Parergon

The ongoing importance placed on Italian painting between 1250 and 1350 is demonstrated in Péter Bokody’s new book, which has its origins in his doctoral dissertation. The Hungarian art historian, now teaching at Plymouth University, examines the major shift in painting that occurred at this time, which led to a new visual language that transformed the two-dimensional image into a representation of three-dimensional space. This period is given heightened significance because it marks the beginning of the familiar narrative that leads on towards the development of Italian Renaissance art and the growing dominance of perspectival imagery in European art. Italian art ceased to be dominated by Byzantine art at this time, and began to develop its own identity. The artists covered in this discussion – Giotto, Duccio, Simone Martini, and the Lorenzetti brothers – are familiar ones and the sites include Assisi, Rome, Florence, Siena, and Padua.

Focusing on painting, Bokody suggests that the images produced at this time had become ‘imitations of reality in terms of their spatial, chronological and emotional aspects’, that they were a ‘mimesis of reality’. While John White and others have focused particularly on the treatment of rectangular objects creating three-dimensionality on a two-dimensional plane, Bokody does not discuss the development of perspective. While the idea of mimesis was to have ongoing ramifications, he is as interested in the more reflexive pictorial tendencies like trompe l’oeil, architectural illusionism, or the idea of meta-painting. He argues that these self-reflexive aspects perhaps also played a role in the development of this new realistic style. Barthes’s concept of the ‘reality effect’ is also evoked in this analysis, as the presence of superfluous or insignificant elements can contribute to a work’s realism, becoming key elements in a visual rhetoric.

Bokody focuses his research particularly on Giotto and contemporaries such as the Lorenzettis and Taddeo Gaddi, while the frescoes at Assisi provide many of the examples. Like White in his earlier study, he also side-steps awkward questions such as the attribution questions in this building and the involvement of Giotto.

Bokody organises his study into seven chapters, exploring questions around three-dimensional space, the role of meta-painting, and the idea of the [End Page 268] reality effect. In this chronological exploration, he begins with the emergence of images-within-images in the Legend of St Francis in the Upper Church of Assisi where they played an important iconographical role, and served as a key element in the work’s realism. The depiction of St Francis praying before the cross of San Damiano is an important example of this, demonstrating too how the representation of prayer was already being depicted in a Franciscan context and revealing how images were venerated.

As the focus of the book is on the marginal or secondary images-within-images labelled ‘parargon’, in the second chapter, illusionistic frames, columns, and chambers are discussed, highlighting how mural paintings reproduced real architectural elements. The third chapter discusses Barthes’s idea, examining both the depiction of architecture and images-within-images and the influence of antique and contemporary models, although these did not necessarily conform to pre-existing models. The self-reflexive aspects of some paintings are also explored in Chapter 4. The layering of meanings was also made possible in these works, and its implications for Netherlandish painting is developed in the next chapter. Giotto’s Arena Chapel frescoes are discussed in Chapter 6, while the final chapter discusses the impact of these innovative approaches in the work of artists, such as Bernardo Daddi and Taddeo Gaddi, who followed Giotto.

This is a clever book that reinvestigates familiar, if often overlooked, aspects of this significant moment in Italian art. It reflects the hold this period has had on the historical imagination when Italian art moved out of the shadow of Byzantine influences to develop its...