsmen on the scaffold of the Navicella were unable to translate Giotto’s vision, especially his ideas about volume, into art (Andaloro 2009; Derbes & Sandona 2004: 3, 240, n11). As with the statements around Giotto the mosaicist on his monument, these too seem to set mosaic aside as a medium to be thought of in a very different (and perhaps inferior) way to painting. But why would Giotto not be on the scaffold physically making the mosaic?
It may be because of a belief that the Navicella was Giotto’s only work of art in mosaic, that this was a one-off dabble in the field, and that therefore he lacked the skill to execute a mosaic. But there is no evidence for this any more than there is any evidence that Giotto created other mosaics that have not survived. The comments of the Italian writers cited earlier, especially Savonarola, Filarete and Vasari, suggest an association between Giotto and mosaic that was greater than one piece of work. That it was Giotto who was selected as the artist for the commission, rather than one of a range of other artists known to have been making mosaic in the early 14th century, is also suggestive of a reputation in the medium. In Rome alone, Camerino, Cavallini (Ghiberti’s preferred mosaic artist), Gaddo Gaddi, Rusuti, Tafi, and Torriti (summoned back by Pope Nicholas from painting the basilica in Assisi to work in mosaic at Sta Maria Maggiore) were all active mosaicists (Hydes 2016: Table 30). Of course, Giotto might have been third or fourth choice, though I would suggest that the commission was too important to be left to someone regarded as an inferior mosaicist. As I will go on to discuss, mosaic was too important and costly a medium to be left to a non-expert. Moreover, if Giotto had been apprenticed to Cimabue, then he would have had every opportunity to learn mosaic-making, for Cimabue worked in mosaic, notably at Pisa, and would, presumably, have passed on his skill to his pupil.16
If there is a question about Giotto executing the mosaic himself, it perhaps comes from the way in which the making of mosaics changed between the 13th century and the 16th. At Orvieto, where the mosaics date between 1321 and 1390, it is clear from surviving documents that the master mosaicists did indeed design the mosaics and create the underpaintings. However, they were also involved in cutting the tesserae to size and inserting them in the wall (Fumi 1891 [2002]; Harding 1989). Similarly, Torriti, Cavallini and Cimabue are usually understood to have been on the scaffold, and so, much later, was Muziano at Sta Croce in Rome.17 In 13th- and 14th-century painting and sculpture alike, the role of the master with his workshop is understood as one where both produced the work of art, with responsibilities for the making of different parts dependent on skill; it seems improbable that this would have been different with mosaic.18 But by the 16th century, as Vasari describes it, mosaics seem to have been made very differently, through the use of cartoons created by the ‘artist’ and cut into pieces and traced or pounced through onto the mortar, which was itself applied piece by piece. This process was very similar to that used in fresco, with the tesserae then set by the ‘mosaicist’ (Vasari 1906b [1998]: Ch XV, 198–9; Maclehose 1907 [1960]: 251).19 This was the case with Raphael in the Chigi Chapel in Sta Maria del Popolo in Rome and Titian in S Marco, Venice (Bertelli 1988: 231). It was a division of labour that is still often practised today, when ‘the artist’ or designer is seen as the creator, and the mosaicist as the artisan.20 In this model of mosaic-making, it would be surprising to find the ‘artist’ setting the mosaic; in the 13th and early 14th centuries, this, however, was the norm.
Part of the problem in understanding the relationship in the 13th century between the ‘painter’ and the ‘mosaicist’ comes from the vocabulary concerning painting and mosaic. Pictor/pittor is the standard word. It can be translated as ‘artist’; equally as ‘painter’. But it does not in and of itself define the medium in which the artist worked. On the mosaics in the apse of the Lateran and Sta Maria Maggiore, Jacopo Torriti is called (or perhaps even called himself) pictor (Bolgia 2012). Nor do the verbs pictura and pingere or dipingere necessarily relate only to painting. Alberti described the Navicella as dipinta, ‘painted’. Vasari described many of the mosaicists in his Lives as ‘painters’ such as Andrea Tafi, ‘painter of Florence’, and noted that ‘mosaic is the most durable painting (pitture) there is’ (Vasari 1906b [1998]: Ch XV, 196; Maclehose 1907 [1960]: 252).21 Giotto himself is repeatedly called pictor and signed himself as pictor; the epigram for the Giotto monument uses both pictura and pingere, and the translation of these words affects our reading of the verse. But the permeability of the terms both makes it hard for us to pin down (if indeed we should) what specific media an artist worked in and easy to assume that an artist only worked in one medium (that ‘a painter paints’). The word pictor might be better understood as ‘maker of pictures’, a term not exclusive to any one medium. For an artist to be expert in more than one medium would be nothing new. Many artists in this period were adept across a range of skills. Cavallini and Cimabue both worked in mosaic and paint, whilst Benedetto da Maiano, sculptor of Giotto’s monument, began working in wood and was adept at intarsia, described as ‘mosaic in wood’ by Vasari (1906a [1998]: Vol. III, 333–4).22 Giotto himself may have worked in stained glass as well as mosaic and fresco (Jacobus 2008: 107–8). The epigram in Florence Cathedral notes his expertise in architecture. Giotto pictor could as well be a mosaicist as a painter, was presumably both, and an architect also, and indeed might have wished to have his all-round expertise recognised.
Our focus, and perhaps implicit starting point, is often with painting, with an unspoken assumption that paint was the superior medium. Artists’ paintings are not often considered in terms of their work in mosaic, though the reverse is often the case—how Cavallini’s style as a painter affected his work as a mosaicist, rather than how his work as a mosaicist might have influenced his painting.23 But an art-historical narrative could easily be constructed about the ‘mosaic elements’ apparent in, for example, Giotto’s painting. At the Arena Chapel, the blocks of light and shade, the systems for highlighting and marking garment folds, the simple figures, some outlined in black, the construction of faces, and the solid blue backgrounds could all translate into mosaic forms without much effort. Perhaps they were translated from mosaic. The decoration of the vaulted roof of the Scrovegni Chapel and the ribbed vaults and roundels at S Francesco at Assisi are suggestive of mosaic. At Assisi, too, mosaic styles can be seen in Torriti’s Deesis vault of the Upper Church of the Basilica of S Francesco, for example, or in the gold grounds of the Vele frescoes in the crossing vaults of the Lower Church, attributed to Giotto.24 At Assisi, there are traces of mosaic and debates about the richness of the painting in a Franciscan setting. Maybe, in fact, mosaic was felt to be too costly a medium to use here, and paint was employed as the less lavish medium.25 The use of pseudo-Cosmati and indeed pseudo-mosaic ornamental designs in the Arena Chapel and at Assisi also evoke mosaic; painted fictile mosaics have remained a constant feature in Italian monumental ecclesiastical painting, certainly into the 20th century.26 All of this suggests a greater significance for mosaic as a medium, and more of an influence of mosaics on fresco painting than has been recognised.
The idea that Giotto was designer, rather than maker, also perhaps relates to a perception of mosaic as a ‘craft’ rather than an ‘art’.27 In this scenario, the implicit understanding would be that Giotto would not be involved in making the mosaic (the ‘craft’) because the true skill lay in the designs for the images, the underdrawings (the ‘art’). This dramatically underplays the skills involved in setting the tesserae, the value of ‘the intellect of the hand’, the ‘right hand’s cunning’, the significance of making itself.28 Setting tesserae requires a huge amount of skill: using tesserae of glass and stone, it involves creating images from close-up to be seen from a distance; it models with blocks of colour, using pure colours to create shading; the actual lines of laying the tesserae are part of the creation of the image.29 Some of our problems inherent in seeing Giotto as a mosaicist may also come from the perceived greater dynamic fluency of the hand in painting.30 In this model, if painting, especially oil painting, and drawing are fluent, active and unifying, then mosaic breaks things up and is done piece by piece.31 Giotto’s O is all about the fluidity, continuity and unity of Giotto’s ‘hand’; mosaic, in contrast, is mechanistic, piecemeal, hesitant, hard. Or there is the view that mosaic took images away from the ‘real-time process of their production’, that every stroke with a paintbrush is a signature of the artist; in contrast, in mosaic, the building blocks do not disappear into the medium but introduce a remove between author and image (Nagel & Wood 2010b). These ignore the process of mosaic-making and its own fluidities. Mosaic artists lay tesserae with distinctive andamenti, the visual flows and directions within a mosaic produced by the placement of rows of tesserae, something that forms an essential part of the style—the ‘hand’—of contemporary mosaicists.32 The suggestion that this work was not something that the master did is an interesting one, depending on the perceived status of the artist, as much as any actual evidence or discussion of practices in mosaic-making. Perhaps, when perceived as a Renaissance ‘master’, Giotto cannot be allowed to set the tesserae of his mosaics, whereas, when understood as a medieval craftsman, this is not a problem.33
As I have already suggested, Giotto as designer rather than mosaicist downplays the enormous importance of mosaic as a medium in the 13th and early 14th centuries. It was a very expensive medium, perhaps four times as costly as fresco painting.34 Filarete (1965: 312) said that mosaic was barely done in his day because ‘it was a great expense of time, materials and skills’. Effectively, therefore, only the powerful and very affluent could commission mosaics, and the use of mosaic therefore signalled prosperity, authority and prestige. When influential and rich Guilds (the Calimala at the Baptistery in Florence, for example) or wealthy individuals (Lorenzo de’Medici, the sponsor of Giotto’s monument) commissioned mosaics, it made a statement beyond the declarations made by mere wall painting; painting was what those sponsors commissioned who could not afford mosaic and mosaicists. This is surely why paint was used to evoke mosaic: in aspiration, and even envy.
The medium was also conceptually significant. There was a very long-standing tradition of mosaic, going back to the Roman period, as the medium of choice for important commissions on the part of significant commissioners, whether emperors, popes, generals, bishops or other leaders.35 Its use in all the great ancient Christian churches of Rome with their links to Christ’s apostles—churches such as St Peter’s, S Paolo fuori le mura, the Lateran, Sta Croce in Gerusalemme, Sta Maria Maggiore—spoke to the Apostolic heritage, to early Christian traditions and sanctity, to creating art in the footsteps of the earliest Christian bishops and rulers (Gardner 2013; James 2017; Kinney 2018; Pincus 1992). It had prestige as a medium, it had resonance, it had status.
And this was very much a live and on-going tradition in the 13th-century medieval world. In Rome, in the 1290s, a few years before Giotto was commissioned to work on the Navicella, Pope Nicholas IV had sponsored major mosaics at the Lateran and at Sta Maria Maggiore, commissioning Jacopo Torriti. Cardinal Colonna had appointed Paolo Cavallini to work in mosaic at Sta Maria in Trastevere. Even New St Peter’s, built between 1506 and 1626, included mosaics.36 Outside Rome in this same 13th- and 14th-century period, new mosaics were commissioned in a host of towns. Some were on a grand scale. In Venice, at S Marco, mosaics were installed and repaired on a regular basis from the 11th century into the 15th century; in Florence, the Baptistery and cathedral were mosaicked and repaired during the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries, combining the latest fashions in art with the richest medium in ceiling decoration. Arezzo, Genoa, Lucca, Messina, Naples, Orvieto, Palermo, Perugia, Pisa, Salerno and Siena all commissioned smaller mosaics.37 Repair works to older mosaic installations were also carried out consistently, if not necessarily on a vast scale, between the last quarter of the 13th century and the first quarter of the 16th century.38 All this underlines that the medium carried some significance that made the expense of its installation worthwhile—perhaps a statement of apostolic Christianity, perhaps a proclamation of civic standing and municipal distinction, perhaps a challenge to Rome (if Rome continued to invest in mosaic, could Venice and Florence afford not to?)39
Further evidence for the scale of mosaic-making in this period comes from 14th- to 16th-century Italian treatises on glass and mosaic tesserae recipes. They indicate a healthy level of trade in the manufacture of tesserae for mosaics.40 And there is a host of artists associated with mosaic-making: in addition to those already mentioned, names include Vincino da Pistoia, Orlando (Deodata di Orlandi), Lorenzo Maitani, Jacopo da Camerino, Lellius di Orvieto (or perhaps da Roma), Antonio di Jacopo, Pietro Oddo, and not forgetting Bingo and Pazzo, caught stealing tesserae from the Florence Baptistery in 1301 (Hydes 2016: Table 7; 23–35.). Behind each name, as Bingo and Pazzo make clear, was a team: many mosaicists were known anonymously, appearing in the art-historical record as, for example, ‘Milieu of Meliore’ and ‘Artist close to Coppo di Marcovaldi’, or even ‘Tuscan artists’ at the Florence Baptistery.41 Mosaic-making was an industry.
Seen from this 13th- and early-14th-century perspective, Giotto the mosaicist makes sense. But it is also fair to say that as a mosaicist, he worked at almost the point when there was a decrease in the use of mosaic from perhaps the late-14th or early-15th centuries (James 2017: 462, fig. 167). The reasons for this are very unclear: perhaps it was the cost; in the Eastern Mediterranean, it was perhaps related to the end of the Byzantine Empire (1453); in Italy, it was perhaps a change in fashion and a change in what was wanted from art. Why, however, is unclear. Syson & Thornton (2001b) traced an increased valuing of ‘design’ ahead of ‘manufacture’, something they relate to costs. This model makes sense also for mosaics, given the relative costs between mosaic and painting; with an emphasis on disegno, drawing or design, there came also an emphasis on the author of the design.
Something of this last is apparent in Vasari’s Lives. For Vasari, in the 16th century, painting, architecture and sculpture were the three great arts. Mosaic, along with tarsie, painted glass windows, inlays, enamel, wood engraving and a range of other artistic practices, was a lesser form of painting (Vasari 1906b [1998]). Nonetheless, within the Lives he told a story of mosaic alongside that of painting, a narrative thread that runs throughout the work.
As is well known, the Lives construct an inevitable forward progression of painting in particular, emerging from the dark age of the ‘Greek’-influenced Middle Ages to the triumph of Tuscan art and Michelangelo.42 Vasari began with mosaic as the ‘Greek’ art form above all. In the Three Arts of Design, he condemned ‘the countless mosaics’ done by the Greeks in all and every city in Italy, notably in the cathedral of Pisa (actually by Cimabue and ascribed by Vasari to Tafi) and S Marco in Venice.43 The figures, staring as if possessed, resembling grotesques, encapsulate all that Vasari felt was wrong in art. Of the artists in his opening seven Lives, Cimabue to Giotto, five are specifically noted as working in mosaic: Cimabue, Arnolfo, Andrea Tafi (whose Life also mentions the mosaicist ‘Jacopo da Turrità’, who may have been Jacopo Torriti, responsible for the stunning apse mosaic of Sta Maria Maggiore), Gaddo Gaddi, and Giotto himself. The mosaics of all of these artists stand as examples of ‘Greekness’ in contrast to Giotto.
Thus Tafi is said to have learned mosaic from a ‘Greek’ artist in Venice. Vasari suggested that his works in mosaic were very much admired in his own time because people were used only to the ‘Greek’ manner and knew no better; Tafi’s mosaics in the Florence Baptistery were crude and lacking in design and skill, and would move the audience to laughter now, though Vasari added conscientiously that the workmanship is sound and the tesserae very well put together. Tafi himself took up mosaic, not as a skilled artist but because he realised that mosaic was more highly valued than all other forms of ‘painting’ because it lasted well. Vasari concluded that Tafi was fortunate to have been born at a time when his work would be well regarded, since people did not know any better. The same, he noted, was true of Jacopo da Turrità, who created the mosaics in the apse behind the altar of St. John in the Florence Baptistery, and, although these were not particularly deserving of praise, he was exceptionally well rewarded for them and then taken to Rome as an ‘excellent master’ (Vasari 1906a [1998]: Life of Tafi, Vol. 1, Apollonio, 331–2; the tavola, 337–8). Tafi fared better than Gaddo Gaddi, however, whose mosaic work Vasari refused to describe, since it did not, he asserted, possess enough artistic merit (Vasari 1906a [1998]: Life of Gaddo Gaddi, Vol. 1, 349).44 It was Giotto who was first to be designated painter, sculptor and architect and so to lay claim to the three cardinal arts.45 It was Giotto’s achievement to change the profession of painting and mosaic from ‘Greek’ to ‘Latin’; his name stood for a particular standard of artistry, and his importance lay in his having reintroduced naturalism into the arts of design—as Vasari chose to use the mosaic of the Navicella to prove.46
Vasari’s praise of the Navicella suggests a high appreciation of it:
This [the Navicella] really is a miraculous work, rightly praised by all discerning minds because of the excellence of the design and the grouping of the apostles who in various attitudes strain to guide their boat through the raging sea while the wind fills a sail which seems to be in such high relief that it looks real. It must have been extremely difficult to achieve with pieces of glass the blending (unione) of lights and shadows shown in the great sail; even a painter working deftly with the brush would have found the task challenging.47
In a similar vein, 15th-century humanist commentators on art, including Rucellai and Alberti, did not deem the Navicella to be a less ‘realistic’ narrative or istoria than Giotto’s frescoes (Baxandall 1971: 130). But it is an appreciation of mosaic framed in terms of Vasari’s beliefs about quality in art, more usually apparent in painting. One of Vasari’s highest commendations for painting is that an artist had achieved the illusion of relief through subtle variations of light and shade: the aim of art was the imitation of nature. This is exactly what he commends in the Navicella. His ultimate praise is that Giotto achieved in mosaic an illusion of relief that would have been difficult in painting. The emphasis here is not just on placing lights and darks together but with blending them together in a kind of sfumato. Of particular importance to Vasari’s conception of good art was the expression of emotion, together with the illusion of relief or volume (rilievo), and these are the two key features of the Navicella that Vasari singled out for praise. Just as Giotto’s paintings looked different from previous works of art, so too his mosaics: that as a mosaicist, Giotto developed different ways of laying tesserae to create the visual effects increasingly sought by patrons; that in appearance, the Navicella might have shared much with the Scrovegni Chapel.
Alongside the progress of painting, Vasari then traced how mosaic progressed from Giotto.48 I highlight here only a few key aspects to this narrative. It was because Baldovinetti’s work was so good that he was employed to clean and rearrange the whole of Tafi’s vault mosaic in the Baptistery in Florence (Vasari 1906a [1998]: Life of Baldovinetti, Vol. 2, 596).49 Baldovinetti in turn taught mosaic to Domenico Ghirlandaio, of whose mosaics there was nothing better amongst the ‘modern’ mosaic masters.50 It is to Ghirlandaio that Vasari ascribed the comment that painting (pittura) was mere drawing (disegno) and the true painting (pittura again) for eternity was mosaic.51 In terms of the increased value placed on disegno that I mentioned earlier, and the 16th-century rivalry of disegno and colore, should this be interpreted as a positive or a negative remark? Finally, according to Vasari, Titian brought mosaic (it is worth noting that Vasari actually says ‘this form of painting’) to such a height of excellence as was possible and to a different level from that which it reached in Florence and Rome with Giotto, Baldovinetti and Ghirlandaio (Vasari 1906a [1998]: Life of Titian, Vol. 7, 466). In Titian’s Life, Vasari also hailed Valerio and Vincenzo Zuccati and Bartolomeo Bozzato for their work in mosaic, producing works ‘well-harmonized’ in lights, flesh-colours, tints and shadows, praising them for mosaics executed so well that it appeared done in oil paint with a brush (Vasari 1906a [1998]: Life of Titian, Vol. 7 468; de Vere 1912: Vol. 2, 802–3).52 By this point, mosaic and painting have converged, achieving the same effects in their different media.
Giotto’s Navicella, dated to c.1300, came at a moment when mosaic-making was still popular in Italy but was, in Vasari’s view, about to be superseded. This would be the simple answer to why Giotto as a mosaicist has been overlooked; a story of art in which the rise of painting is accompanied by a decline in mosaic, so that by the 16th century, it was outmoded and archaic.53 But that was not the story of mosaic-making that Vasari actually told, and Giotto as a mosaicist matters because mosaic-making was not a negligible art form during the 14th to 16th centuries. Returning to the monument in Florence Cathedral, it is clear that it hails Giotto’s skill as more than painter in both its words (‘To none was it permitted to make more art or better’; the reference to Giotto the architect) and in its image (a mosaicist making the face of Christ—and might the reference here be specifically to the highly-praised Navicella and its figure of Christ?) It demonstrates that he was an artist involved in one of the most luxurious and prestigious of monumental media, an artist whose work in mosaic was recognised in 14th, 15th and 16th-century Italy as one of the greatest of all works of art. The key word in that sentence is mosaic—a medium whose relevance to the development of Renaissance art has been disregarded.
Acknowledgements
Many colleagues have assisted me [Liz James] with this paper. The earliest version was presented to Joanna Cannon and the Giotto’s Circle Group at the Courtauld Institute, Donal Cooper kindly advised on an early version, and Anne Alwis gave encouragement at the right moment. My thanks also to the two anonymous readers for their advice and helpful suggestions, especially around the epigram. I owe a great deal to Michelle O’Malley for her input and critique. Carol Hydes generously allowed me to use material in her unpublished PhD thesis. My biggest debt is to Sharon Fermor, for the crash course in Vasari and Renaissance aesthetics, and for saving me from many errors. All misunderstandings of the Renaissance are mine alone.
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1
The artist was Benedetto da Maiano. Vasari mentioned the monument and quoted the text (Vasari 1906a [1998]: ‘Life of Giotto’, vol. 1, page 409). Nagel (2008: page 143, note 1) offers a more elegant translation:
I am he through whom painting, dead, returned to life
And whose hand was as sure as it is adept.
What my art lacked was lacking in nature herself.
To no one was it given to paint better or more.
Do you admire the great belltower resounding with sacred bronze?
This too on the basis of my model has grown to the stars
After all, I am Giotto. What need was there to relate these things?
This name has stood as the equal to any long poem.
Deceased 1336. Erected by the citizens 1490.
Nagel notes (page 147, note 15) that an earlier draft of the epigram made reference to the Navicella. The monument is also discussed by Nagel & Wood (2010a). The epigram is also discussed by Barolsky (1995). It is worth noting, pace Nagel, and Nagel and Wood, that Giotto does not hold a micromosaic tessera (micromosaic tesserae are perhaps 0.22 mm2 in size and would almost certainly have to have been inserted with some sort of tool; wall mosaic tesserae are closer to 0.7 cm2 and inserted manually) and discussion of micromosaics in the context of this image is a bit of a red herring.
2
3
Another commemorative portrait in the Church of San Francesco in Montefalco, part of a cycle of frescoes of the Life of St. Francis by Benozzo Gozzoli, dated to 1452, shows Giotto at work on what is either a drawing or a panel painting. See Ahl (1996: page 52, Plate 56).
4
The exact date is unclear. Julian Gardner connects it with the Jubilee of 1300 (Gardner, Gardner 1974, 2013: 293–6). Kempers & de Blaauw (1987) argue that both Stefaneschi and Giotto were too junior in 1300 to have been entrusted with such major works in St Peter’s and have preferred a date closer to 1310.
5
For details of the pen and ink drawing shown here and now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and of other related drawings, see Virch (1961).
6
For a detailed study of which bits are/not Giotto, see Andaloro (2009). Also see the short note by Kheel (1986). For a detailed account of the image (rather than the mosaic) see Kohren-Jansen (1993). Also see Schwarz (2008: 255–80), again with little discussion of the mosaic aspect.
7
Although now the Scrovegni Chapel is revered, it was only in the 19th century that it began to appear as a major monument in Giotto’s oeuvre: see Maginnis (1997: 85) on the 19th-century hailing of the Arena Chapel. Jacobus (2008: 15 and appendices 13, 14, 15, 16) describes some 14th- to 16th-century responses to the Chapel.
8
9
Villani, De origine civitatis Florentiae et eiusdem famosis civibus, in the section on painters (translated in Baxandall 1971: 70–2, especially 70). Villani, even in his emphasis on the Classical model of art, was happy to include works in mosaic.
10
I am very grateful to Michelle O’Malley for this suggestion and reference.
11
Lorenzo Ghiberti, Second Commentary, chapter 3. However, Ghiberti (chapter 9) also notes that he has never seen any work better in mosaic than that of Cavallini. For the date of the Commentaries, see Krautheimer, Lorenzo Ghiberti (1956: 11, 308–17).
12
Michele Savonarola, Speculum, 170 (x) and in Libellus, 44, as the artist ‘who first made modern figures out of ancient and mosaic ones in a marvellous way’. Both references borrowed from Brennan (2019: 184, 221). Whilst this is not ‘proof’ of work in mosaic, it does suggest a conceptual link between Giotto and mosaic.
13
Giovanni Rucellai ed il suo Zibaldone, vol. 1, ‘Il zibaldone quaresimale’ (1960: 67–77: Descrizione delle bellezze e antichità di Roma): ‘Item, in una faccia del detto cortile la nave degli Apostoli, colla vela et timone, di musaicho i cosa multo buona, che si dice essere di mano di Giotto’.
14
Antonio di Piero Averlino detto il Filarete, Trattato di architettura (1972: Book XXIV, pp 670–2); Filarete, Treatise on Architecture. Being the treatise by Antonio di Piero Averlino known as Filarete (1965, vol. 1, Book XXIV, fol. 183 r and v, page 312). Filarete seems to have liked mosaic: see the comments by Borsook (1980: l and note 1). He also praised the work of Cavallini.
15
By Casella (Gombrich 1987).
16
Mariagiulia Burresi and Antonino Caleca (2005: 238, cat. entry 78), pointing out that the mosaic is the only documented work of Cimabue’s career, despite Vasari’s attribution of it (in the Life of Tafi) to Tafi, Gaddi, Jacopo da Turrita and Vicino in his place. For Giotto not as Cimabue’s pupil, see Schwarz & Theis (2004: 15) and Schwarz (2007).
17
Perhaps it is fairer to say that I have not come across any discussions of these mosaicists suggesting that they were not involved in setting mosaics; the assumption is that they were, and it is not clear why if they were, then Giotto was not.
18
On the relationships between Giotto and his assistants in the painting of the Arena Chapel, see Jacobus (2008: especially 133–52). More widely on workshop practices, see O’Malley (2013).
19
In his Life of Titian, Vasari indicates that Titian used drawings and cartoons (Vasari 1906a [1998]: vol. 7, Titian, page 466). The earliest mention of the use of cartoons—for stained glass—seems to be Cennino Cennini’s Libro dell’Arte (1390s) which makes no mention of their use in mosaics (see Cennini 1932: XI, page 7, Thompson 1933: 111). Bambach (1999), admits that it is tempting to extrapolate from Cennini for the contemporary use of cartoons for mosaics; she also points out that there is no documentary evidence for that.
20
Usually with less success, as the 20th-century mosaics in Westminster Cathedral bear witness (Bentley 2013).
21
Debates around pittura always take the word as meaning ‘painting’, but it is perhaps more complicated than that, especially when the artist is known to have made pictures in more than one medium.
22
23
For Cavallini, compare his construction and colouring in the angels’ wings in the mosaics of Sta Maria in Trastevere and the frescoes in Sta Cecilia. See also Hetherington (1979: 130–1), who starts to open up the question of the stylistic links between Cavallini’s work in mosaic and in fresco. Brennan (2019: 14–15, 63 (placing dark on light), 282), for example, without mentioning mosaics, discusses colouring in the painting of Giotto in ways strikingly similar to the use of colour in mosaics.
24
East web, second bay of the nave, dated c.1288–90 and well-illustrated in Cooper & Robson (2013: plates 113, 114).
25
The same perhaps was true in Theodore Metochites’ church of the Chora in Constantinople (dedicated in 1321), where the church is mosaicked but the funerary chapel, where Theodore’s body would be buried, was painted. For images of the mosaics and wall paintings, see Ousterhout (1999).
26
On fictive mosaics elsewhere in the 13th and 14th centuries, see Drpić (2022). Fictile or fake or fictive or faux mosaics are visible in a range of churches in Rome, including Sta Maria in Aquiro (16th–17th century), Sta Anastasia (17th or 18th century) and Sta Maria in Monticelli (19th century). The relationship between mosaic and painted mosaic is a fascinating one.
27
On art versus craft in a gendered context, see Parker & Pollock (1981: especially chapter 2, pp. 50–81).
28
For ‘The intellect of the hand’, see Graves (2018: 26–58); for the ‘right hand’s cunning’, see Cutler (1997). Helms (1993) makes an important argument (amongst other things) about the power of objects produced by skilled artisans. For theorising making, see Ingold (2013).
29
On the sorts of skills needed for making mosaics, see James (2017: especially chapter 2, ‘Making Mosaics’, 46–95).
30
Similarly with tempera painting, done through small, dry brushstrokes. Vasari admired painters who used this technique, but felt that they could not achieve the dynamism of oil painting. For mosaics as a fluid medium, see Hills (1987: 31–40), on Cavallini’s mosaics in S Maria in Trastevere, implying that they evoke a different and more ‘Renaissance’ ethic than that suggested by ‘Byzantine’ mosaics.
31
Andaloro (2009) calls this ‘syntactic’ versus ‘paratactic’.
32
Andamento: see for example the definition at http://www.thejoyofshards.co.uk/glossary/andamento.shtml; https://helenmilesmosaics.org/mosaics-miscellaneous/andamento/. For an eloquent articulation of andamento at S Marco in Venice, see Hills (1999: 54–5).
33
Cadogan (2000) suggests that Ghirlandaio’s (1449–94) career just preceded a change in the social status of the artist from medieval artisan to Renaissance genius.
34
35
This is one of the fundamental points in James (2017).
36
DiFederico (1983: 5) suggests this was the result of a concern with early Christian tradition, and that mosaic sanctified by its apostolic connections and the still-existing examples on the basilica. The new mosaics were praised by Borghini in 1584 as being so beautifully done, it was as if with a paintbrush and colour (for which, see DiFederico 1983: 6).
37
See the maps, lists and charts in James (2017) and Hydes (2016).
38
Hydes (2016) provides evidence for the installation of 63 individual mosaics, 27 mosaic cycles and 16 repairs to mosaics in this period—a minimum of 106 areas of mosaic activity on different scales. This is not a ‘collapse’ of mosaic-making (as implied, for example, in Nagel & Wood (2010a: 130)).
39
For S Marco, see Demus (1984); for Florence, see Paolucci (1994) and Schwarz (1997). The statement about fashion and rich medium is Borsook’s 1980. Also illustrative of this are Harding (1983) and Hydes (2016).
40
See Milanesi (1864). Also the discussion in Verità (1996).
41
For these different artists and more in the Florence Baptistery, see Paolucci (1994) and Hydes (2016: Table 12).
42
For the Lives as a skilful product of the conventions of historical writing in the 16th century, see Rubin (1995). For Vasari as storyteller see, for example, Barolsky (1992). As both note, Vasari’s facts about the early periods are often inaccurate and misleading, in part a product or instrument of his own agenda. Hope (2014) discusses the Lives as written by several writers.
43
‘Infinite musaici che per tutta Italia, lavorati da essi Greci’ (Vasari 1906a [1998]: Proemio delle Vite, vol. 1, page 242), de Vere (1912: 46). For Vasari, ‘Greek’ described a style with associations both with Byzantium and with medieval art in Italy; it is a style term rather than a geographical one.
44
Barolsky (1992) shows how this Life is constructed as a fall and rise narrative.
45
See also Barolsky (1992: 16).
46
Rubin (1995: 36). Rubin (295–6) observes that Vasari had no real affinity for Giotto’s art: if anything, Giotto served as a proverb for artistic fame, awakening painting as Dante did, citing Boccaccio and Villani on Giotto. Landischk (2014) sees the Life as a compelling myth of the genius Giotto. For debate about links between painters’ art and humanists’ verbal art, see Baxandall (1971).
47
‘… la quale è veramente miracolosa e meritamente lodata da tutti i belli ingegni i perchè in essa, oltre al disegno, vi è la disposizione degli Apostoli, che in diverse maniera travagliano per la tempest del mare, mentre soffiano i venti in una vela, la quale ha tanto rilievo che non farebbe altrettanto una vera: e pure è difficile avere a fare di que’pezzi di vetri una unione come quell ache si vede nei Bianchi e nell’ombre di sì gran vela, la quale col pennello, quando si facesse ogni sforzo, a fatica si pareggerebbe’ (Vasari 1906a [1998]: vol 1, page 386; translation by Sharon Fermor).
48
There is a lot more to be said about Vasari and mosaicists. Twenty-one of the Lives suggest that their subjects, or others mentioned in those Lives, worked in mosaic, and I collect them here for completeness: Cimabue, Arnolfo, Pisano, Tafi, Gaddo Gaddi (and Turrita), Buonamico, Cavallini, Agnolo Gaddi, Lippo, Ghiberti, Brunelleschi, Michelozzo, Baldovinetti (who taught Ghirlandaio), Cecca, Gherardo, Domenico, Davide and Ridolfo Ghirlandaio, Bramante, Salviati and Titian. There are also examples of artists who worked in mosaic but this aspect of their oeuvre is not mentioned by Vasari—for example, Orcagna, see Harding (1989); Uccello, see Bertelli (1988: 227) on a letter of 1432 written by the workers of Sta Maria del Fiore in Florence; Raphael: see Bertelli (1988: 230–1).
49
However, Baldovinetti learned his skill from a ‘Tedesco’, a German or Northern European, not a ‘Greek’, although what Baldovinetti’s German friend was doing knowing about mosaic is intriguing. The only North European mosaic in this period is the mosaic on the façade of Prague cathedral, dating to 1367/71.
50
For Ghirlandaio and his brother and son as mosaicists, see Cadogan (2000: 30, and cats. 51, 65, 67, and pp. 159–60, 281 and 286–7).
51
Baldovinetti as Ghirlandaio’s teacher is in Life of Baldovinetti (Vasari 1906a [1998]: vol. 2, page 597). See also ‘La pittura essere il disegno, e la vera pittura per la eternità essere il musaico’ (Vasari 1906a [1998]: Life of Ghirlandaio, vol. 3, pp 253–78 at 274) and de Vere (1912: vol. 1, page 528).
52
Vasari identifies the brothers as Zuccheri rather than Zuchatti.
53
See the note by Milanesi to the Life of Tafi (Vasari 1906a [1998]: vol. 1, page 340); see also Bolgia (2012).
Cite
DOI: 10.5871/jba/013.a40
Published on: 6 November 2025
Volume: 13
Issue: Issue 4
Article view count: 200
Article download count: 27
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© The author(s) 2025. This is an open access article licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International LicenseCite this article
James, L. with Hydes, C. (2025), ‘Giotto the mosaicist’, Journal of the British Academy, 13(4): a40 https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/013.a40Crossref
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Received
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May 2023
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July 2023
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