Examine Giotto’s portrayal of the Virgin Mary in Madonna Enthroned with Saints and Angels, comparing his work with portrayals of the Virgin in at least one of the following artists’ works: Duccio, Martini, or Cimabue

Question

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Answer 1

1. Giotto’s Madonna Enthroned with Saints and Angels is a remarkable a shift toward naturalism. Although it retains a Byzantine hierarchy of figures—the Christ Child is almost as big as the angels, and the Virgin three or four times their size—it is spatially convincing. Light plays across their forms—note the folds and pleats of the angels’ gowns in the foreground—and substantial bodies seem to press outward from beneath the material. Giotto’s colors gradually and continuously blend from light to dark around the contours of his figures and their draperies, recreating the realistic appearance of shadows. Giotto was also a master of the human face, capable of revealing a wide range of emotion and character. The total effect is to humanize Christ, the Virgin, and the saints, to portray them as real people.
2. Duccio’s Maestà begins to leave the conventions of the Byzantine icon behind and incorporates the Gothic tendency to naturalism. Beneath the Madonna’s robes, we can sense a real body. Her knee especially asserts itself, and the drapery falling from it drops in long, gentle curves, much more natural-looking than the rigid, angular drapery of earlier, Byzantine works. She is much larger than those attending her, conforming to the hierarchies of Byzantine art.
3. One of the great innovations of Simone Martini’s Maestà is the Virgin’s crown, which signifies her status as Queen of Heaven. Surrounded by her celestial “court,” she reveals the growing influence of French courtly poetry and becomes a model for human behavior, including devotion to the right conduct of government. The Virgin and surrounding figures are depicted almost on the same scale, but Simone’s Virgin sits in a deep space of the canopy with its delicate Gothic arches behind the throne. Both of the Virgin’s knees are visible, with the Christ Child standing firmly on one of them. Her head and neck, rather than being shrouded behind an all-embracing hood, are rounded and full beneath the crown and its softly folded train, which is itself fully rounded in shadow behind her neck. Her robe is composed of rich, transparent silks, beneath which we can see her right arm. Above all, her porcelain-white skin, tinged with pink, gives her complexion a realistic tone. Blood flows through her body, rouging her cheeks, and her flesh breathes with life. She embodies, in fact, a standard of beauty absent in Western art since Classical times.
4. Although the Byzantine roots of Cimabue’s Madonna Enthroned with Angels and Prophets are clear—following closely, for instance, a Byzantine hierarchy of figures, with the Madonna larger than the figures that surround her—it is remarkable on several fronts. First, it is enormous. Standing more than 12 feet high, it seems to have begun a tradition of large-scale altarpieces. Most important are Cimabue’s concern for spatial volume and his treatment of human figures with naturalistic expressions. The throne creates a spatial setting for the scene, and the angels seem to be standing on the architectural frame; the front two clearly are. If the Virgin and Child are stock Byzantine figures, the four prophets at the base of the throne are surprisingly individualized.