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Giotto. Eternally modern

Giotto, l’Italia. This exhibition concludes the cycle of exhibitions that has been created for EXPO 2015. It is dedicated to the father of Italian painting and curated by Pietro Petraroia and Serena Romano. Furthermore, it is supported by Milan’s Palazzo Reale (the setting for the exhibition which closes on January 10th 2016), and the publishers, Electa. In extraordinary circumstances, fourteen works by Giotto (whose works were for the most part frescoes) are being exhibited and are mainly works on board. All the works are in all certainty attributed to Giotto and have never till now been brought together in one exhibition.
One particular work, the fragment with Two Saints’ and Apostles’ Heads created for the main altar at St Peter’s (1315-1320) has never before left the Vatican Museums. It was commissioned by Cardinal Stefaneschi who was the same Cardinal who commissioned Giotto for the Polittico of the same name that was carried out in the second decade of the Fourteenth century. The exhibition will also include the pinnacle featuring God The Holy Father and Angels, kept at the San Diego Museum of Art in California, which for this occasion will once more be on view alongside the Polittico from the Baroncelli Chapel in Santa Croce in Florence (circa 1330).
The exhibition is laid out chronologically and tells of the immediate success and subsequent fame and wealth enjoyed by Giotto during his lifetime, working as he did on several sites throughout Italy (Florence, Assisi, Padua, Rome, Milan and Bologna, to where the pontifical court returned to Italy from Avignon) and carrying out important commissions for cardinals and religious orders as well as for kings, local dukedoms and bankers. This exhibition is wholly concentrated upon the figure of Giotto himself without any connection or comparisons being made to the works of other artists who were inevitably influenced by him wherever he worked. With the contribution of an illustrious scientific committee – that over the last few years has been of the utmost importance in terms of the knowledge we possess of Giotto and in the studies carried out on the artist and his work – the curators intend to emphasise the absolute revolution and innovation that Giotto brought to figurative art, in the same way that Dante revolutionised and “renewed” the Italian language: two men who from the Thirteenth to the Fourteenth centuries brought the Middle Ages to a close and opened their worlds onto the modern age.