About the Book

This four-volume set provides the most comprehensive collection of modern scholarly literature on the artist and his work. Assembling writings that are as disparate as they are sometimes hard to retrieve, it permits readers to consider the state of scholarship on a variety of specific problems surround Giotto's life and sheds light on larger historical issue concerning early Italian art and culture. In doing so, the series lays bare the methodological preoccupations of scholars since the nineteenth century. Above all, matters of connoisseurship and the larger question of the nature of the matter's art have governed the study of Giotto. Perhaps in part because of the intractability of the problems involved in arriving at an agreed-upon catalogue and chronology for Giotto, the Arena Chapel has served the chief means of demonstrating Giotto's pictorial subtlety, his dramatic range, and his intellectual depth. Curiously, the Arena Chapel came to be regarded as the cornerstone of Giotto's genius only in the nineteenth century. The notion of the essentially sculptural character of Giotto's art, pervasive in modern scholarship, is likewise recent, acquiring canonical status thanks to Bernard Berenson's celebration of "tactile values" in the Ognissanti Madonna.
The second volume focuses on Giotto's chief work, the cycle of murals in the Arena Chapel, Padua.