Il conflitto fra Bonifacio VIII e i Colonna e la cronologia di Giotto

• Autores: Guido Tigler
• Localización: Commentari d'arte: rivista di critica e storia dell'arte, Vol. 19-20, Nº. 56-57, 2013-2014, págs. 5-25
• Idioma: italiano
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• Resumen

  • In recent years Chiara Frugoni’s hipótesis that the columna with spiral decoration, perhaps Trajan’s Column, in one of the frescoes depicting the Life of St Francis in the Upper Basilica in Assisi – the scene of the liberation of a heretic from prison – is a tribute to the Colonna family, whose coat of arms is a column, has gained considerable groun. And that consequently the whole cycle of frescoes should be dated to before May 1297, when the Colonna family fell temporalily into disgrace, since they opposed Pope Boniface VIII. The same scholar puts forward a further hypothesis deriving from this, which is that the broken column in the scene of the Dream of Innocent III, in the panel by Giotto from the church of San Francesco in Pisa, now in the Louvre, is an allusion to what happened in May 1297, and hence the panel shoul be dated after those events. By re-examining the sources on the miracle depicted by Giotto and Gaddo Gaddi in Assisi and by interpreting differently the architecture shown there, and giving a different religious explanation of the motif of the broken column in the Paris panel, this article demostrates that the Colonna events had no influence on the iconography of Giotto’s paintings. The Giotto chronology of the 1290s and the beginning of the 14th century is also re-examined and new hypotheses are put forward on the relationship between Giotto and Giovanni Pisano.