Flowers for Christmas have traditionally been flowers inside; pink and white azaleas, potted orchids or hippeastrums with large red flowers like open lilies. Outside, I just found a flowering carnation, a hardy pink that’s supposed to open in early July.
This Christmas, my most precious flowers are the ones that shine in my mind, printed there during a recent visit abroad. Viewers often miss them. they are flowers painted by giottothe master of medieval art. I notice that some of them have live doubles in my flower beds. As always, art, flowers and gardens intertwine.
Giotto was born in Tuscany. He was active from the 1290s until his death in 1337, not only as a painter but also as an architect, designer of the base of Florence’s multicolored bell tower next to its cathedral. Modern critics like to decenter famous names and discover forgotten talents among their contemporaries. Giotto was a genius, to the point that they tend to elude him. I just checked out what Kenneth Clark said about him in his wonderful BBC series. Civilizationfirst broadcast in 1969. In the third episode, Giotto declared, “he is one of the world’s supreme painters.”
Dressed in a well-pressed suit with a folded handkerchief in his breast pocket, Clark spoke in the Arena chapel in Padua. At the beginning of October I was there too, without a scarf and with my pants sagging. Clark dwelled on some of the paintings that most captivated me, but he didn’t say anything about the elements I’ve learned to value. He presented Giotto as a master of human gesture, form and painted drama. In fact he was, but Clark didn’t say that he was also a master plant artist.
The Arena Chapel, or Scrovegni, was built and painted for a businessman who would have enjoyed the FT Weekend if it had been available in a medieval Italian edition. Enrico Scrovegni was an important moneylender in Europe, even more so than his father, whom Dante, a contemporary of Giotto, put into a humble pit in purgatory because of his sins as a moneylender with high interest rates. Bankers have a bad press in social history, but without them many of the best frescoes in Italian churches simply would not exist. The bankers ordered them and paid for them.
I had previously thought that Giotto’s landscapes were bare and rocky, unlike his lively human figures. His Nativity scene shows Mary lying on her side under a wooden roof and interacting with her baby Jesus, but the setting is an arid hill landscape in which angels bring the shepherds the good news. However, in his Risen Christ, Giotto painted plants around Christ’s feet. The excellent restoration of the chapel’s frescoes has highlighted the details. Christ has a laurel, a strawberry tree or strawberry tree, and parsley and dill plants behind him and a variety of calaminta under his feet. They are painted with exceptional precision. Some parsley leaves are yellow, as in old age.
When Giotto painted The Dream of Joachim, Future Father of the Virgin Mary, he also placed individual plants, this time on a rocky hill; borage, chives and a prickly thistle. When Clark talked about it up front, he ignored them. In the previous scene, The Sacrifice of Joachim, Giotto painted in the foreground a goat eating a plant with pink flowers. It is a clover, exactly painted, and around it there is a marigold and another chamomile.
The genius is capable of almost anything in his field: Giotto, I now realize, is a brilliant botanical artist. How and why did you paint certain plants? His Risen Christ is the Christ that Mary mistook for a gardener. I don’t think that’s why he showed plants behind him. Neither did Maria Autizi, one of the restorers who worked closely on Giotto’s paintings.
In 2023 he published a fascinating, excellently illustrated book, The Scrovegni Chapel: Giotto and the song of nature. Giotto had already worked for the Franciscans in Assisi. He even named his son and daughter after Saints Francis and Clare. Autizi suggests that his plant paintings were inspired by Francis’ vision of nature, birds and animals as evidence of God’s presence in creation. I think they are too rare and selective for that theory to account for.
In my garden, calamintha attracts bees next to the front steps. My marigolds are good too, especially the French-African hybrid Konstanz. I also grow dill for fish stews. Thanks to Giotto, I now watch them with Christian episodes in mind, but he didn’t include them for that purpose. The palm trees in his Palm Sunday scene are precisely painted for obvious reasons, but surely his other plants are grouped with symbolic meanings. Autizi believes that a clover symbolizes the Trinity and that the strawberry tree has links with death, but if this is the case, it seems strange to me that it is present in a scene of the Risen Christ. As for marigolds, it follows those who associate them with mourning when their flowers close at night. However, a woman also wears a garland of marigolds in the painting of the joyous wedding at Cana.
We do not have the meanings that Giotto had in mind. Later texts should not be read into them, because the symbolism varies from one source to another. Autizi notes that no colored herbal book was compiled in Padua around 1305, but experts have listed to me some in Florence and other parts of Italy that Giotto might have known. However, their plants have a vitality that yours do not have. My hunch is that he also painted from real specimens. He could have obtained them from a guild of pharmacists: Dante belonged to the one in Florence.
Beneath the biblical scenes, he painted virtues linked to vices. Injustice, a bearded man, sits before an ivy-covered wall. In front there are exact trees, a young pine, ash, alder, cypress and oak. The injustice is then exemplified in the theft of a horse, men stripping a prostrate woman, what Autizi calls “the first depiction of rape in medieval art,” and two warriors advancing.
Injustice may seem an appropriate warning for our time, but I prefer to dwell on the choice of Joseph as Mary’s boyfriend. He and the other suitors carry bare branches to the Ark of the Covenant, knowing that one of them will come to life and indicate Mary’s groom. Overnight, Joseph’s branch does so, and in the next scene he advances with it toward his bride, who looks modestly down. A white lily has sprouted from it on which a white dove has come to rest, a symbol of the Holy Spirit. In gardens, daylilies are best planted as bulbs in July. Mine bloom the following year but a pigeon never lands on them. If they were, they would collapse, and yet that dove flutters, a source of hope in my pre-Christmas thoughts.
In 1868, the Italian family that owned the Scrovegni chapel agreed to sell Giotto’s frescoes to the Victoria and Albert Museum. Imagine: pre-Christmas crowds would parade past these masterpieces in Kensington. At the last minute, the Padua city council banned the sale. In Padua, visitors are now timed and dehumidified, preserving these wonders, plants and all, in their true home.
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