The disastrous earthquake in Umbria at the end of September seemed to have destroyed one of the most precious and important works of art in the world: the cycle of frescos depicting the life of St Francis, in the Upper Basilica in Assisi. Television pictures from inside the Basilica looked awful: dust, rubble, shards of shattered plaster.
A 13th century painting by Cimabue on the ceiling was pulverised, and the bell tower was left in imminent danger of collapse, but the quake miraculously spared the cycle of frescos on the walls of the Upper Basilica. Thousands of people still shivering in tents and temporary accomodation on the hillsides of Umbria are understandably resentful at the attention lavished by the Italian government and the world's media on the fate of the frescos. But the paintings in the Upper Basilica occupy a unique place in the history of art. Painted in about 1300, they are traditionally assumed to be the work of the Florentine painter Giotto, who broke away from the Byzantine tradition of stiff, frozen figures to create naturalistic images of people, buildings and objects; a completely new style of realistic representation which would dominate western art for the next 600 years.
Giotto's discovery of how to create the illusion of three dimensions on a flat surface is a pretty familiar story. At least it ought to be. It has been around for over 400 years; ever since Giorgio Vasari published his Lives of the Artists in 1550. Vasari was a terrible painter but an evocative art historian. His account of how Giotto single-handedly started the Renaissance has dominated subsequent studies of that epoch.
Vasari is followed, more or less exactly, by two highly influential art historians whose writings inspired countless trips and tour guide talks in Italy. "For Giotto to break away from Byzantine painting and evolve this solid, space-conscious style was one of those feats of inspired originality that have occurred only two or three times in the history of art," wrote Kenneth Clark in Civilisation. Ernst Gombrich noted the same in The Story of Art, still a standard textbook for first year art history students: Giotto was "the genius who broke the spell" of the "frozen solemnity of Byzantine painting... Nothing like it had been done for a thousand years."
These judgements could almost have been written by Vasari, so completely are they based on his version of events (which remains the standard one). But earlier this year Bruno Zanardi, an Italian picture restorer, published Il cantiere di Giotto: a detailed account of Giotto's Assisi cycle. Zanardi says Giotto did not paint it. Three different "masters" worked on the cycle-none of them Florentine; they were all from Rome, and one Pietro Cavallini was responsible for the largest segment. He was active between 1270 and 1320 and did not like wearing a hat. That is about all that is known about him.
Giotto's authorship of the Assisi cycle has been questioned before, but never in Italy and never in such detail. And no one has ever maintained that Cavallini-known, if at all, for a series of mosaics in the church of St Maria in Trastevere, Rome-was the cycle's principal artist. Cavallini is not a "name," and mosaic is not a medium which features in the story of how western artists came to create realistic representations. Vasari regarded mosaic as Byzantine and backward, irrelevant to the development of painting. Subsequent art historians have followed him. Vasari says hardly anything about Cavallini, neither does Gombrich or Clark. Yet if Zanardi is right, Cavallini is one of the greatest figures in western art; and the 400-year-old orthodoxy on how the Renaissance developed is wrong.
Is Zanardi right? He spent ten years working on the frescos and is certainly being taken seriously in Italy, where questioning Giotto's authorship of the Assisi cycle is comparable to asserting that the Virgin Mary was not a virgin. Federico Zeri, Italy's most distinguished art historian, has come out in vociferous support of Zanardi's claims. He believes that Zanardi has "settled the question."
Zanardi reaches his conclusions by exhaustive analysis of the techniques and materials used to construct the Assisi cycle. Whereas traditional art history determines questions of attribution on the basis of aesthetic style, Zanardi examines how the painting was made: the chemical composition of the paints, the method used by the head of a workshop to impose his style on his assistants, and the precise way in which he made brush strokes.
The Assisi cycle comprises 28 scenes stretching down both sides of the Basilica's long nave-a lot of wall to cover. Fresco involves painting on wet plaster. Because it dries within 24 hours, you can only apply as much plaster as you can paint in one day. So a completed fresco is a series of chunks of plaster, each a day's work. By studying the joins between the plastering, Zanardi discovered that the 28-scene cycle had been painted in 546 separate daily chunks.
With several hundred square metres to paint, the biggest problem was to standardise output. Because nothing could be changed once the plaster had dried, 13th and 14th century painters had to be very careful to ensure that the size and style of their figures were consistent. Zanardi maintains that to solve this problem, mediaeval painters found a simple solution: they used tracing paper. The master of a workshop would decide on a figure to be used as a template, known as a patrono. Assistants then traced it on to the wall wherever a figure of the appropriate size was needed. By altering details of face and hair, this standardised outline could serve as a basis for any number of different characters. Zanardi claims to have identified the same template used in figures as diverse as a monk and a young woman.
Zanardi argues that the templates are a critical clue to the authorship of the Assisi cycle: each workshop had its own unique style of template. He claims to have identified three template "signatures" in the cycle. This shows that it could not have been created by a single genius. At least three different masters had to be involved in creating the frescos.
Not everyone is convinced by this part of the argument. John White, former art history professor at University College London, believes that it is "a hypothesis in search of evidence. But there isn't any. There is not a single contemporary reference to patroni. Yes, they are mentioned by Dionysus of Furna. But he's writing two centuries later. It is not acceptable historical practice to project back 200 years." White made a close study of another fresco cycle where Zanardi claims to have identified the use of templates: the paintings in the chapel of the Sancta Sanctorum in Rome, completed in 1280, about 20 years before the Assisi frescos. He believes that "there may be some similarities between the figures and pieces of drapery, which Zanardi says come from a single patrono, but none of them are identical."
Zanardi thinks that such criticism misunderstands the role of patroni. "Of course the figures which derive from a single patrono are not identical. Patroni ensure that figures have the same scale and proportion, not that every figure looks exactly the same."
But patroni are only part of Zanardi's thesis. His claims relating to the varying chemical composition of the paints used in the cycle are trickier for sceptics to argue with. Creating homogeneous colours was a serious problem for mediaeval fresco painters. In their pots all paints looked the same: a colourless liquid. Only when the paints dried did their colours become evident. Small variations in the preparation could lead to big differences in what appeared on the frescoed wall. If a member of a workshop was to be sure that he was painting the same colours as his colleagues, he had to follow rigidly the formula for mixing, set down by his particular master. Otherwise the fresco would end up as a series of clashing blotches.
Examination of the paints used for the flesh tones on faces in the Assisi cycle showed Zanardi that three distinct formulae were used-all from Roman workshops. Zanardi believes that the composition of the paints establishes something else: of the three masters employed on the cycle, the principal artist-the man who painted most of the cycle's famous scenes such as St Francis Preaching to the Birds-was Pietro Cavallini. The composition of paints employed in these scenes is very similar to that in a fresco in the church of St Cecilia in Rome painted by Cavallini.
Zanardi also compared the way brush strokes are used in the Assisi cycle with those in the St Cecilia fresco. To Zanardi, they are identical. "They are indeed very similar," says Julian Gardner, professor of art history at Warwick University. "And quite different from anything known to be by Giotto. I am not sure about his argument on the composition of paints-there are regional differences, I agree, and these are enough to establish the presence of Roman, rather than Florentine, artists. I doubt they are specific enough to guarantee the presence of a particular workshop, as Zanardi claims. But the argument on the brush strokes is powerful evidence that the frescos were not painted by Giotto. It also makes one think that he has a point about Cavallini."
Zanardi may or may not succeed in persuading his colleagues that Cavallini painted the Assisi cycle. In a sense, it does not matter. The wider point-that the source of Renaissance art has been misunderstood-does not depend on whether Cavallini was the main artist. It requires only that the artists who painted the cycle were from Rome, not Florence. It is much easier to persuade experts to accept that point. Indeed, John White himself has argued for this on stylistic grounds. Zanardi's analysis of the materials places the thesis on a firmer footing. And if the Renaissance depended on rediscovering the artistic skills of antiquity, then Rome with its abundance of classical remains was the natural location for it.
So: out with Giotto as the man who started the Renaissance; in with a series of anonymous Roman artists? "Giotto was obviously a supreme genius," stresses Zanardi. "There can be no doubt at all about that. But the question is wrongly posed. It assumes that there was an artist, or a group of them, who were solely responsible for the development towards greater realism. That is not so. It was actually the Church itself, the patron, that was pushing for it. The artists attempted to comply with that demand. You should not forget that fresco painting was a very low status occupation. It was a job where you tried to get everything done as quickly and efficiently as possible."
Zanardi's re-reading of art history goes further: "The history of western art, following Vasari, is told in terms of painting. But this creates the misconception that every artistic advance happened first in fresco. This is not true. Mosaic was preferred as a form; fresco is what you got if you couldn't afford a mosaic." To confirm this, Zanardi says one should take a closer look at Cavallini's mosaics in Rome, created a few years earlier than the frescos in Assisi. They have all the essential elements of "realism": solid, weighty figures, situated in three-dimensional space. They depict intimate, domestic scenes, rather than the monumental, hieratic compositions characteristic of Byzantine-influenced mediaeval art. The same break with tradition can be seen in Filippo Rusuti's and Jacopo Torriti's mosaics in St Maria Maggiore: the elements of perspective are there, quite as elaborate as in the Assisi cycle.
Today, Rusuti and Torriti are as obscure as Cavallini. In the late 13th century, they were among the most celebrated artists of the age. Indeed, Zanardi believes that Rusuti and Torriti are the most likely candidates as the two other masters who worked on the St Francis cycle in Assisi. But they have been written out of the history of art because they did not fit into Vasari's story. Vasari, a Tuscan, devoted his Lives of the Artists to proving the superiority of Tuscan artists, from Giotto to Michelangelo. Had Vasari been a Roman, our history of art would have been radically different. "It would also have been different if you could buy and sell mosaics," adds Zanardi. "But you can't, because they are attached to walls." In the 19th century, when art history began as an academic subject, money could be made out of dealing in Renaissance paintings. Attributing a painting to a famous artist makes a great difference to its value. "This led art historians to scrutinise fresco, the earliest form of painting to survive, but mosaics were not thought to help you attribute a painting to a particular artist, so they were ignored. So were the artists-such as Cavallini-who produced them."
Another factor explains these artists' obscurity: most of their work has literally disappeared. Rome's old churches were drastically altered in the 16th and 17th centuries, which destroyed most of the frescos and mosaics of the 13th century. Students who want to see the roots of realistic art can still make a pilgrimage to Rome and crane their necks at the badly lit mosaics in St Maria Maggiore and St Maria in Trastevere. It is not an alternative to seeing Assisi. But while the Basilica is closed, and the rubble is cleared, it may be the next best thing.
