Original subtitles

The story of art over the past 700 years is dominated by a dozen or so great artists

whose work has struck a universal chord, with Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael

as the first internationally known figures.

But the artist they saw as their father figure began his life as a humble shepherd boy,

a painter whose brush brought the Bible to life

and made art seem more substantial, more real.

His name? Giotto.

For many, the story of Western art starts here.

In 1267, Giotto de Bondone was born in Colle di Vespigiano,

a remote hamlet in the heart of the Tuscan countryside.

His father was a local shepherd, so as soon as he was old enough,

the young Giotto joined him tending the family's sheep.

The beginnings of Giotto's transformation from shepherd boy

to one of the most famous artists in Western history is shrouded in mystery.

But the most popular story says that Cimabue, the most famous Florentine artist of the day,

was wandering here in the hills and he saw the young shepherd boy sketching sheep on a flat rock.

Subsequently, he persuaded Giotto's father to let the boy come to Florence to train in his workshop.

Imagine the shock for a 12-year-old shepherd boy to find himself beginning his apprenticeship

in the hubbub of Florence.

For the population of nearly 100,000, Florence is one of the largest cities in Europe.

It was four times the size of London.

The phenomenal growth of its wool trade and banking business

established Florence as the most powerful city-state in Tuscany.

And on the back of this boom came patronage for numerous works of art

to enhance the prestige of the city.

Giotto's master, Cimabue, was the most celebrated painter of his day.

His work is spiritually moving, but remote.

His figures seem two-dimensional and static.

Cimabue was heavily influenced by stylised icon paintings, like this one,

from the Byzantine Empire, which dominated religious art during the Middle Ages.

Giotto's training probably lasted over ten years.

His first tasks would have been to grind pigments for paints

or make frames for altarpieces.

Much later, he'd have been taught to paint saints and stories

according to a very strict set of rules,

diligently copying from pattern books.

Creativity and originality were not requirements of the job.

The medieval artist was an artisan,

no different in status from a carpenter or a baker.

As a result, we don't know much about Giotto's life.

Artists were certainly not considered important enough

to warrant biographies or portraits.

The only contemporary image we have of Giotto

is one which he painted himself,

here as a member of a crowd in a fresco series.

What we do know, though,

is that Giotto was born into a profoundly changing world,

where the traditional attitudes to art, literature and even religion

were gradually being broken down.

It's a little surprising to discover

that probably the most potent place

for Christianity and religious art in the 13th century

was here in Assisi,

the little hill town in Umbria

that was the home of St Francis,

who preached a new Christian message

that empowered the poor.

And when he died here in 1226,

within two years,

the monastic order that he'd founded

began to build a monastery

with a basilica rearing up dramatically like a fortress

out of the hillside.

And towards the end of the century,

the crowning glory, the upper church,

this was the public place,

and it needed decorating.

So, the greatest artist of the region was invited,

Cimabue, along with his workshop, around 1277.

And ten years later, the young Giotto arrived.

The Franciscan complex here in Assisi

is not just a great centre for Christianity.

It was an artistic workshop,

and any artist worth his salt

came from far and wide to try and get work here.

In fact, there were workshops from Rome and Florence,

and from the local regions,

all vying with each other for domination.

There's an edge of competition,

there's a sense of tension,

of each image trying to outdo the previous one.

And so, what we get is a great monument to Western art

that survived for 700 years.

But there's also a problem.

Over the centuries, a debate has raged among art historians

about who exactly did what.

We know that Cimabue painted the apse and transepts,

and some of the ceiling.

What we're not so sure about

is the most prestigious commission,

the 28 frescoes that roll all the way around the lower walls,

telling the life of St. Francis himself.

Now, Italian art historians,

from the great Giorgio Vasari onwards, say this is Giotto.

Others, though, are not so sure.

Ultimately, it's a debate that can't be resolved.

But one thing is certain.

The main lessons and ideas that emerge

from this cycle are those developed and pushed by Giotto

for the rest of his career.

And so, I'm sure that he had some involvement.

What we see are 28 images that, in a sense,

are like a cerebral cartoon strip,

or a pictorial Bible for the illiterate,

bringing to life a story in graphic detail,

and in a way that utterly reinvigorates

the flat, stylised compositions of Byzantine art.

The great, strong idea from Giotto is the idea of space.

And here it is, writ large, in each one of these images,

where the artist paints a sense of a window, a classical window.

So it's as if we're looking into another space, another world.

Also, inside the images themselves,

he paints architectural constructions to give the figures

a sense of existing in real space.

This anticipates the great development of perspective

in the Renaissance, although it's a little bit flatter here.

The most stunning example of all this is in the very first image,

where we see a Roman temple, the Temple of Minerva, actually here in Assisi.

The realistic treatment of human figures, expressions,

and in particular of tangible spaces,

were significant developments in art,

and were to become a distinctive feature of Giotto's painting.

This move to make ideas more accessible

was also mirrored in other arts at the time,

in sculpture and in literature,

where Giotto's fellow Florentine, the poet Dante,

wrote his divine comedy, not in Latin, but in his native Tuscan tongue.

And Franciscan and Dominican friars retold the Bible

to their illiterate congregation in vernacular Italian.

Giotto's fame began to spread.

In 1300, he was summoned to Rome by the Pope Boniface VIII.

He produced a mosaic over the entrance to the old St Peter's

and decorated the balcony of the Lateran Palace.

Today, they only survive as copies.

These high-profile commissions were good for Giotto's career.

They made him quite rich,

as well as well-known to other potential patrons.

Still only in his early 30s,

Giotto returned home to Florence and set up his own workshop.

He continued to experiment, using the latest techniques in fresco painting.

Instead of working on dry plaster, as his master, Chimabue, had done,

Giotto would apply wet plaster in small areas

and put on the image quickly as it dried.

This allowed for much richer colours and was more durable.

It also meant that the artist had to work at double the speed.

Giotto's big opportunity to use this technique came in 1303,

when he was summoned to Padua

to decorate the small family chapel of a wealthy businessman.

It was a commission which would establish Giotto's reputation

over the next seven centuries.

Here, in the Arena Chapel in Padua,

are some of the most spectacular images ever painted.

Incontrovertibly by Giotto,

they're an extraordinarily ambitious cycle of 38 frescoes,

which run around the entire interior of the building.

At the top are scenes from the life of the Virgin and her parents, Joachim and Anne,

and below them are scenes from Christ's life and death.

Giotto's emphasis is on storytelling.

His paintings are human dramas.

His settings have a believable feel.

Here is one of the most dramatic moments of the Gospel.

It shows the split second after Judas has betrayed Christ with a kiss.

Soldiers have already surrounded Christ,

and amidst the chaos, Giotto's brilliant composition

focuses all our attention on the central image of two men embracing.

But what Giotto does is imbue the figure of Christ

with a real sense of emotion, a real sense of passion.

There's a panel just to the right of the crucifixion

where Christ lies in the arms of his mother.

He's dead.

His mother has a sense of real loss on her face.

Likewise, the figures that surround it convey a real sense of drama,

and suddenly it becomes clear that raw emotion

and the real essence of a story in the Bible

can be brought to life through painting.

But he does that most sensationally of all on the final image,

the image that confronts us when we leave the chapel on the west wall.

This is Giotto's Last Judgment.

In my opinion, the best Last Judgment ever painted,

apart from Michelangelo's 200 years later in the Sistine Chapel.

At the centre is Christ, throned in splendour, passing judgment.

Above him, two figures are peeling back the firmament

to reveal a sparkling new Jerusalem.

Giotto's drawing our attention to the actual process of painting as an illusion,

but he's also suggesting, through these visual sleights of hand,

that it might just be real.

Christ himself is flanked by angelic choirs and the Twelve Apostles,

but beneath him, and acting as the dividing line between heaven and hell,

is the central symbol of Christianity, the cross.

To the left lies redemption, layer upon layer,

of the Christian great and good, the devout from down the ages,

from saints and kings, to a mere artist down on the lowest level,

Giotto himself, wearing a rather jaunty hat.

And in the foreground, we see the man responsible for this whole chapel,

Enrico Scriveni, giving his chapel to the Virgin Mary.

But why?

Well, his father was a moneylender, a vice in the eyes of the church,

and Enrico himself was probably a userer too.

So this building was perhaps an act of atonement for the sins of his family.

But things get really interesting, really dramatic, and really traumatic to the right of the cross.

Because here is hell, where four tongues of flames suck nude figures down into hell.

This is the descent into depravity, where figures are pulled apart, they're falling,

they're being raped, they're being violated by demons.

And here, with this massive image of Satan, they're being devoured and excreted in a vicious cycle.

The chapel still seems visually dazzling.

In the 14th century, it must have seemed staggering.

There were critics, of course, monks from a neighbouring monastery,

who claimed that it was too ornate a display of wealth, particularly for a private commission.

But this was perhaps just a fit of jealousy, because by all other accounts,

people flocked to see it in their droves,

a religious spectacle created by the new wunderkind of Italian art.

After the success of the Scriveni Chapel, Giotto was given a prestigious commission closer to home,

in Florence, in the church of the Onisanti, or All Saints,

where he produced this large altarpiece, showing the Blessed Virgin Mary and Christ,

surrounded by saints, with an architectural construction that amplifies that sense of perspective.

Above where the altar would have been, Giotto paints two steps, mottled and marbled,

in blues and greens and reds. And that draws us up to the throne of the Virgin Mary herself.

It amplifies that sense of stepping into the picture in our minds.

And then we approach the heavenly couple, the central image of the painting itself.

And there is Christ, giving a blessing, a benediction to all who look at the work.

But we're also struck by how wonderfully real, certainly by comparison with the previous art,

this image seems. The Virgin herself, with that translucent veil, we can see the outline,

slightly centrally, of her breast. But this is the image of a fecund, nourishing mother.

But this altarpiece is now in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, next door to the work of Giotto's great teacher,

Cimabue. And you can compare a work that Cimabue did 25 years before, and you realise just how much

more intimate Giotto's work is, how more worldly, how more real and tangible. Both pictures have an

audience of figures surrounding the holy pair. Cimabue stacks them up, one on top of the other.

Giotto, however, creates more solid, sculptural beings, arranged to recede slightly, giving a sense

of perspective. At the same time, there's a real weight and monumentality to both Mary and Jesus.

And so, what Giotto manages to combine very deftly is an image of gravity and of grace.

During the next 20 years, Giotto travelled widely for work. He painted for popes, kings and noblemen,

all over the Italian peninsula, and even in France. He created an international reputation

unprecedented among artists.

Giotto had become a wealthy landowner. As well as being a major artist, he was a shrewd business

entrepreneur. One of the few surviving documents from Giotto's life tells that he used to hire out

his wool weaving loom at a very high price, a clever and apparently widespread practice to make money

without being directly guilty of the sin of money lending.

Painting, however, remained his main source of income. And back in Florence are two examples of

the artist's later commissions, here in the church of Santa Croce.

Giotto's contribution to the vast cavern of Santa Croce was very intimate. These two small family chapels.

This chapel was commissioned by the Peruzzi family. They were bankers and it was an early example of the

patronage of arts that flourished over the next two centuries. What Giotto did, in three panels on either

side, was fuse together the lives of two saints or interweave them. So on this side, we have the life of

John the Evangelist. And on this side, we have the life of John the Baptist. The Peruzzi who commissioned

the chapel was also called John, so there's a little nod to him. But John the Baptist was the patron saint of

Florence itself. What we see on the left hand side begins with Saint John having his revelations on the

island of Patmos to his ascension up to heaven in the bottom panel. But here on the right things get

really dramatic. Down here in the largest panel, closest to the audience, we see the beheading of

John the Baptist by Herod for Salome. The head of the Baptist is presented as if it's a joint of meat

to King Herod himself. Architectural shape gives us a greater sense of perspective. It also draws us in.

And if you look at the whole design, you see that Giotto lets buildings disappear where the real

architecture of the church begins to give a sense of a fragment of reality.

These frescoes are very damaged. Giotto was working with dry plaster,

probably because it was wintertime and the temperatures were too low for using the more

durable wet plaster technique.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, horrifyingly, these chapels were whitewashed. We don't really know

why anyone would do such a thing. But what we do know is when they were restored in the 20th century,

particularly here, a lot of the paint comes off. And so you get this very faded image.

Round the corner though, although the chapel is very damaged, things are slightly clearer.

In this chapel, Giotto's working again with wet plaster. It was commissioned by another banking

family, the Bardi, and Rodolto di Bardi, the man who actually commissioned Giotto to work,

is buried right underneath where I'm standing. Here though, Giotto returns to the time-honour

tradition of a life cycle of one man, exactly the same format as the Paruzzi, six panels,

but this time dedicated to the life of St. Francis of Assisi. But the climax of the whole work of the

cycle is here, closest to the viewer again, where ornament is stripped down and there's an extraordinary

range and subtlety of human emotion here. Even though most of the expression is grief, each of the

faces registers a slightly different expression. And it'd be very easy to show these as generic monks,

but Giotto doesn't do that. Each one is individualised. So we see the body of St. Francis,

but at the same time, we see the monks animatedly holding and kissing his hands and his feet,

where the stigmata were. And this draws the viewer in. What began in Assisi now reaches fruition here

in Florence, and it establishes Giotto as the visual chronicler of the life of St. Francis.

As bankers with a branch in Naples, the Bardi family were probably instrumental in Giotto's

appointment as court artist to the King of Naples. In 1330, he was given an official post for which he

received a large salary, apprentices and materials. Unfortunately, very little from this time has

survived.

The city of Florence honoured their son with the title of Magnus Magesta, or the Great Master.

His rise from shepherd boy to courtier was now complete. Giotto's personal fame had put the

painter's profession on the social map in Florence. His career proved a new departure in the way that

artists were perceived. From now on, painting was destined to be more than just a manual craft,

and the status of the artist, more than that of a mere artisan.

In 1334, Giotto was appointed master architect of the city of Florence, and oversaw the building of

walls and fortifications. He also was in charge of the most ambitious project in the city's history,

the ongoing building of the cathedral, and in particular, the campanile or bell tower, whose

foundation stone was laid in the same year. And for the next three years, Giotto made designs and

sketches and saw the slow rise of the tower, but he never saw it completed. And in January 1337, at the

age of 70, Giotto died, to be buried with an almost state-like funeral in the cathedral here.

Giotto had transformed religious art, infusing painting with a new naturalism and solidity,

and creating something of the illusion of pictorial space. It was his revolutionary

vision that laid the foundations for the next generation, the artists of the Italian Renaissance.