Key Monuments of Fourteenth-Century Painting

The key monuments of fourteenth-century Italy begin with Giotto and the shift from Cimabue's Late Byzantine style to Early Renaissance style. Vasari describes Cimabue as the last great Byzantine artist, who occupied a transitional role between the "dark" past and the "enlightenment" of the Renaissance. A comparison of two monumental paintings, the Madonna Enthroned, by Cimabue and Giotto will serve to highlight the latter's departure from Byzantine tradition. Cimabue's Byzantine-style throne rises in the picture space, elevating Mary the material world of the viewer. The iconography of Giotto's Madonna Enthroned is similar to Cimabue's, but the treatment of form and space is more sculptural. Although the persistence of such conventions would have facilitated worshipers' reading of the imagery, Giotto added iconographic elements that reinforce his formal innovations. Duccio's Christ is more babylike than Cimabue's—with rolls of fat around his wrists and ankles and a chubby face—but less so than Giotto's.