Ooooh Shiny! - Advent Calendar

The meeting of Joachim and Anna at the Golden Gate.

Giotto di Bondone

c.1303-10

From a cycle of frescoes in the Arena Chapel, Padua.


Bigger version here


The fresco is slightly curved becuase of its location on the wall.

Giotto, who is sometimes known as the father of Renaissance painting (thanks to Vasari and his LIES unique method of perceiving the past), utterly rocked. And the Arena Chapel in Padua, decorated for Enrico Scrovegni, is about his most famous work.

Giotto, you see, broke from an essentially Byzantine tradition in Christian art whereby a) figures are elongated and depicted as quite ethereal, and b) backgrounds are gold. Giotto's bright blue Italian skies intrigued later artists and art critics because of their realism compared with the traditional use of gold leaf in other paintings. Not that Giotto abandoned gold completely - there's a lot of it used in haloes and to accent architectural details - but his approach was notably different to that of his contemporaries.

In the Meeting at the Golden Gate, Joachim and Anna - Mary's parents - are reunited after a long separation. They thought that God had deserted them, as they were never able to have children, but an angel arrived and told them otherwise, instructing them to meet at the Golden Gate in Jerusalem.

The legend of Joachim and Anna was intrinsic to the fourteenth and fifteenth century Life of the Virgin (a cycle of images protraying the life of Mary). It emphasised the immaculate nature of Mary herself, born of God's will to a couple who believed themselves, in old age, to be destined never to have children. Although Mary is not born of a virgin (it's implied that Joachim and Anna have tried their level best to have kids), it's the next best thing.

Things to look out for in Giotto's work include his modelling of light and shade, which is generally considered to be more sophisticated (as in, more realistic - I think you can guess what aesthetic values these scholars had) than the work of his contemporaries. His ability to convey emotion is also very highly regarded.

Anyway, I've gone on for long enough about this work. Giottot rocks, nuff said.