The Florentine painter (1266 to 1337) in whom Steiner saw a new artistic world-conception arise: the first master to give a human face the weight of a soul standing on Earth.
Giotto di Bondone is the painter with whom, in Rudolf Steiner's reading of art history, the soul of Western painting first steps down out of the golden Byzantine heaven and onto solid ground. Where Cimabue's saints hover in two dimensions, Giotto's figures stand in real space and look out with their own eyes. Steiner names him the threshold between two ages of humanity.
Giotto in Anthroposophy is the Florentine painter (1266 to 1337) whom Rudolf Steiner reads as the threshold-figure of Western art, the master with whom, in his words, an entirely new artistic world-conception arose in the West. In the lecture cycle The History of Art (GA 292, given at Dornach on 8 October 1916), Steiner places Giotto at the turning between the fourth and fifth post-Atlantean ages: where Cimabue's figures still gaze down from spheres beyond the Earth, Giotto's stand within earthly space, weighted with their own inner gravity. He is the first painter to give a face the look of a face actually seen, kindred in spirit to Francis of Assisi, whose life he painted at Assisi. The Arena Chapel frescoes at Padua, the cycle made for Enrico Scrovegni and completed around 1305, are the anchor-work of this birth of the individual soul in paint.
In Steiner's Own Words
It is true, indeed, that a whole world of things from beyond the Earth looked down upon Giotto from the walls around him. (All this is no longer extant, for reasons we shall afterwards discuss.) On the other hand, we must never forget that with Giotto an entirely new artistic world-conception arose in the West. Indeed, it is Giotto, above all, who in the realms of art represents the rise of the new age, the 5th post-Atlantean age. In painting, the 4th post-Atlantean age goes down with Cimabue; the 5th begins with Giotto.
What it Means Today
The standard art-historical verdict says much the same thing Steiner says, only without the spiritual diagnosis. Giorgio Vasari, writing his Lives of the Artists in 1550, credited Giotto with rescuing painting from the stiff Byzantine manner and restoring it to the study of life. A century earlier the painter Cennino Cennini, in Il Libro dell'Arte around 1400, had already written that Giotto "translated the art of painting from Greek into Latin." What both sentences register, and what Steiner reads at the level of the soul, is a single event: the human figure stops being a sign pointing at heaven and becomes a person occupying weight, space, and grief.
You can still stand inside that event. The Arena Chapel in Padua, frescoed around 1305 for the merchant Enrico Scrovegni, survives nearly intact, and conservators at the Musei Civici di Padova have spent decades stabilising its blue ground. Walk its north wall and watch the mourners bend over the dead Christ in the Lamentation: the backs are turned to you, the faces crease, the angels twist in real air. This is the Thalira reading of Giotto as the first individual, the painter in whom a face becomes a biography. Steiner places that birth at the door of the consciousness age, which is why his throat-centre, the seat of the inner word made outwardly visible, is the one this entry sounds.
Where to Read More