Giotto, Dreaming the Renaissance | Giotto e il sogno del Rinascimento
Director | Mario Martone
Presented by ISTITUTO ITALIANO DI CULTURA, SYDNEY
This beautiful documentary recounts how, in the fourteenth century, the world of art was revolutionised by the arrival in Padova of the artist and architect, Giotto Di Bondone.
2022 | 94 mins | Italy | Documentary | Italian with English subtitles
The documentary recounts the great development of 14th-century painting in Veneto that began with Giotto’s arrival in Padua. At a time when the great Signorias and Maritime Republics dominated the Italian territory, artists were called upon by the powerful to decorate palaces and churches as testimony to their influence. The Carraresi family, at that time at odds with the Serenissima Republic of Venice, initiated a policy of culture. More and better than other important Signorie of the 14th century, they moved in a cosmopolitan context, forging relations with the major European courts. They hired the leading artists of the 14th century into their service for self-celebratory purposes and modelled the city in their image and likeness, originating the Urbs Picta.
When Giotto died in 1337 at around the age of 70 (his year of birth is unclear), he was given a ceremonious state funeral in Florence, the first time such an honor was bestowed upon an artist. In his lengthy career he worked across media and subjects, creating large mosaics, altarpieces, painted crucifixes, portraits, and frescoes. There still isn’t scholarly consensus about what works can be firmly attributed to him, although there is widespread agreement that he painted the Arena Chapel frescoes in Padua, the Bardi Chapel frescoes in Santa Croce, and the Ognissanti Madonna.
A documentary that maps a multitude of things: art history, a city, history, and has the ambition to reach all audiences from the curiosity of studnets, the interest of amateurs and to pique the experts.
Francesco Costantini, Cinematographe.it
The Guardian
GIOTTO
Giotto is hailed as the father of the Italian Renaissance, and his name is used to brand colorful markers for emerging (child-aged) artists to this day. He was fêted even in his lifetime. Humanist writer Giovanni Boccaccio, a contemporary of Giotto, wrote in his Decameron (1353) that “so faithful did he remain to nature . . . that whatever he depicted had the appearance, not of a reproduction, but of the thing itself.” Giotto’s reputation lived on, with sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti writing around 1450 that “Giotto saw in art what others did not put into it. He brought forth naturalistic art and gracefulness.”