Fresco may dethrone Giotto, rewrite Renaissance history

By ALASDAIR PALMER

When art historian Tomassio Strinati stripped away an 18th-century painting of an altarcloth in the church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli in Rome, he made a sensational discovery. Underneath was a fragment of a medieval fresco.

The fresco - depicting Mary, Jesus and two saints - is in astonishingly good condition. Removing parts of the later fresco which covered the chapel walls, Strinati found several more medieval fragments. Underneath the over-painting the whole chapel may be covered with medieval wall paintings.

Even in Italy, where priceless works of art are often uncovered, 27-year-old Strinati's discovery was a surprise. The fragments found so far have been enough to cause the first tremors of what could turn out to be an earthquake in the history of art, dethroning Giotto from his position as the creator of the realistic tradition of painting in Western art and replacing him with the obscure Roman artist Pietro Cavallini.

The fragments have such a major effect because they are very similar to frescos known to be by Cavallini in the nearby church of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere. As well, the fragments in Santa Maria in Aracoeli bear an astonishing resemblance to the cycle of frescos in Assisi's basilica which depict the life of St Francis - long accredited to Giotto.

The Assisi cycle is extremely important in the history of Western art because it is regarded as the first example of naturalism between the end of antiquity and the beginning of the Renaissance. It marks the start of the tradition that dominated art until Picasso: realistic depictions of figures, arranged in perspective, standing in believable buildings and landscapes, each scene catching a moment of intense psychological drama.

The St Francis cycle, probably painted about 1300, marks a decisive break with the static visions of celestial glory - the idealised golden icons of divinity that had dominated medieval painting.

A work of such importance must have been painted by a very important artist. The Assisi cycle has traditionally been attributed to the most important medieval artist of them all, Giotto di Bondone (1266-1337), generally recognised as one of the greatest artists who has ever lived. More than this, he has been elevated to the status of solitary genius, single-handedly transforming Western art.

When Giorgio Vasari wrote one of the first histories of Italian painting, Lives of the Artists, published in 1550, it was more than 200 years after Giotto's death, but Giotto's reputation as the founder of realistic painting was by then secure.

Vasari had no doubt that Giotto was the author of the St Francis cycle. "It was Giotto alone who rescued and restored art. It was a great miracle that in so gross and incompetent an age Giotto could be inspired to such good purpose that he completely restored the art of design, of which his contemporaries knew little or nothing."

Art historians have generally followed Vasari's view. But four years ago Dr Bruno Zanardi published Il Cantiere di Giotto, a detailed study of the Assisi cycle, in which he showed that the techniques used were quite different to those thought to have been used by Giotto. He demonstrated that at least three different "masters" and their workshops must have been involved creating the cycle, all of Roman origin - and none of them Giotto. The techniques used for the central section of the cycle were identical to those used by Cavallini in The Last Judgment, a fresco in the church of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere. Zanardi drew the obvious conclusion: Cavallini was one of the most important artists in a team who created the Assisi cycle, possibly with two other equally obscure Roman artists, Filippo Rusuti and Jacopo Torriti.

Although Federico Zeri, then Italy's most celebrated art historian, insisted that Zanardi had "solved the problem of who painted the cycle in Assisi," most scholars insisted that the attribution to Cavallini was ridiculous and that only an artist as great as Giotto could have painted the Assisi cycle.

Almost nothing is known about Cavallini, who was born in the 1240s, apart from the fact that he lived to be 100 and did not like wearing a hat.

Most of his work has been destroyed in the course of seven centuries, including a fresco cycle in St Peter's and another in the church of St Paul's Outside the Walls in Rome, which burned down in 1823. His Last Judgment fresco in Santa Cecilia survives only in a mutilated form. His only work to have survived intact is a series of mosaics in the church of Santa Maria in Trastevere.



These stunning mosaics incorporate all the innovations that would be seen in Assisi - the naturalistic portrayal of figures, the creation of the illusion that they have weight and depth, and the rendering of three dimensions on a flat surface. The artist who was capable of those mosaics was certainly capable of executing the frescos in Assisi.

Those initially sceptical scholars may now have to rethink their rejection of any role for Cavallini in Assisi, because the paintings that Strinati has just uncovered in Rome provide fresh evidence that Zanardi is right. From the scaffolding in Santa Maria in Aracoeli, the similarities of technique between the St Francis cycle and the small fragments in the Roman church are immediately obvious.

The similarity is not just in the background buildings but in the flesh tones and the repeated strokes of a thin brush to build up a contoured surface. Technical similarities of that kind are telltale signs of a particular workshop.

"You have constantly to bear in mind that fresco cycles in the Middle Ages were produced not by one man but by a team," Zanardi says. Artists worked much more in the way Walt Disney produced a cartoon than in the way, say, Rembrandt painted a self-portrait. Each team had its own way of working, set by the maestro in charge.

"Between workshops you find small but perceptible differences in the way in which paint was mixed, how it was applied and how colours were built up," Zanardi says. "Giotto, for instance, used a cropped brush called a mozzetto. He splayed out the bristles so that change from one tone to another was achieved with a smoothness not found in the productions of any other workshop, certainly not in any of the paintings in the St Francis cycle in Assisi where the individual brush strokes are thin and highly visible." Just as they are in the newly-discovered frescos in Santa Maria in Aracoeli and in The Last Judgment in Santa Cecilia.

If it is proved that Cavallini painted most of of the frescos in Assisi, it may mean that the cradle of the Renaissance was not Florence, but Rome.

"It would be obvious," Zanardi says, "had not most of the works created in the last half of the 13th century in Rome been destroyed, either by natural disasters or by later popes, because we simply can't see what those artists did. The assumption has been, quite wrongly, that they didn't do anything significant. And then Vasari, who created the history of Italian art 250 years later, was a Tuscan, and dramatically overemphasised the importance of Tuscan artists such as Giotto."

Zanardi is confident that Giotto was not one of the three masters who painted the St Francis cycle in Assisi. But he is cautious about elevating Cavallini, or indeed any individual artist, to the status of "the man who started the Renaissance. Trying to do the history of art by attaching the names of individual artists to particular works is not helpful. There were thousands of artists in Italy. We know the names of about five."

Still, further work on the frescos in Santa Maria in Aracoeli should help to settle, once and for all, the question of whether the Renaissance began with the Florentine Giotto or with a group of now almost unknown Roman artists.

The evidence seems to be coming down on the side of Rome. It is not a point that will be appreciated in Florence.