#Latest news with #frescoWall Street Journal21 hours agoGeneralWall Street JournalGiotto's ‘The Legend of St. Francis': Assisi's Devotional FrescoesWhen 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.'
Wall Street Journal21 hours agoGeneralWall Street JournalGiotto's ‘The Legend of St. Francis': Assisi's Devotional FrescoesWhen 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.'
21 hours ago
