Trecento Frescoes - The age and legacy of Giotto

This tour celebrates the heroic age of fresco painting from the late 13th century to the mid 14th. The era of innovation that revolutionised the visual arts in Italy began in the decades around 1300 and is above all associated with the medium of fresco, especially the narrative cycles painted in the Basilica of San Francesco in Assisi and the Arena Chapel in Padua. Fresco cycles are site-specific, conceived to be experienced by the viewer within a particular purpose-built architectural setting. Perhaps more than any other medium, to fully feel the force of their meaning, impact and beauty they need to be appreciated first-hand, within the spaces for which they were designed.

The magnificent principal cycles to survive from this period across northern and central Italy include the narratives of the life of Saint Francis in the Upper Church at Assisi; the cycles by Giotto, Simone Martini and Pietro Lorenzetti in the Lower; Giotto’s masterpiece, the Arena Chapel, Padua; the Passion cycle attributed to Barna or Lippo Memmi in San Gimignano; and Bonamico Buffalmacco’s recently restored Triumph of Death in the Campo Santo at Pisa.

Alongside the sacred narratives to be explored are also civic schemes for town halls at San Gimignano and Siena, where Ambrogio Lorenzetti created a pictorial political treatise of unprecedented sophistication in the so-called ‘Sala della Pace’. A generation of painters followed Giotto and the Black Death through schemes such as Andrea da Bonaiuto’s chapter-house frescoes at Santa Maria Novella, Florence, or Altichiero’s audacious experiments in perspectival space in Padua.

Throughout their schemes, Giotto and his contemporaries combined narrative and allegory in their frescoes to stake new intellectual claims for painting as a universal art. Painters exploited alignments, symmetries and vistas to generate additional registers of meaning for their viewers. A visit to Assisi compels investigation into one of the greatest of all art-historical controversies; whether or not Giotto did in fact paint the 28 scenes of the life of Saint Francis.