Giotto’s Santa Maria Novella crucifix changed art history

For most of the Middle Ages, religious paintings in Italy followed a style influenced by Byzantine art. Subjects were depicted front-faced, against a plain background, often with a gold halo and with unrealistic two-dimensional features.

In fact, realism was hardly the point of these artworks. Byzantine artists were focused on creating icons that were intended to serve as a bridge to the divine. Icons were mainly seen as highly symbolic renderings of the religious figures they represented. Creating “symbolic” paintings of Christ, the Virgin Mary and the saints was the accepted canon in Italian painting up until the 1200s. That’s when Florentine painter Giotto da Bordone (1267-1337) changed everything.

For the first time, Giotto made religious artworks that were conveying real, human subjects in real, physical places. This was a total revolution in visual culture. Of the Italian master’s groundbreaking works, no one is perhaps more revolutionary than the crucifix-shaped panel painting “Christ on the Cross,” completed for the church of Santa Maria Novella in 1234. Through this painting, hanging in front of the altar of the church, viewers saw for the first time a real human suffering on the cross. No longer “just” a symbol, Giotto’s Christ has unprecedented realism and drama, creating a deep emotional connection.

As explained by art historian Cristian Camanzi in his blog Artesplorando, Giotto had just finished a series of frescoes for the Franciscan order in Assisi. Both Franciscans and Dominicans, which were newly founded orders at the time, were focused on Christ in his full humanity. These notions deeply affected Giotto, who later transported this worldview into his visual vocabulary. Never before in art history was Christ’s humanity depicted in such a sincere and moving way, Camazi explains.

Here, Giotto depicts Christ’s body with a three-dimensional plasticity that conveys a deep sense of realism. We can almost feel the force of gravity weighing on his head, hands and feet. Christ's body takes on a natural arch that distinguishes it from the unnatural curves that had been previously adopted by Cimabue and other Tuscan painters. Blood flowing from a wound in the rib adds to the intensity of the scene. The rocks at the bottom of the cross are a visual reference to Mount Calvary. Once again, Giotto is not focusing on an “idealized” version of the crucifixion, but on the real, human experience that took place in a real place. Because of this deep departure from previous pictorial canon, art historians consider Giotto’s works (including Santa Maria Novella crucifix) as the official starting point of modern European painting.

Giotto’s pictorial innovation, known as the “archetype of suffering Christ,” later spread to other parts of Central Italy and became the standard canon to represent the crucifixion during the second half of the 14th century.

Giotto, now known as the “father” of European modern painting, had such a great impact on his epoch that Dante Alighieri, a contemporary of Giotto, famously featured him in the Divine Comedy as the painter that surpassed Cimabue in talent and fame. His realism and his attention to the human experience paved the way for the humanistic painting of the Renaissance that came in following centuries. As Camazni notes, it is only with Giotto that Christ “really has died” on the crucifix.

Santa Maria Novella is open for visitors Monday to Thursday from 9:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., Friday and civil holidays 11:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. and between 1 p.m. and 5 p.m. on Sunday or on religious holidays.