These frescoes painted by Giotto inside the Church of Santa Croce in Florence, are already a mature work of this great artist of Trecento. And therefore in his paintings of the Peruzzi and Bardi Chapels made between 1320 and 1325 important differences can be seen with respect to previous works.
Pictorial ensemble of the Peruzzi and Bardi Chapels
For example here he has already abandoned the intense colors that he had used in pictorial ensembles such as the life cycle of Saint Francis or in the Chapel of the Arena in Padua. Instead, here he opts for different shades with a greater mastery of the range of ochres.
But differences are not only seen in the color treatment, other characteristics also show us the evolution that has taken place in Giotto's art. For example, you can see that the architectures they represent are much lighter, and above all he integrates them much more into his compositions, creating visually more harmonic ensembles.
The truth is that when Giotto made this work, he was already a character of enormous prestige and, above all, very rich, so much so that he embarked only on the projects that interested him, thus greatly expanding his field of artistic action, with many forays into engineering and architecture, because in addition to directing the works of the famous Campanile of Florence,It is also dedicated to designing fortresses or walls. An attitude that in some way is turning him into a model to be followed in later centuries by the great multidisciplinary geniuses of the Renaissance.
Scene from Giotto's Peruzzi Chapel frescoes
However, although you can see his evolution, Giotto's enormous ability to paint in a very natural and realistic way is still appreciated. In this sense, an anecdote is well known according to which, when he was an apprentice with the great Cimabue, one day his teacher went to remove a fly from a board painted by his student, but the truth is that this insect had been painted by Giotto.
And to that capacity for realism, his treatment of volume and the study of perspective were gradually added, still in the making with respect to what would come in the following decades. But those first attempts are more than valuable since it is possible to analyze how he uses architecture, vegetation or groups of characters to configure elements that actually serve him to compose scenes or landscapes, since he uses all of this to plastically organize three-dimensional space. you want to represent.