Italian Painter Buried 700 Years After Death

V I E N N A, Austria , Jan. 8, 2001 -- The great Italian master painter Giotto has been finally laid to rest, 664 years after he died. Or has he?

Cardinal Silvano Piovanelli, Archbishop of Florence, said mass today in Florence’s Cathedral, for the peace of the soul of pre-Renaissance painter Giotto on the anniversary of his death in 1337.

Immediately afterward, he presided over the reburial of three skeletons found in one of the tombs excavated there in the early ’70s, in the church of Santa Maria Del Flore, the foundation of which dates back to 760 A.D. But he could not lay to rest the academic spat that rages over whether one of those skeletons could have been that of Giotto himself.

The church has hedged its bets by describing them as the “presumed remains” of the renowned painter whose life is almost as much of a mystery as his final resting-place — most of whose once world-famous works of art have been destroyed over time.

The claim to have identified the bones as Giotto’s were originally made by Stefano Sieni, professor of anthropology, and Francesco Mallegni, a paleontology professor, from Pisa and Palermo, respectively.

The church was delighted to have found the lost grave and remains — until American Archaeology Professor Franklin Toker, who teaches art history at the University of Pittsburgh, weighed in with a devastating critique.

Wrong Bones

“Sieni has chosen the wrong side of S. Maria del Flore, the wrong end of the 14th century, and the wrong notion of scientific method for his wrongheaded hypothesis,” he concluded.

Toker spells out in closely documented argument that Giotto’s original grave was probably on the other side of the church from where the skeletons were found. He cites as his source Giorgio Vasari, a Renaissance artist and writer who published his Life of Giotto, the first of his famous artists’ biographies, in 1550. Vasari describes the location of a marble slab “where his body lies buried.” But since that vital phrase disappeared in the 1568 edition, even that is not completely assured. In addition, says Toker, coins found in the grave date all three skeletons at least 40 years later than Giotto’s purported date of death in 1337.

His critique is scathing about attempts to reconstruct a face from one of the jawbones and match it to a reputed self-portrait of Giotto, said to be visible on one of his frescoes — wall paintings on plaster — in Padua’s Scrovegni Chapel, Giotto’s most famous surviving work. It was not a self-portrait, Toker claims. As for matching it to the face on the wall-cenotaph commemorating Giotto in the same church, that was made in 1490 by an artist who had no portrait of Giotto to copy.

Toker also makes mincemeat of the pathology that claims to establish the skeleton in question is indeed that of Giotto.

“It is astonishing that remains which in 1973 and 1974 were reported as totally generic are now reinterpreted as showing us a person who was robust, ugly, talked a lot, kept gazing skywards, injured himself on a scaffold, and kept nibbling on a paintbrush containing supposed paint components of arsenic, manganese, iron, lead, aluminum, copper and zinc. All this suggests that the poor inhabitant of tomb 78 was not merely nibbling on his paintbrush but wolfing his paints down.”

So if it the skeleton isn’t Giotto, then where is he? Perhaps moldering on some garbage dump if Toker’s suspicions are correct. There were, he says, 10 14th-century graves along the north wall of the cathedral, all of them close to the original location of Giotto’s wall-cenotaph and the site of the grave given by Giorgio Vasari.

“Any one of these could have been the tomb of Giotto, but we will never know for sure because Guido Morozzi, then-head of the Historic Monuments Commission of Florence, ordered the workmen to destroy these tombs early on in the excavation,” back in the late 1960s when renovations were being done.

Toker had appealed to Cardinal Piovanelli not to “grace with your presence the burlesque ceremony of honoring the bones of some fat butcher.” The Cardinal took the middle road, blessing the bones but stopping short of identifying them definitely as Giotto’s.

Mysteries of the Master

The row about his “presumed remains” seems fitting for an artist whose whole life is surrounded in mystery and speculation. Even his 1267 date of birth is contested. Art historians are engaged in ongoing wrangles about what he did or did not paint.

His early work, also disputed, was destroyed by an earthquake in Assisi. Only fragments survive of frescoes in the San Giovanni Laterano church in Rome. His Ravenna frescoes are all lost, as are those in the Church of St. Anthony and the regional palace in Padua, and those in Nice. He only laid the foundations of the bell tower named after him in Florence.

However, the Frescoe cycle in the Scrovegni chapel in Padua survives in significant glory, and is the primary example of Giotto’s work, with its hitherto-unkown naturalism and storytelling technique.

Giotto’s fame rests on what was seen then as a revolution in style. Fresco painting before his time has been described as “a puppet show,” a wooden depiction of biblical scenes sticking strictly to long-established traditions. Giotto was believed to be the first who made those figures come to life and tell a story.

Or was he? Only last September another fresco in the same living style was found in the south of Italy and is being attributed to Petro Cavallini, a painter who pre-dates him. The art historians are at loggerheads about that attribution too.

What is not in dispute is the fact that Giotto was Western Art’s first undisputed superstar. He was mentioned in Dante’s Inferno, and in the works of other famous poets of the time, and was the first artist ever to be mentioned in a world chronicle while still alive.

Honor Due

Giotto’s wall-cenotaph is being returned to the place it originally occupied, on the north side of the Santa Reparta chapel. Jan. 8 will be respected as his memorial day, with services in his honor.

Does it matter if the bones beneath the chapel floor are not those of the man himself? There are more “true relics of the Holy Cross” in churches around the world to fill a forest, more digits of some favored saints than their whole village could have possessed set in gold and silver. This does not stop the faithful worshipping what they represent.

The church is pragmatic about this phenomenon. It is the symbol that matters, they say. And so it is with Giotto. The bones of Italian painting’s founding father may have disappeared, along with most of his work, but his legacy surely lives on.