ARS IMITATUR SUPERNATURAM The Relation Between Trecento Concepts of Art and Nature in Commentaries on Giotto
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2025-05-06
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Abstract
The character of the poet Giovanni Boccaccio, deeply immersed in a dream, is wandering through deserted places when he encounters a woman, who leads him to a castle. She gives him the option to pass through either a small door, which promises virtue, or a large door, which promises wealth and earthly glory. After rashly choosing the latter option, he enters a hall of gold, blue and other colours, where many personifications of deceivable earthly triumph are depicted, from Averroes to Tristan. No one, the poet believes, was ever able to depict this multiplicity of figures as described in this imaginary castle with such ingegno, with the sole exception of Giotto: only for him, part of Natura is unconcealed, as he resembles her.
However, Boccaccio does not explain exactly how Giotto resembles her in this part of the Amorosa Visione. He either seems to suggest that Nature did not conceal from Giotto a part of herself in the very act by which she "seals".2 This implies that Giotto was granted a special artistic ability, almost as if Nature herself had impressed her mark upon him, allowing him to resemble her truthfully in making his art. Or Giotto is suggested to be an active participant in capturing Nature – his artistic genius allows him to "seal" or "imprint" Nature in his paintings. It would suggest that he does not merely imitate Nature but rather confirms or solidifies her truth through his work. In his monumental Decamerone, he seems to confirm the latter interpretation:
“[…] l’altro, il cui nome fu Giotto, ebbe uno ingegno di tanta eccelenza, che niuna cosa dá la natura, madre di tutte le cose ed operatrice col continuo girar de’cieli, che egli con lo stile e con la penna e col pennello non dipignesse sí simile a quella, che non simile, anzi piú tosto dessa paresse, in tanto che molte volte nelle cose da lui fatte si truova che il visivo senso degli uomini vi prese errore, quello credende esser vero che era dipinto.” 3
Here Boccaccio provides a more efficient and empirical, but less particularized impression of the manner in which he perceives the works of the painter. Giotto, he says, had ingegno of such excellence, that it enabled him to depict with stylus, pen and brush anything that Natura presented to him, to the point of deceiving man’s visual senses, which would take the thing depicted for the thing itself. Boccaccio was not alone in praising Giotto for his supposed ability to imitate nature; other poets and historians referenced him in various contexts in this regard as well.4 How did they relate the artist to Nature while praising his ability to imitate her? And what specific abilities did they attribute to Giotto in recognizing his ability of this imitation? These questions are closely interconnected: the first defines the perceived ontological relationship between the artist and Nature, the second explores how Giotto was believed to possess knowledge of Nature. Michael Baxandall has laid a strong foundation on the humanist writing on Giotto, in Giotto and the Orators, but almost no scholar has provided such depth since. Monographs revolve around the paintings themselves; clues on their time provided their patronage, style and influence. By centralizing the writers in their intellectual context, we aim to more directly approach the perception of Giotto’s art during his time.
Boccaccio does not refer to any particular work of art by Giotto – let alone one in the real world – to both exemplify the painter’s practice and to animate the poet’s experience. Let us then seek to fill this gap and illustrate his point more concretely by examining a real work that exemplifies the connection between the conception of a painting and the way it is experienced. Throughout Italy, Giotto adorned churches with works of gold, blue and colour, presenting a multitude of figures that narrate the lives of saints, from their humble, earthly beginnings to their heavenly glory. The remarkable clarity and naturalism of these works must have been so striking as to inspire Boccaccio’s uniquely personal and specific praise. In the Stigmatization of Saint Francis (fig. 1), for example, we are able retrace these qualities on the saint, who walked the same earth as a monk not even a century before the completion of the panel. The figure, kneeling on the ground, is rendered with strong, harsh facial features, pale skin and slender fingers; he is shaped with a consistent weight and broad tonal range to indicate the solidity of his body underneath the graceful folds of his cloak. We thus realize the source for Boccaccio’s praise when we approach the Stigmatization from a standpoint that recognizes its representational adequacy. In doing this, we express the manner in which we are aware of the relation between the representation of human figures on panel and how they appear to us in the real world.5
Comparing the Stigmatization to a panel of the same subject by the Master of San Francesco Bardi (fig. 2) from half a century earlier, we observe only a few of the qualities we associated with Giotto’s work. Here the figure is represented with harsh but weak facial features, golden skin and stiff hands; the folds of his cloak seem rigid and schematized, making the body underneath stylized and construed. The figure appears flat and assembled from distinct parts, as if each visible plane or brushstroke represents a specific, tangible component of the saint. In contrast, Giotto’s Francis feels present and grounded in space, his form constructed through seamless brushstrokes that merge into a plastically unified and naturalistically convincing figure. Boccaccio’s praise of Giotto derives from this manner of looking at a painting as well. He asserts the resemblance between the painted figure and its natural referent as the result of the painter’s ability to appeal to human visual perception in a way that merges a panel painting with reality.
To praise someone who has accomplished to produce these plastic effects by applying pigments onto a panel was no strange phenomenon in the Trecento. During this period there was a growing awareness of painting beyond the mere presentation of subject matter, to prescribing the manner in which the picture is perceived. The awareness of the viewer as visual recipient, and the painter as interpreter of his own visual experience into painting, grew accordingly.6 Giotto appears to have awakened a discourse on the visual experience of his paintings by making the viewer part of what constitutes their form; it exemplifies the awareness that the presence of the viewer constitutes their legitimacy and meaningfulness.7 This would have given rise to discourse from the side of the viewer on the experience of artworks in relation to the perception of Nature.
We can note another figure in the Stigmatization, for whom the relation between the work of art and Nature will not be as straightforward to comment on. No empirical comparison can be made between this outer phenomenon and its representation, regardless of the mode and the conception of depiction, since its supernatural essence makes it unsusceptible for cognition. It is the figure of the heavenly Christ, wrapped in six angelic wings, suspended in the sky to send the stigmata to the saint, as indicated by the hatched tracing lines. Equally distinct as the other, it displays the same substance and texture in its weightless body and simplified feathers.
But would Boccaccio have been referring to an inapprehensible figure when commenting on Giotto’s ability to imitate Nature? Would he have implicitly claimed to have apprehended such a phenomenon himself, in order for him to appraise Giotto on the quality of his depiction? He has made no concrete comparison between a figure inside a picture and its counterpart in reality anywhere, only noting the semblances between the general sense of the picture and how he perceives the real world. Nonetheless, his use of “figura” and “cosa” does indicate to the appearance of individual elements inside a painting, instead of a more general sense of the painting itself. In this way, a distinction between a natural and supernatural referent within the same painting could be made – or has implicitly been made – as not to measure the painting’s general sense against a supposed referent in Nature. Boccaccio thus asserts that Giotto’s paintings appropriately depict both apprehensible and inapprehensible phenomena according to a unified standard. He is convinced that Giotto’s decision to depict a monk and a heavenly figure in the same stylistic manner is appropriate for both figures.
Indeed, there was “niuna cosa dá la Natura, madre di tutte le cose” that Giotto was not able to represent; this notion thus seems to include the supernatural. From this, we get a broadened concept of the artist as imitator of Nature, as included in this notion of Nature are phenomena, he is not even able to apprehend himself. And somehow the writers that praised Giotto this way still decided that all figures inside his paintings are represented accurately. So, we retrieve our questions, and rephrase them is this context: How did they relate the artist to Nature while praising his ability to imitate her? And what specific abilities did they attribute to Giotto in recognizing his ability of representing the supernatural? Our question stems from a somewhat naïve concept of “Nature”, which would be shaped by the concurrent intellectual tradition. Therefore, we will firstly explore the relation between art and Nature, from which we will conceptualize an epistemology on the conception of art, and on the limits of knowledge.
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