August 27, 2018 Monday
Bedtime Story
Giotto is Commissioned by Scrovegni of Padua
Last night we saw that the news of Giotto’s
artistic talent was beginning to spread far and wide until it happened to reach
the pope who in turn dispatched a messenger ordering him to get some kind of
evidence (perhaps a sample painting) in order to judge for himself if what he
had heard about the young artist was true or not.
Giotto as an evidence had merely provided a
circle for the evidence.
The messenger did not take it well for he
considered it very contemptuous of Giotto for having sent him back to Pope with
merely a red circle.
When this work reached Pope and his
courtiers, explanation was sought as to how Giotto drew the circle.
When the messenger described what he had
seen (that Giotto had drawn this circle with his free hand without the use of
compass and straight edge), the Pope and his men were stunned for the circle
was perfect and they had expected it to have been constructed using geometrical
instruments.
This event established Giotto’s reputation
as the best artist among his Italian contemporaries and Cimabue from that day
on knew that he has been overtaken by his disciple.
While Cimabue’s style of painting was
primarily Byzantine with a mix of Gothic, Giotto took a sharp deviation from the
prevailing style with his human figures not elongated and uni-dimensional but
appearing solid three-dimensional, with faces and gestures in the form that
would appear on close observation.
The apparels worn by his subjects were not
some kind of formal artistic drapery but hung like natural clothes having form
and weight.
But beyond all this, he boldly uttered the
element of foreshortening in his paintings and also having the faces of the
figures turned in.
To add a greater element of naturalness he
used forced perspective devices constructing his paintings as if they were a
set on which some kind of action was being enacted.
If his paintings had in them several
figures, then they would be placed strategically such that the person seeing
them also felt he was in certain specific position and maybe even a feeling
that he was one amongst them.
If you wish to see his work, you need to go
to Padua, Italy and see the interiors of Scrovegni Chapel (named after the
affluent banker Enrico Scrovegni who commissioned the work) which today is
considered as a masterpiece of Western art.
Giotto was commissioned by Scrovegni to
paint the interiors of the chapel which would include both the walls and the ceilings.
Giotto had about 40 men along with him to
do the entire fresco painting and he calculated that it would take him 625 work
days to do the complete work.
Now I will tell you more about fresco
painting later but in fresco painting labor, a single “work day” is not your usual
diurnal day that is generally understood.
A “work day” includes the maximum painting
that requires to be done to a calculated portion before the plaster dries up
and is thus no longer “fresh”.
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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