Early life of Giotto di Bondone
Early life of Giotto di BondoneEarly life
Much of Giotto’s biography and artistic development must be deduced from the evidence of surviving works (a large portion of which cannot be attributed to him with certainty) and stories that originate for the most part from the late 14th century on. The date of Giotto’s birth can be taken as either 1266/67 or 1276, and the 10 years’ difference is of fundamental importance in assessing his early development and is crucial to the problem of the attribution of the frescoes in the Church of San Francesco, in Assisi, which, if indeed by Giotto, are his great early works. It is known that Giotto died on Jan. 8, 1337 (1336, Old Style); this was recorded at the time in the Villani chronicle. About 1373, a rhymed version of the Villani chronicle was produced by Antonio Pucci, town crier of Florence and amateur poet, in which it is stated that Giotto was 70 when he died. This fact would imply that he was born in 1266/67, and it is clear that there was 14th-century authority for the statement (possibly Giotto’s original tombstone, now lost). But Giorgio Vasari, in his important biography (1550) of Giotto, gives 1276 as the year of Giotto’s birth, and it may be that he was copying one of the two known versions of the Libro di Antonio Billi, a 16th-century collection of notes on Florentine artists. In the Codex Petrei version, a statement that Giotto was born in 1276 at Vespignano, the son of a peasant, occurs at the very end of the “Life” and may have been added much later, even, conceivably, from Vasari. In any case, whether Vasari or “Antonio Billi” first made the statement, it cannot have the same authority as that attached to Antonio Pucci, who...
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