Lost History – How a practical joke might have sparked the High Renaissance
In The Lives of the Artists, the revered art historian, Giorgio Vasari, recounts an amusing tale. It is the story of a Florentine master-painter being bamboozled by his prodigious pupil. According to some, the episode preludes the stylistic shift from impressive classical imitations and emulations of Byzantine aesthetics to the phase of true-to-nature compositions that characterised the High Renaissance. Apocryphal or not, the anecdote is a charming reminiscence of extraordinary talent being discovered by an astonished instructor.
Cimabue was a celebrated Florentine painter who pioneered the evolution in medieval art from depictions of flat figures to more lifelike renderings. Far from the full flowering of the renaissance, his mosaics and frescoes nevertheless anticipated the direction Italian painting would take in the succeeding decades. One afternoon, Cimabue was walking in the hills of Tuscany when he came upon a young shepherd boy sketching his flock on a piece of wood.
The gifted youth’s portrayal of his sheep was so magnificent that the bewildered Cimabue asked the child to become his student. The boy’s name was Giotto, and he would one day receive the acclaim and adoration that his abilities deserved.
The daily life of a medieval artist’s apprentice must have been extremely tiresome. Doing chores, repeating dull exercises and serving the master in every conceivable way would have obstructed opportunities for uninhibited inventiveness. Giotto’s natural genius must have been stifled by the obligations he owed Cimabue, and I imagine the young virtuoso would have sought any means of displaying his exceptional skill.
It happened that one morning, Cimabue was called away from his studio to pay a visit to a patron. He left the young Giotto in the studio to complete the background of a portrait he had recently finished. His mischievous protege took the chance to play a practical joke on his tutor and painted a small yet shining fly on the face of the subject.
The resplendent insect was so realistic that when Cimabue returned from his visit and saw the bug beaming on the painted visage, he waved his hand over the canvas and shouted “shoo!”. The tiny fly did not stir and so again he blew at the pest, irritated by its persistent presence on his work. The young Giotto began to chuckle behind his benighted mentor.
At that moment, Vasari says, Cimabue realised that his student had already surpassed him in terms of creativity and execution. Some versions of the story show Cimabue congratulating rather than chastising his impish disciple, but after the amazement, he must have been mildly ticked off by that brilliant embellishment.
The anecdote is sometimes framed as one of many seminal moments in the history of Italian art, when the prevailing Byzantine style was abandoned in favour of pure accuracy and the pursuit of representing earthly perfection. The prank also precedes the fixation that renaissance painters often had with designing convincing illusions. True or not, it is undoubtedly a funny story about a master learning his student’s enviable potential.
Many historians have questioned the veracity of Giotto’s cheeky chicanery. The yarn shares many similarities with a myth recorded by Pliny the Elder of a competition between two great painters in Ancient Greece. One of the painters, Zeuxis, painted grapes with so much verisimilitude that hungry birds circling above swooped down to peck at the fake fruit. It goes to show an inherent aptitude for reproduction in human beings, an aptitude so capable that it can trick our fellow beast as well as our fellow man.