Cimabue and Giotto a Comparison Essay

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This, however, is not enough to claim that Cimabue's work is as three-dimensional as Giotto's. Giotto, for example, gives his characters more depth and better realism.

Giotto's Ognissanti Madonna is a tempera on wood, 325 x 204 cm. In size, which makes it slightly smaller than Cimabue's tempera on panel used on the "high altar of Santa Trinita church in Florence" (Kren, Marx "The Madonna in Majesty"), signifying that its primary purpose was devotional, abstract, and didactic. Giotto's Madonna is certainly somewhat less traditionally didactic than Cimabue's. Cimabue, after all, gives a history lesson in his icon, incorporating Old Testament figures into the story of the New Testament Christ, illustrating how the ancient prophets and patriarch pre-figured and served as the foundation for the Christ. Giotto's work, however, is more representational: It strives not to teach so much as to make the subjects come to life in a real way. In other words, Giotto's objective is to make the subjects more human and less scholastic.

The medieval world was certainly scholastic, and the Byzantine style of structure, order, symmetry, balance, and design is perfectly seen in Cimabue's Madonna. Giotto prefers to break out of this mold. His Madonna would also serve as an altarpiece, but its style effects a different tendency in thought. The central point in the picture is not the Madonna, but the Christ Child's "gesture of benediction" (Kren, Marx "Ognissanti Madonna").

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Indeed, the blessing by the Christ Child appears to transfix the angels and saints that surround Giotto's Madonna as she sits enthroned with her Child on her lap. Gold is everywhere as in Cimabue's and the Madonna dons a similarly colored dark blue cloak. Her robe underneath is much lighter and appears silkier. Everything, in fact, appears richer and more fluid in Giotto's work. He spends much more time creating a three-dimensional effect in the figures themselves, by working light colors against dark in the robes, faces, necks, arms, and hair. Giotto sacrifices the didacticism that makes Cimabue's work so powerful. But Giotto creates power in a different way -- through elegance of representation, a sense of realism and naturalism, of depth and dimension that moves this work of iconography out of the Byzantine school and into the emerging school of Renaissance work.

In conclusion, both painters begin with a similar subject. The materials, size, texture, and composition are also similar. But the overall style is different: Cimabue tends toward traditional iconographic didacticism while Giotto tends toward realism. Thus, Cimabue concentrates more on teaching a lesson through pictures, while Giotto concentrates on bringing his subject to life with greater three-dimensional effect than Cimabue's Madonna achieves.

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