Giotto the Painter. Volume 1: Life

Giotto (1334) is the first European artist about whom it is possible to write following the schema of life and work. The situation of the sources, however, is complicated: On Giottos life, there are on the one hand biographical accounts from the mid-fourteenth century onwards that responded to various ideological requirements (patriotism, humanism, Renaissance ideology, cult of the artist); on the other, there is extensive documentary material from Giottos lifetime, which seems to reflect less the biography of an artist than that of a bourgeois businessman resolutely climbing the social ladder. The present volume focuses on this second aspect of the Giotto figures double life relating it to the form of existence of the pre-modern artist.