13th to 14th C Perspective St Francis Cimabue and Giotto cc

So, we're going to take a look at Saint Francis and we're going to relate Saint Francis of Assisi to the actual the artwork of the time and the development of linear perspective because I think a lot of the stuff that we're going to be talking about is really about personal perspective and how it relates to linear perspective and also to humanism. So, we start first by looking at a painting that's done in the Greek manner and this is sometimes you'll see it in your art history and Saint Francis is one of the first great apostolic saints of the Italian Catholic tradition and what I want to start first with is describing what that means because later on when you study the Reformation it's going to be really important. Previous to this time, it was actually considered heretical, meaning that you were wrong or you got something wrong if you had a direct experience of God and you had a vision of God and it isn't until Saint Francis that that kind of thing is accepted and they actually take a look at Saint Francis and his life and he has several visions in which he encounters God or a messenger from God and he takes this to heart and he's kind of in the footsteps prefiguring some of the things that Erasmus of Rotterdam will believe, that you actually have to be apostolic, means basically following in the footsteps of Jesus as one of the apostles would do. So, we look at this portrait and we see that it's an altarpiece and it's very stiff, it's very doll-like, the figures are unrealistic, the scenes that we see surrounding, flanking on the left and the right hand sides of Saint Francis who's in the center of the altarpiece are basically unrealistic and there isn't a creation of deep space. It's more like a cartoon that's meant to clearly portray some of the ideas that we are exploring about his life and times and this was painted in 1235, so this is about 70 years before Giotto that we're going to be studying a little bit more in depth and his paintings of Saint Francis. Now, the medium that this was painted in is tempera paint and it's on a wooden panel, so that's another thing. If you were to look closely at this, you'd see that most of the modeling or the value transitions would have actually been accomplished by a series of cross hatches and sort of lines that add up to showing that the form's turning over and creating some sort of shading, but yet we don't really have real shading in this and we're not sure where the light source is. I want you to also notice that Francis is kind of floating, almost as if he is not tethered to the ground and there's no sense of gravity or any sense of real understanding of anatomy in this painting. Now, that's all going to change when we look at Giotto in a minute or two. The main ideas about Francis as being the turning point in some ways that lead, I believe, to the Florentine Renaissance is that Francis has a direct experience of God and chooses to model his life as if he was following directly the lessons that Jesus had taught. So, he starts out, he's the son of a wealthy cloth merchant, and at one point he's actually taken prisoner when his town of Assisi has a battle with a neighboring town, and while he's imprisoned, he actually has some visions. He also has visions later on in which a crucifix speaks to him and basically says that, uh, my house is in ruins, you need to go repair it, Francis. And the events that happen after that are actually set up almost like a comic strip around Francis in this altarpiece. We see at one, uh, in one image that he's actually receiving something called the stigmata. So, if you look closely at this picture, you can actually see that Francis has this wound in his hand and he's receiving this stigmata. In the upper left-hand corner, you can actually see a serif is actually delivering a sort of laser beam to his hands in which he is, uh, receiving the, uh, the wounds in his hands and his feet, and that's also an emulation of Jesus. At one point, he is on his way home, uh, to his father's house and he gives away all of his earthly goods, his cloaks, his clothing. We also see that depicted here. At one point, St. Francis is returning home, and as he's returning home, he actually gives away all of his worldly goods in emulation of Jesus, so that he also doesn't believe in worldly wealth. And, in fact, another thing that he does, which we're going to look at in a little bit more detail in one of the frescoes by Giotto, is he actually gives away all of his father's stuff, all of the, uh, the, uh, clothing and stuff like that from his father's warehouse, and he shows up in town, uh, naked, and he gets clothes. Now, the interesting thing about all of this stuff is Francis is, first of all, he's taking the teachings of Jesus personally, and he's going to emulate the life and times of Jesus. He's going to sort of say to himself, what would Jesus do? The second thing is the church itself doesn't know what to do with Francis, because he is kind of, um, he's a mystic. He has a direct experience of God and he has visions, so instead of making him a martyr or branding him a heretic, they do something different. They actually ask Francis to start his own order called the Franciscan order, which is a little bit different from the Dominican order, and it's a monastic order in which they believe in poverty, chastity, and obedience, and if you look, that the Franciscan order wears rope belts, where the Dominican order would actually have worn leather belts, and they also, the Franciscan order, either wear sandals or goes about barefoot, so the main tenets of the Franciscan order are poverty, chastity, and obedience, which is a bit different, actually, from the Dominican order that has been founded before it, where the monks are fairly wealthy and they live fairly well. So, the main points in showing you this is, this is at the end of the sort of Byzantine or Greek manor style, it's actually during the Italian Gothic, and they're depicting this saint who comes from actually Italy, and they are showing you that you can live a life in emulation of the life of Jesus, and this is clearly a humanistic kind of reference or perspective. Now, by about 1230, Francis was canonized, which means he was made a saint, and shortly thereafter, in the town of Assisi, they constructed a church, and the church is built into a hill that has an upper and lower part to it, and the church was dedicated to Saint Francis, and the two artists who decorated the majority of the church are Cimabue and his student Giotto, and this is at Assisi. So, we're going to take a look at some of the frescoes in the church, and we're going to start first here in this sort of fresco cycle in the bottom of the church, and we're going to take a look at one of Cimabue's frescoes that depict Saint Francis. You can see in Cimabue's fresco that he is actually showing Francis. Francis looks a little angry here. He's a little stiff, and if you recall the altar paintings that we looked at by Cimabue of Mary and Jesus, you can actually see that this follows in that same style, the same schema. The figures are kind of doll-like. They're not really regarding Mary or Jesus, and they're looking almost straight at the viewer and kind of voguing in these various poses, and so Cimabue is still painting in this sort of a Greek manner, a Gothic manner, and he's really evolved into the style that we're going to see later on that comes with Giotto, his student, who surpasses him in a lot of style and illusionism, which will also relate really to some of the ideas of Franciscan teachings. Giotto is given the job of painting the upper church, and he paints these in fresco, and so I think it's important to analyze what fresco is and take a look at this painting and discuss some of the components of it in order to understand how fresco works. Starting first with fresco is an extremely durable medium, and it was used all the way back in ancient Greece and ancient Rome, and this is a cross-section of a wall to show you how fresco works, and the wall is basically made out of stone or brick, and then a layer of rough plaster called the arriccio is placed on the wall, and a drawing is placed on top of that called the synopia or underpainting on top of the arriccio, and then what they would do is they would work in daily sections called giornata or giornato. A giornata is basically a single section that you can complete in one day, and that would be so you do the drawing in the synopia, which is basically a brown, you plaster the section that you can paint, and you paint that in what's called Juan fresco. Juan fresco is basically the plaster is still damp, and when you paint it, you use watercolors, some mineral lime mixed in with the watercolor, and then you paint it on top of that wall while it's still damp, and it has the benefit of soaking into the wall and becoming permanently a part of the wall. Now, if you're using expensive colors, you don't want all that color soaking into the wall, so what you do is you paint the last layer, which is either applied sometimes with encaustic, which is actually wax and some pigments, or sometimes it's tempera paint, which is egg yolk or egg whites mixed in with pigments and glues the particles of pigment to the wall, and that's called secco, and secco is actually dry fresco, which means basically once the Juan fresco has dried, you go back in with a dry layer and you glue some expensive colors. You can actually see this in this painting by Giotto of Saint Francis delivering his sermon to the birds, and that's one of the famous stories that Francis basically at one point just decides that everything is invested with some kind of holy spirit or soul, and he goes out and he believes that he should even deliver sermons to the animals in the wilderness. So if you look at this painting, one of the things that you'll see in the painting is that Giotto has some sort of outlines around some of the objects. For instance, if you look at Francis's hands, he has sort of almost mittens or paddles around them. Those mittens or paddles that we're looking at are actually those daily sections or the giornata of what he's painting. Then you can also see that the blue that is painted, that's the background behind Saint Francis, is actually sort of scratched off and it looks sort of worn away, whereas a lot of the other painting is much more solid and doesn't seem to be have worn away. That's because the blue was probably made out of lapis lazuli, which is a very expensive mineral and would have been put on in the secco layer. So one of the things that Giotto has really is very accomplished at is painting fresco, and you can see that these figures have a lot of gesture, they have a lot of movement. There's even the indication of a foreground, a middle ground, and a background in his painting a little bit, and it gives you a sense of landscape. The figures have a little bit of gesture. So we're going to take a look at what makes Giotto's paintings of Francis so illusionistic and really fit in with what Francis would have liked as a painter. So here are the episodes in the life of Saint Francis that I kind of recounted to you before, and what Giotto does in these is he humanizes Saint Francis. Francis is a real person and that really fits in with Francis's theological philosophy, that one should be human, one should emulate the life of Jesus because Jesus was God made human, made flesh. And so we see here in the left-hand side, Saint Francis is giving away all of his worldly goods on the road. Now if you look closely at that painting, some of the other formal aspects of it that I think are pretty cool that will sort of explain that this is a persuasive image. It sort of appeals to your sense of rhetoric. It argues that this really did happen because it's so real looking. We have a foreground, a middle ground, and a background. We have some size-scale relationships. In the foreground, the figures are larger than the landscape in the background. They're bigger than the buildings are, and that's how we actually see things. And he almost gives you a sense of sky and horizon line in those mountains. In the image on the right-hand side, we've got a similar kind of setup where we have Saint Francis is in the town square. He's renouncing his worldly goods, and I think Giotto even had a sense of humor because if you look at the bishop's face and you look at how some of these people are dealing with Francis who threw his clothing off in town, in the main square more or less, and gave away all of his father's goods, they look very distressed. And Giotto tends to put a sense of humor in some of his stuff. You can also see that the figures in the foreground are larger, the buildings are smaller. And then up in the sky, you can actually see a hand coming down, and that's God delivering a blessing directly to Saint Francis. So, these are episodes that basically it's kind of what would Jesus do, and we could also say what would Francis do, and we can emulate what Francis did in his emulation of what Jesus would do. The next two scenes, more or less, are scenes that deal with the other miracles that Francis performed. And so, for instance, we see Francis actually throwing some demons out of the town of Arezzo, and he is on the ground there in the lower left-hand corner in the foreground praying, and we have another monk who's saying, look up in the sky, the demons are fleeing. And then as you move back into the background, you see the churches in the background, and you see in the archways of those doorways, there are smaller people. So, he's working with this sense of relative scale, that the figures in the foreground are larger, the figures in the background are smaller. And then one of the other things that you see about the buildings that we saw in the other things is they kind of have a sense of volume because he's turning some of the corners to you, and he's showing you the buildings almost in a three-quarter view, which looks a little bit like a later development during the Renaissance, and it really isn't until 1400 that this gets going, something called linear perspective and two-point linear perspective, and we're going to take a look at that in more depth. And then, of course, this next scene, we see Francis delivering his sermon to the birds, which basically he's one of these people who is so compassionate, so kind, that he even thinks that the animals are invested with a human spirit. The last scene that I want to show you relates directly to the Bonaventura Berlingheri altar that we looked at before, and it's Saint Francis receiving the stigmata. Now, the reason why I'm sort of emphasizing some of these scenes and showing you these things is you'll see a lot of paintings that have the same exact poses, and have the same exact subject matter and iconography. And this, if you were to look closely at the Bonaventura Berlingheri altar piece, you would see that there's a seraph that has multi-wings on it, and it kind of is projecting these almost like laser beams that are going down into Francis' hands and feet, where he's receiving the wounds that Christ received on the crucifix, and Francis is receiving them. In the foreground, almost unaware, you see this one figure who seems to be just reading his Bible and in a life of hermetic isolation, and Francis is receiving the Spirit of God, and that's a special honor if you receive these wounds called the stigmata. The other thing about this painting is that we can, again, see that the blue of the sky is a little scratched off, it's a little chalky, that's the secco layer, but the other areas are a little bit more defined and a little bit more solidly painted because they are the buon fresco area. So, the stigmata is just basically the wounds of Christ, and the seraph, which is a kind of angel that has multi-wings, is delivering this honorific wound to St. Francis. So, I think the next thing that's probably really important to talk about to get you to understand how Giotto is very innovative and kind of sees into the future when a system called linear perspective will be invented, Giotto is one of those stepping stones that lead to the invention of basically linear one and two-point and actually multiple-point perspectives. In most of Giotto's paintings, you see he does some things that are in the left-hand side of this diagram. He overlaps things, he diminishes the size of objects as they move into the background, and he actually, with the lines that are parallel in real life, for instance, the top and bottom of a building or the upright vertical walls, he uses something called divergent and intuitive perspective, where he decides that the backs of buildings need to narrow out a little bit. And that's intuitive, that when you look at, for instance, a road, you'll see that the points on the road seem to converge at a point on the horizon line, and they almost seem like they meet on this point on the horizon line. That point on the horizon line is called the vanishing point, and that's where it seems like the orthogonals that should be parallel to one another converge far off in the distance. Some of the other things that Giotto kind of does that's similar to Chimabue is he uses something called a vertical perspective, which means that just basically anything that's higher up in the picture plane seems to indicate that it's further in the background. And then something else that he does is something called diagonal perspective, where he kind of counts one thing off at an angle to another. The other thing that we're going to see later on, the later innovations, for instance, atmospheric perspective that we're going to study in a minute or two, and one and two point perspective, those are much later innovations. Giotto doesn't use them at all, but he kind of understands that they should exist, but he hasn't been able to figure them out yet. In one point perspective, there's this idea that's a horizon line, and then the things that are parallel, for instance, the sides of a road seem to vanish and come together at a point on the horizon where the sky meets the earth. That's called the vanishing point. And so, I want to do a sort of diagram and an explanation of what one point linear perspective is and two point linear perspective for you. So, what I wanted to do now was give you a demonstration of how one and two point perspective work, because that'll apply directly to how things happen in the Renaissance and how we think about looking at paintings. So, let's start with one point perspective. In one point perspective, you basically have this line across the picture plane that's called the horizon line, and you have a little dot in the center of that space. We'll make a little mark here, and that dot is called the vanishing point. So, this horizontal line is called the horizon line. It's where the sky meets the earth, and this dot here is the point at which things vanish, and it's the vanishing point. If you have a block or a cube sitting in front of this vanishing point, we'll draw that in for you. Basically, what happens is you get to only see the front and the top of this cube, and the way that it works with one point perspective is it's actually a sort of mathematical proportion in which things recede at a regular rate towards that vanishing point on the horizon. So, you can see it looks like a block that goes back infinitely in space. So, if you were to draw a line across the top of this that was parallel with the horizon line, and you erase the spaces in between. So, for instance, we erase this line. Doesn't it kind of look like that box makes some sort of sense? Now, what they figured out in the Renaissance is you can use actually the lines that you drew already to continue this box infinitely back into space. So, let's draw, for instance, the top of the box behind it, and you drop verticals off, draw another one behind it, and what starts to happen is you actually have a bunch of boxes that relate to one another and actually will seem to make sense in proportion to one another. If you have a box off to the side, you get to see three sides of it. So, we'll just draw another box here. The lines will recede off to the vanishing point, and it kind of makes sense then, right? So, you can actually draw an infinite amount of boxes going back in space to this vanishing point on the horizon just by duplicating a square box. Please excuse the fact that I'm doing a lot of this by freehand, and if you erase the lines, these boxes make sense in reference to one another. Now, if a box rises above the horizon line, we can do that over here. You don't get to see the top, and you don't get to see, actually, sort of like this one. You don't get to see the top of it because what goes above the horizon line is above the eye line. So, we'll continue to draw the forms off to that horizon line or that vanishing point. We can subdivide that, and we can continue to make boxes that are overlapping one another just by making lines that are supposed to be horizontal to each other or parallel to each other. Then, we'll just erase out the things that don't make sense in terms of this. So, you can't see through this box, right? Now, the other thing that they started to notice was that when they would use this system called linear perspective or one-point perspective where things would recede to one vanishing point in the background, if they shaded these things using the principles of chiaroscuro that we discussed earlier, it would seem that the things had more volume and that they would actually make more sense and that the picture plane itself was unified because the light seemed to come from the upper right-hand corner and rake across objects and cast shadows. So, it made it even more illusionistic. Later on, they actually even figured out that if they added the addition of changing the contrast from the foreground to the background, for instance, the foreground would be a higher contrast and have more darks and lights and the background would have would become lighter as it moved towards the horizon. What they figured out was this was called atmospheric perspective or sfumato in which the air and the vapor and the particles of water in the air interfered with the ability to see light and so things became bluer and lighter as they reach the horizon or the vanishing point on the horizon line. Figuring out size-scale relationships in inanimate objects like boxes makes a lot of sense and so Renaissance artists also figured out that they could use that same system to figure out even how tall or short people should be as they move into the background. So, for instance, you just start with two guidelines and then you draw your first figure into that guideline and then you draw another figure and you make that figure fit within that sort of those two parallel lines or seemingly parallel lines that converge on the vanishing point in the background and then you can even add one in the background. If you want to get even fancier, you can actually lighten it up as it moves back and use that sfumato to make it seem as if it even has more depth and more volume. Now, two-point perspective is a little bit different because in one-point perspective, the front of the box is parallel to the top of the picture plane or the horizon line and the sides of the front of the box are parallel to the left and right-hand sides of the picture plane. In two-point perspective, you've got a slightly different kind of notion and things become sort of weird obliques and parallelograms. So, let's start by taking a look at this. You start first by having horizon line and then you add two points on that horizon line that are vanishing points. The leading edge of the box is a vertical that's parallel with the sides, but then you draw a series of lines that lead off to the edges that lead to the first vanishing point and then to the second vanishing point and then you cross those lines by adding other verticals that stand for the backs of the box. Then again, from the corners of those boxes, you draw another series of lines that lead off to the vanishing point. Now, you can use these guidelines also to create boxes that are behind that one that are proportional to the box in front of it and recede at a sort of systematic rate and this is where the math kind of comes in, but you don't actually have to figure out with numbers. So, you draw another vertical line and you draw lines from that vertical line the same way you did with the box in the front off to the vanishing point and you can continue to do that so that you have a complete box that's behind it. And eventually what you end up having is actually an image that is a series of boxes that make sense to one another on the picture plane. Now, if you erase all of the extra lines on this, what you eventually have is two boxes that make a lot of sense without all the guidelines and it's sort of magic. In the renaissance, they thought that this was an incredible innovation and it is and all the video games you guys play use this thing. Now, what happens when the box rises above the horizon line? Well, let's take a look at that next. What you do is you draw another vertical and because it's above the horizon line, you actually don't see the top of it. So, you draw again a series of lines that go off to the two vanishing points and then vertical lines that stand for the backsides of the box and then the next thing that you do is you erase out those lines and you have three boxes on a plane that relate to one another in a system that's proportional. And if you were to add light and shadow, let's add a light source from the upper left-hand side and draw some cast shadows. What you have is a system of linear perspective combined with chiaroscuro that makes a complete illusion of a real space and it unifies the picture plane, the light and shadow the chiaroscuro does and so does the two-point linear perspective. Now that I've done that example or that demonstration of how one and two-point linear perspective work, I want to show you how much later, nearly 600 years later, in the late 1800s, early 1900s, it's just part and parcel. Everybody understands one and two-point perspective. So this painter Gustav Caillebotte is doing all those things. He's using linear perspective and you can actually see he probably has more than two points but this is considered to be two-point linear perspective. You can see the diagram here that there are two points and I've laid out the points for you and traced out the vanishing points. You can see that Caillebotte is an interesting painter because he's actually able to understand how to use one and two-point perspective in a way to even divide the picture plane in half. So for instance, we have that vanishing point that's in the center of the picture that's right behind the lamppost and it divides the background area with all of those buildings off from the foreground area on the right-hand side. One of the other things that Caillebotte does as a painter is he does something that's called using atmospheric perspective. Sometimes that's also referred to as sfumato. Atmospheric perspective and sfumato are basically the term sfumato was coined by Leonardo much later and sfumato just literally means smoke and what atmospheric perspective is, is there are layers of vapor and air and smoke that interfere with your ability to see the light that passes through it as things get further and further away from you. You can see on the horizon line, the building in the left-hand side, as things move towards the foreground, you see a lot more contrast. You see a lot more darks and absolute lights but as you move into the background, things start losing a lot of the darks. Things sort of go from a middle range of a 50% gray all the way up to a very light. The other thing that happens is that as things move away from the viewer, they sort of cool off and what I'm talking about is with the color wheel, there are some colors that are considered to be warm. For instance, red, orange and yellow are warm colors and warm browns all seem to project forward but blue colors that are associated with water are considered cool and cool colors seem to recede or move away from the viewer and artists start to understand this and they incorporate that in their use of atmospheric perspective to show that there is a space and that there's actually air and vapor coming between you and the viewer. So, we can see that the actual buildings are turning blue and gray and lighter as they move into the background. Now, Giotto has an intuitive understanding of two-point perspective but he doesn't really understand it yet. He hasn't figured out two-point perspective yet and so, if you look at this painting of him driving the demons out of Arezzo, you can see that those buildings kind of make sense. We do have the larger size of the figures and a figure scale sort of diminishing of size as it moves into the background and then the building, the orthogonals on those buildings seem to recede off to a vanishing point but it still isn't completely logical. And so, what I want to do is I want to trace out some of the lines for you. If you look at the lines on this painting, you'll see that the lines that I've traced out for you indicate that he kind of intuitively understood where all the lines should go but he hasn't really nailed it. There's no horizon line. There's no continuous line where the sky meets the earth where things are running across. So, you know, if I can be a little bit bold, I'm going to correct Giotto's painting here and show you where all of those lines should diminish to. Now, if you see, if Giotto had gotten the memo, he would have understood that what you do is you take this horizon line, you draw it across and then all the lines need to move off to that and you can see in a lot of instances, he really does kind of get it right but he hasn't quite gotten it down yet. And we're going to see by the time the 1400s come about, now Giotto's working in the early 1300s, you'll see that the artists who do that actually do understand it and they understand linear perspective very well and they improve on what Giotto does.