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Uffizzi Gallery, Florence, June - December 2008 - Giotto Exhibition
When the great Giotto died in Florence, in 1337, it seemed in retrospect that the lights had gone out on great European art. Though one of the great medieval Italian painters, Giotto di Bondone would be seen as a precursor to the Italian Renaissance. But that great period of European art - whose major figures in and around Florence included Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and a host of other names famed to this day - wouldn't kick off until the end of the 14th century. The death of Giotto coincided with the birth of a very bleak period for Europe and, until now, this half century hiatus was seen as a similarly arid period for the arts ... but a new exhibition at The Uffizi Gallery in Florence seeks to redress that view.
Giotto's Legacy: Art in Florence from 1340 to 1375 (L'eredita di Giotto: L'arte a Firenze tra il 1340 e il 1375) runs from 10 June to 8th December 2008 at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and brings to light some of the major but occasionally overlooked artists of the 14th century - the likes of Andrea Pisano, Maso di Banco and Andrea Orcagna. Retrospect sees Giotto at the beginning of the Renaissance, with his fully three dimensional figures, a humanist concern in painting individual faces rather than flat iconic images - and the great artist funded by commissions that came from the rich patrons of Florence, a city grown rich first on the wool trade but then by its invention of modern banking.
Innovative Florentines were financing much of the debt of medieval Europe, the banks lending money to the continent's kings to finance their continual wars. But the economy ground to a halt with a series of catastrophes, natural and manmade. First the weather got worse. The medieval warm period subsided into the 'Little Ice Age', with declining crop yields and famines. The Hundred Years War in northwest Europe wrecked trade. Edward III of England defaulted on his massive debt to Florence's Bardi and Peruzzi banks and, worst of all, the Black Death decimated the population of Europe - Florence lost half of its population during the second half of the century.
And so ... the Renaissance stalled, though Italian literary figures of the time, including the great Dante and Petrarch kept the flame flickering. Giotto's great realist adventure receded into workmanlike, flat Gothic art and nothing new or innovative was produced. Or so the theory has gone ... Visit Giotto's Legacy: Art in Florence from 1340 to 1375 at the Uffizi to see what was really going on during the 'Ice Age' of Florence's mid 14th century.
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