FLORENCE | Until the 1st.I.2001 | Giotto | Gallerie dell’accademia

“Giotto”, this name is enough to make crowds of people, from all over the world, come and wait hours to see the exposition.
Who worked to promote this event made really a good job, but the exposition is maybe a bit disappointing. Few works are on display, and the most famous paintings are missing: you are not going to see the famous Crucifix of Santa Maria Novella, or some celebrated Madonnas.
There is the first work attributed to Giotto, the spoiled Madonna of Borgo San Lorenzo, a beautiful “Madonna in Maestà” and the “Polittico di Badia”, and looking to these works you can truly understand the novelties Giotto brought in the figurative art of his time: at last Madonnas are real women, with a concrete, round, even heavy body. Jesus moves his hands to touch his mother, and comparing this figures to the ones painted by Giotto’s great teacher, Cimabue, only few years earlier, you understand the revolution brought by this Florentine painter. To the contemporaries of Giotto, his paintings seemed incredibly real, and maybe we cannot understand that, because our concept of a realistic representation is deeply influenced by photography and mass media.
A recall to present time is done by two fragments of one vault of the upper Basilica of S. Francis in Assisi, destroyed by an earthquake just three years ago. With emotion you can see this fragments, which are going to be recomposed and replaced; in this way curators come to the point of the splendid cycles of frescos in Assisi, and to the problem of attribution to Giotto.

As I said before, works on display are few and you can find many gaps in the representation of the artistic evolution of the painter; this was partly to be expected, because a temporary exposition cannot deeply analyse an artist who gave his best in frescos.
By the way you can learn a lot about Giotto and his time reading panels of explication and looking photos and reproductions of paintings. So curators give you the impression of a complete way through the work of this great painter.
I also should say that ads and posters of the exposition are nice, and you can buy a nice catalogue and fine objects expressly designed by Salvatore Ferragamo. All that gives a pleasant and attractive image to the event. So, congratulations to advertisers, promoters and organisers, even if we cannot help noticing that, in reality, the exposition is not the great event we expected.

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Simona Piselli