GE’s ‘Oil and Gas University’ decided to run a “second wave” instructional program this year, similar in all respects to the one given in early Spring – and so I was very fortunate to be able to come back and visit Florence again in September. There were 29 participants from 19 different countries in this program – with a particularly large contingent from the UAE. It seems that climate change is increasingly being recognized as a crucially important topic of concern for energy firms – and I obviously hope that such an increased instructional pace continues!

Every tourist in Italy (like me) has been affected in some way – whether they realize it or not – by the views of the Victorian-era art critic, travel writer, Oxford don, and all-around polymath John Ruskin. He wrote volumes and volumes about Italian cities and art, and his thinking has now permeated the very way we consider and appreciate culture in that part of the world. His 1881 book Mornings in Florence is a well-known example (and is available free on Kindle). That book outlines six artistic tours, beginning with a visit to Santa Croce, and the very first sentence of his very first tour reads:

If there is one artist, more than another, whose work it is desirable that you should examine in Florence, supposing that you care for old art at all, it is Giotto.

Giotto at the Uffizi

Giotto di Bondone was a painter and architect who is usually considered the first of the great Italian artists that brought about an Italian Renaissance. He was favorably mentioned in Dante’s Divine Comedy, and it is known that Michelangelo closely studied his frescoes. One of his principal architectural works was the bell tower (the campanile) immediately adjacent to the famed Duomo….. and his statue now stands in a place of honor outside the Uffizi. And so, on this visit… Giotto it was.

Following Ruskin’s advice, I headed to Santa Croce on the first morning of my Florence trip – although admittedly I did not “rise with the sun” to do so (staying instead at the hotel for a great Italian breakfast!); nor did I follow his recommendation to take along my opera glasses. But it was a rewarding trip nonetheless, and the Bardi and Peruzzi Chapels immediately to the right of the main altar are particularly noteworthy. Giotto’s work represented a significant shift, away from the previous icon-oriented Byzantine period with its symbolism and abstract representation of religious subjects, towards one that was much more naturalistic, with more realistic representations of physical space. One of Michelangelo’s studies of Giotto’s Peruzzi Chapel work still survives, and while Giotto’s knowledge of anatomy certainly didn’t match that of his disciple — how many artists would?? – he certainly laid down a path followed by his talented successor. His work on the campanile came in the latter stages of his life, and he didn’t live to see it finished…. but I found the representations of physical space in that work very, very real as well. [And yes, I’m talking about the 414 steps I climbed to reach its top!]

Giotto’s Campanile

Despite the beauty he created, it seems that Giotto doesn’t always get the respect he deserves. There’s a wonderfully funny scene early in E.M. Forster’s 1908 novel A Room with a View (in the chapter entitled “In Santa Croce with No Baedecker”) where the young Lucy – alone at first – worried that she wouldn’t be able to know which works of art were really beautiful, the ones “most praised by Mr. Ruskin.” Ultimately led to the Giotto frescoes in the Peruzzi Chapel by Mr. Emerson (a young gentleman staying at the same pensione), they listened to a somber lecturer discussing Giotto’s technique. But the lecturer was soon interrupted, “in a voice much too loud for a church,” by Mr. Emerson’s irascible father: “Look at that fat man in blue! He must weigh as much as I do, and he is shooting into the sky like an air balloon.” [his somehat uncouth critique of Giotto’s “Ascension of St. John.”]

On a more personal level, the statue at Uffizi hints that Giotto himself was not the most handsome of men, and apparently his children were quite plain as well. There is a story that Dante once asked him how a person who created such beauty could have sired such children. His response: “I made them in the dark.”