August 25, 2018 Saturday
Bedtime Story
Understanding the Style of Giotto di Bondone's Art
It is in the nature of the bedtime stories
of the storytelling chimpanzee that when certain new topic is breached upon, it
has to be elaborated and narrated.
It obviously calls for a digression but
then no true story would be worth its salt without it.
It’s the constant digressions that give the
bedtime story its true narrative power; or at least that is how the chimpanzee
would want to believe.
So it was with the subject of Byzantine art
and the icons of the Eastern Orthodox Church which was a fairly primitive kind
of religious art focusing primarily on Jesus or his mother or few of his
disciples with haloes around their heads as a mark of supernaturalism and
distinguishing them from average mortals (it would not be right to use the word
ape here for religious people stand firmly against the truth of evolution
simply because if they were to accept the evolutionary truth their entire
belief edifice would collapse).
So truth has to be sacrificed at the altar
of belief and faith.
The icons of the Eastern Orthodox Church
are very typical in nature where your visual sense will be left with the
impression (at least that what mine gave to me) that the artists have been
trying to get as real as possible yet failing in their attempts.
These art works also seem to lack both the
concept of proportions, ratio and linear perspective and that’s the reason for
considering them primitive.
In any painting where you find more than
one people, it is hard to miss that there is a complete lack of body
proportionality as the distance demands for each figure and for each location
of their presence.
Giotto di Bondone quite boldly and uniquely
took a bold break from this kind of style and subjected his own work to the
greater rigors of perspective drawing.
He is described by another Italian who
followed his steps some two hundred years later as the initiator of the “great
art of painting as we know it today, introducing the technique of drawing
accurately from life, which had been neglected for more than two hundred
years.”
Giotto was a gifted artist from the very
childhood and so I am not sure whether he actively and consciously applied the
mathematics of perspective to his paintings or sketches.
There are a great number of stories that
reveal the artistic talent of Giotto even from his early childhood days.
Giotto as a young boy was an apprentice for
one of the great Florentine painter and mosaic designer by the name of Cimabue
whose paintings are largely a reflection of the Byzantine style of art that you
find in today’s Russian Orthodox churches.
In the language of artists’ Cimabue’s style
of painting was clearly medieval (not exactly in the sense of primitive but
more with perspective to the historical time frame) largely Byzantine with a
mix of Gothic.
Medieval art, as far as the Western world
is concerned, spans a large time scale of about 1000 years originating from the
artistic heritage of the Roman Empire along with a strong influence of
Christian Iconography of Early Christian Church.
Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling
chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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