Giotto, Virtues and Vices: Charity
Wearing a garment identical to that of Hope, Charity also possesses a similar face, which, however, is not an exact replica. Nuances seep into Giotto di Bondone ’s art and will eventually spread out into the tremendous diversification of high renaissance and following art trends. The woman humbly smiles and bends slightly backwards, producing a set of graceful and plastic movements. She balances easily standing on a few sacks of grain or flour; her posture, though firmly stable is somewhat dance-like — she seems like a buxom peasant, yet not without a characteristic elegance. The basket symmetrically counters the image of God the father in an additional symbolical correlation of fertility and abundance with divinity. Her gaze and thoughts are directed towards the deity, as far away as possible from the supplies she carries and treads upon — an indication of readiness to part with them, give them away for free, or for a spiritual retribution.
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The act of receiving a fruit via divine intervention resembles the activity of picking, and I think not incidentally so. The artist wishes to allegorically converge the two, and to transfer the notion of God the provider, the same one that believers express in daily thanks and graces, and which has been numerously narrated in biblical text, to a visual form. Moreover, the figure engages in a process, of which we witness one act; she would place the fruit into the container and continue the toil. To sum up the idea visually, Giotto fills the basket with a variety of produce, as to imply that both trees and soil are only agents of divine assistance. There is a certain cheerfulness to her countenance: it brings to mind peasant festivities associated with crops and harvesting. Her hair appears to be adorned with some sort of vegetables (artichoke maybe), a clear sign of a country festival.
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I can’t think of any religious reasons why God emerges from the right upper corner (besides that he evidently must be above the human), so I’ll try to figure out the aesthetic and the artistic ones. The natural tendency of the viewer’s eye is to progress from left to right, from the center towards the loftier parts of the piece. That way, God would become the conclusion, the final compositional point in this scene. So, when we realize from the theme that everything begins with god (thesis), we can then deduce from the composition(antithesis) that everything ends with him, too (synthesis). Another interesting point to make is that it is unclear whether God hovers above the allegory or simply stands perpendicularly her (most probably the former, as the latter is possible to envision only due to technical inaccuracies). I think that when turned by ninety degrees, the scene retains its core concept as it is summarized in the eye contact between the two actors: both faces are easily observable and only the woman appears to be hanging by the container. But, perhaps, even that anomaly can be adequately interpreted.
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This entry was posted on Saturday, November 10th, 2007 at 6:52 pm and is filed under Giotto, Religious, Renaissance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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