Latest news with #Giotto
Wall Street Journal
3 days ago
- General
- Wall Street Journal
Giotto's ‘The Legend of St. Francis': Assisi's Devotional Frescoes
When I first saw Giotto's fresco cycle 'The Legend of St. Francis' in the upper church of the Basilica of St. Francis in Assisi—a small Italian town two hours from Rome by train—I thought: Is this really what I traveled halfway around the world to see? The colors have faded into ghosts of what they once were. The figures are as boxy as the houses that surround them. Their stiff faces look like those of cadavers that have been stretched into place. But spending more time with these huddled masses of earnest zealots slowly reveals the complex inner lives behind their static masks. If we set aside our modern biases and 800 years of artistic advancement, we can start to understand why medieval viewers thought these images were the most lifelike they had ever seen—and why the founding father of art history, Giorgio Vasari, stated in his 'Lives of the Artists' that Giotto alone rescued painting from 'an evil state and brought it back to such a form that it could be called good.'
Yahoo
11-03-2025
- Yahoo
The ultimate guide to the 2025 Jubilee in Rome
A trip to Rome is an exhilarating experience at any time. But with the Catholic Church's Jubilee currently hitting its stride, 2025 is gearing up to be an even bigger year than usual. The Jubilee is expected to draw more than 30 million visitors to the Eternal City, which has spent billions of euros cleaning up its monuments and upgrading its transport networks in preparation for the event. People are already starting to trickle in, so if you're planning to come later in the year, be prepared for crowds at key sites and a festive atmosphere in the city's cobbled lanes and baroque piazzas. Here's what you need to know to navigate Jubilee 2025. The Jubilee, also known as a Holy Year, is one of the Catholic Church's major global events. Traditionally held every 25 years, it's a period of prayer, reflection, and penance, during which pilgrims who travel to Rome and visit certain designated churches can secure a plenary indulgence (remission of their sins). The tradition dates back to 1300 when Pope Boniface VIII proclaimed the first holy year. It was an immediate hit, attracting an estimated two million pilgrims, including the artist Giotto and possibly Dante, who alluded to it in The Divine Comedy. Proceedings officially kicked off Christmas Eve 2024. In a ceremony at St. Peter's Basilica, Pope Francis opened the basilica's holy door — which is usually kept closed — and launched the year-long celebration, which is scheduled to finish on January 6, 2026. Religious and cultural events are planned throughout the whole year, but peak times will be spring (May to June) and autumn (September to October). The Jubilee will be felt across the whole city, but center stage will be the Vatican, the tiny papal state on the northwest bank of the Tiber River. Most people who visit for the Jubilee will want to go to St. Peter's Basilica in St. Peter's Square, while museum-goers will want to marvel at the masterpieces on display in the nearby Vatican Museums. Elsewhere, action will focus on Rome's other three papal basilicas: San Giovanni in Laterano, Rome's official cathedral in the San Giovanni district; Santa Maria Maggiore on the Esquiline Hill; and San Paolo Fuori le Mura in the city's southern suburbs. Top of the bucket list for many pilgrims will be to walk through a holy door at one of the papal basilicas. This can only be done in a Jubilee year, as the sacred portals are kept shut at all other times. To Catholics, the act of passing through a holy door symbolizes the passage from sin to grace, a central requirement for the obtaining of an indulgence. Attendees can continue their spiritual journey, while also sightseeing, by walking a designated pilgrimage route. The most famous of these is the Seven Churches walk, a punishing 15.5-mile hike (25 kilometers) that takes in seven important basilicas, as well as Rome's catacombs. If urban hiking is not your thing, there are plenty of planned Jubilee events, including exhibitions, concerts, open-air masses, and papal audiences. Away from the main pilgrimage sites, Rome is home to a dazzling array of artistic and architectural treasures. These range from ancient monuments such as the Colosseum and Pantheon to Michelangelo's frescoes in the Sistine Chapel and Caravaggio's paintings in the Church of St. Louis of the French. But with so many people in town, the top attractions will be extremely busy. For a more relaxing experience, visit some lesser-known sites that are still extraordinary. The Baths of Caracalla, for example, offer magnificent Roman ruins without the crowds, while the Cimitero Acattolico is a soothing spot to recharge your batteries, especially if prefaced by a classic trattoria lunch in the nearby Testaccio district. To the south of the city, Via Appia Antica (the ancient Appian Way) is ideal for exploring by bike. (Related: A hiking tour along Rome's Appian Way) To get the most out of Rome's ancient sites, which can be confusing, a tour can make a real difference. Silvia Prosperi and her team at A Friend in Rome offer excellent, tailor-made visits as well as city excursions ranging from Vespa rides to street food walks. (Related: 10 of the best hotels in Rome) Walking is the best way to explore the center of Rome. Distances between popular attractions are not far and the labyrinthine lanes are made for leisurely strolling. Just make sure to bring some comfortable walking shoes — Rome's sampietrini (cobbles) can be very unforgiving. For longer distances, there are buses, trams, and a three-line metro system. Public transportation is cheap but the system will be under enormous pressure from the crowds, so be prepared for the odd delay and packed carriages. Taxis can be booked via apps such as itTaxi or ChiamaTaxi 060609. To get to and from Leonardo da Vinci Rome Fiumicino Airport, taxis cost about $60 (€55), or a train to the central Termini station costs about $15 (€14). From the smaller Ciampino Airport, you can take a taxi (for around $43, or €40) or a shuttle bus (one-way from $6.50, or €6). (Related: How to dine like a local in Italy) Visitors who want to participate in official Jubilee events and join a pilgrimage to a holy door need a Pilgrim's Card. This is a free digital pass that you can register for on the Jubilee website or the IUBILAEUM25 app. Once in Rome, there's also an information point near St. Peter's at Via della Conciliazione 7, open daily from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Tickets to main attractions like the Colosseum, Vatican Museums, and Galleria Borghese will be in high demand so try to book these as early as possible. Similarly, if there are any popular restaurants you want to try, reserve in advance. Rome's main tourist website is a good source for sightseeing suggestions and up-coming events. Based in Rome, Duncan Garwood is a travel writer specializing in Italy and its ever-fascinating capital. He authors guidebooks for Lonely Planet and has written for several newspapers and websites including The Independent, The i Paper, the BBC, and la Repubblica.
Telegraph
28-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
How Christian art became the National Gallery's next smash hit
One of the biggest surprises in the art world last year was the success, on the other side of the Atlantic, of an exhibition of 14th-century Sienese art. Awash with pictures with gold backgrounds depicting sacred subjects, Siena: The Rise of Painting 1300-1350 electrified visitors to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York – so much so that, to the publisher's astonishment, the accompanying catalogue had to be reprinted within weeks. Now, the same show of about 100 works (sculpture, metalwork and textiles as well as painting) is coming to the National Gallery in London. You might think that in a secular age, sacred art would hold little appeal. Yet seemingly it still bewitches us. Why does it retain such power? Along with its rival city-state of Florence, Siena – 145 miles north of Rome – was the powerhouse of Tuscany during the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance. By the 13th century, it was an epicentre of European banking, and its heyday fell between 1287 and 1355 (the period covered by the exhibition), when it was ruled by a council of governors, selected every couple of months from a group of Siena's male citizens, known as I Nove (The Nine). A major school of painting flourished that would prove important to the history of Western art. Its father was Duccio, who died around 1319, and, along with Giotto (who hailed from Florence, and died almost two decades later), is often described as the founder of European painting. Other individuals contributed to the brilliance of Sienese art, including Simone Martini and the Lorenzetti brothers, Pietro and Ambrogio, works by all of whom feature in the exhibition. Caroline Campbell, the director of the National Gallery of Ireland, who came up with the concept for the show with her co-curator Joanna Cannon back in 2012, was amazed that Siena proved such a hit in New York. As she puts it, 'these gilded objects can look very, very foreign to us. I've noticed, in galleries, people often walk past the gold-ground pictures. They don't want to look at them.' Why? 'I think they feel intimidated.' Many of the paintings in the exhibition occupy an unassailable position within the Western canon, but to modern eyes they can seem alien and impenetrable. Could this be increasingly the case with Christian art? According to the 2021 census, the most recent, for the first time, the proportion of the population in England and Wales that identifies as Christian has dipped below half, while more than 37 per cent (22.2 million people) have no religious affiliation. Ours is an era of ever-intensifying secularism, as certainties about what constitutes great art have been challenged. This presents a little-acknowledged problem for museums with important historical collections – which are already besieged by contentious issues, from questions of restitution to dealing with climate activists attacking artworks. About a third of all paintings in the National Gallery's collection depict Christian subjects – reflecting the fact that, as its website puts it, 'after classical antiquity, Christianity became the predominant power shaping European culture between the 13th and 19th centuries'. Yet it would be absurd to suggest that non-believers today are only baffled by Christian themes. 'Christian art' is a category of mind-boggling scope, encompassing everything from elaborate early-Christian sarcophaguses to, say, The Light of the World (1851-54), an allegorical composition by the Pre-Raphaelite William Holman Hunt, which presents the cloaked figure of Jesus holding a lantern, about to knock at dusk on a sealed door. Leonardo's mural of The Last Supper, executed in the convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie, in Milan during the 1490s; Pieter Saenredam's 17th-century paintings of bare, whitewashed Dutch church interiors; any number of intense, visionary illustrations etched around the turn of the 19th century in England by William Blake: all, despite their variety, count as Christian art. Even the minimal compositions of Piet Mondrian, the Dutch modernist (who was raised Calvinist), have been interpreted as a form of abstract Protestant iconography. The trouble is, the teachings and stories of Christianity that informed these examples are no longer common knowledge. Our collective understanding of them has diminished, and the subjects and conventions of sacred art, which once would have been recognised and appreciated by the humblest viewers, are becoming more obscure. Recently, while visiting the National Gallery (which will unveil a rehang of its permanent collection in May), I was struck by how much of the labelling that accompanies its Christian paintings was devoted to simple nuts-and-bolts – and once-unnecessary – explication. Fair enough: without it, some viewers may wonder why, for instance, in about 1623, the Dutch painter Gerrit van Honthorst depicted a slumped, semi-nude male corpse tethered to a tree, pierced by four arrows. This figure, a caption reveals, represents Saint Sebastian, 'a Roman soldier... martyred for his Christian faith by the Emperor Diocletian in 288 AD' – which is, I suppose, the sort of detail that schoolchildren or tourists from other cultures cannot be expected to know. Such matter-of-factness may be indispensable, but it risks rendering powerful art bland. The label neglects to say that Honthorst's painting is bloody and shocking – the more so for the dissonance of its icily smooth style. It also reminds us that violence is at the heart of the Christian tradition, especially in art. What is the key moment of the Christian story – the Crucifixion – if not an appalling episode of astonishing brutality concerning the prolonged, grisly death of a man nailed to a wooden cross? Perhaps because we are so accustomed to encountering paintings of Christian subjects in museums that we take them for granted, we've become inured to the ferocity of sacred art, as well as ignorant of its meaning. 'When things are very familiar,' Campbell says, 'you don't think about them: they're just there.' Curiously, then, Christian art today is both overfamiliar and not familiar at all. For me, there's a gulf between viewing a sacred masterpiece in a museum, and encountering, say, an Italian altarpiece in the church for which it was painted. Whenever people ask me what they should not miss in Venice, I tell them to head for the magnificent Frari church in the city's San Polo district to see the Assumption of the Virgin – Titian's first major commission, and largest painting – which still hangs in situ above the high altar. To encounter this bespoke, gigantic work, with its dramatically spiralling composition, within such a grand setting is special. Titian's painting elicits an uplifting sensation within the viewer that's perhaps comparable to the effect induced by, say, the vast artificial sun installed by the Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson in Tate Modern's Turbine Hall in 2003. 'That combination of seeing objects made for a space in that space, which was also made for that purpose, can be completely dazzling and jaw-dropping,' says Campbell. The curators responsible for the National Gallery rehang have been giving thought to the question of whether museums can resurrect sacred art and restore its sense of wonder. Although, they tell me in a statement, the 'major organising theme' of the rehang is 'an overarching aesthetic and stylistic narrative', they intend to display 'sacred works in new ways to reflect their original purpose and uses', and ''bring them to life' for visitors who have no knowledge or experience of Christian art in its original context'. For example, a large painted crucifix by Segna di Bonaventura (apparently a nephew of Duccio) will be suspended from the ceiling in the Sainsbury Wing, 'to reflect the way it would have originally been positioned above the rood screen in a church'. This should prove effective, not least because the wing's interior was designed to evoke the architecture of early-Renaissance Italian churches. Other sacred works, such as the Wilton Diptych, a rare English panel painting made in London for Richard II, probably by a French artist versed in the techniques and courtly refinement of Sienese art (hence its inclusion in the Siena exhibition), will 'be displayed standing on plinths, rather than flat against the gallery walls [to emphasise] their identity as portable objects for private devotion'. Strategies such as these should help to offset the reduction of the aura a sacred artwork can suffer when stripped of its original setting. Perhaps this need not be seen as a dark age for Christian art after all. For Ayla Lepine, an art historian and theologian, and associate rector at St James's Church, Piccadilly, there has 'never been a better time to bring aspects of sacred art into public view in innovative ways, because, for lots of people, they won't necessarily know [its] story, the context'. She mentions Treasures of Heaven, an exhibition of devotional medieval art held in 2011 at the British Museum during which 'each morning, security staff were wiping kiss marks off the vitrines, because there is still a devotional aspect to the way that people engage with art'. Two years ago, the National Gallery explored the life and legacy of Saint Francis of Assisi, in a show curated by its director, Gabriele Finaldi, a Catholic. 'I don't see the public falling out of love with sacred art at all,' Lepine says. The Siena exhibition boasts many coups. For the first time since they were dismembered and dispersed during the 18th century, all surviving scenes from the back predella (the long, horizontal structure normally found at the base) of a huge, double-sided altarpiece that Duccio created for Siena Cathedral have been reunited. Known as the Maestà, this altarpiece was brought, with considerable effort and fanfare (involving a procession through the city enlivened by trumpeters), to the cathedral in 1311. The panels, which depict scenes from Christ's ministry, are an early and sophisticated feat of narrative art. 'It's not simple to do this type of project,' says Campbell. 'A lot of the things that are coming have never been outside the institution that owns them. In fact, I've just come up from installing the Tarlati altarpiece [by Pietro Lorenzetti], which has not been out of Arezzo since the 1320s.' Indeed, she adds, it has only ever previously left Santa Maria della Pieve, the church for which it was made, for restoration. Campbell attributes the success of the exhibition in New York to the 'extraordinary beauty' and 'dazzling skill' of its 'exceptional' objects, rather than their sacred content: this, she suggests, is what 'so many people really responded to'. Throughout the show, she and her co-curators emphasise various aspects of the works, including details about their manufacture, their spiritual impact and their emotional intensity. Along with mastery of narrative, the last was an important innovation of Sienese art – just look at the tender gaze shared by the Virgin and Child in Duccio's triptych in the National Gallery. Still, Campbell says, 'You can't be scared of the faith bit, because these objects were made for that purpose. Frankly, the faith is what animated so many people in society at that time.' The extraordinary thing is that – seen seven centuries after they were made, in a supposedly godless world – these sacred Sienese objects still inspire a passionate response. People, it seems, are yearning for transcendence – irrespective of their beliefs.
