Lost Works

Giotto's career was larger than the paintings we can still see. A great mosaic confronted pilgrims at Old Saint Peter's in Rome. Royal chapels in Naples absorbed years of work and substantial expenditure. A painted heaven spread above a civic hall in Padua, while Florence remembered allegories through which a city could examine its own conduct. These commissions place Giotto among rulers, communal governments and the institutions of the papacy as well as the religious communities familiar from his surviving frescoes. Their disappearance has changed the balance of his reputation. ^[1]

The losses also leave very different kinds of traces. A treasury account can establish that a chapel was being painted without telling us the arrangement of a single scene. A copy can preserve figures while reversing the composition or recording alterations made centuries after Giotto. A small fragment may retain medieval material yet reveal almost nothing of the surrounding narrative. A later writer can name an impressive work whose location, authorship or subject remains uncertain. To recover something of this larger career, we have to follow each kind of evidence on its own terms.

Following these traces brings into view the practical business of making art: ceilings and windows, gold and gilded tin, a king's household, painters working alongside labourers, and viewers who carried the memory of a picture into another century. The lost works enlarge the surviving achievement even where their appearance cannot be recovered.

An early reputation with missing foundations

One of the earliest accounts of Giotto already describes a geographically extensive career. In a passage belonging to the continuation of his chronicle to about 1313, Riccobaldo of Ferrara names works in the Franciscan churches of Assisi, Rimini and Padua, and paintings in Padua's communal palace and Arena church. The last is the building now generally called the Scrovegni Chapel. Riccobaldo presents the works as testimony to the painter's distinction: readers could judge Giotto by what he had made. ^[2]

The short notice is especially valuable because it predates the long biographical narratives that gathered around him. It is also less precise than a modern catalogue. Riccobaldo does not inventory individual subjects, distinguish the master's brush from assistants' work, or provide a dated contract for each location. Even the chronological placing of the passage within the chronicle needs care. Schwarz and Pia Theis explain that the surrounding entries do not supply a rigid sequence from which every commission can be assigned a year. The text establishes an early horizon for the reputation and the named activities, rather than a complete itinerary. ^[2]

For Rimini, the evidence creates a productive imbalance. The painted crucifix survives in the former Franciscan church, now the Tempio Malatestiano. The municipal account places Giotto's presence around 1300 and describes a possible fresco cycle lost when the church was remodelled. Its qualification matters. The surviving cross is an identifiable object; the extent and programme of the lost wall decoration cannot be read out of it. Riccobaldo's wording does not tell us which Franciscan stories, if any, appeared on those walls. ^[3]

The Rimini Crucifix Image source. Public domain. Proportionally reduced reproduction; no colour or content enhancement.

Giotto's work at the Santo, the Basilica of Saint Anthony in Padua, is another reminder that a named institution and an identifiable painting are different things. The surviving decorations have been compared with Giotto and his followers, but Schwarz concludes that the works to which the early testimony refers are lost, whether they were murals or one or more panels. His discussion also leaves open the route by which Giotto obtained Paduan commissions: Franciscan connections are one possibility, while family and curial networks offer others. ^[4]

This uncertainty changes how we understand the Scrovegni Chapel's survival. It can appear to be an isolated, extraordinarily complete monument because so much of the surrounding activity has disappeared. Riccobaldo instead places it within a busy regional career, moving between churches and civic authority. The missing works once helped make the connections that the surviving chapel now seems to embody alone.

Padua's lost painted heaven

The Palazzo della Ragione offers something rarer than a simple name in a list: an early description of the decoration. Giovanni da Nono's Visio Egidii describes the enormous wooden roof over the communal hall, a structure resembling an overturned ship. Within it, the twelve zodiacal signs and seven planets, with their properties, would shine through Giotto's work. Other golden stars, mirrors and further images would contribute to the display. The future tense belongs to the literary form of a vision, rather than to a surviving commission instructing the painter. ^[5]

Even through this indirect account, the change of setting is striking. In the Arena church, the stories of Mary and Christ unfold beneath a starry vault. In the communal palace, celestial imagery addressed the world of civic government. The surviving testimony brings astronomy, astrology and the representation of an ordered universe into Giotto's range. It is one of the strongest reasons to resist confining him to the moving human encounters of sacred narrative.

How the scheme occupied the hall is debated. Taking Giovanni's words literally, Schwarz places Giotto's paintings on the wooden vault and infers painting in tempera. Other scholars have understood the original decoration as fresco on the walls below it. These alternatives affect the imagined materials, the relation of the images to the building, and what might have happened to them. Schwarz also cautions that the description need not mean every inch of the great ceiling was painted with figures: separate images distributed among stars are another possibility. ^[5]

The hall suffered a major fire in 1420. Its celebrated surviving astrological decoration belongs to the history of reconstruction and renewed painting after that disaster; it cannot be approached as an untouched Giotto cycle. A visitor can still experience the extraordinary scale of the room and the ambition of a civic heaven, but the later paintings do not supply a transparent window onto his lost arrangements. ^[5]

A familiar name attached to the programme requires equal care. Pietro d'Abano, the physician and astrologer who taught in Padua, is often described as its intellectual designer. Schwarz traces the explicit assignment of Giotto's programme to him to Bernardino Scardeone's history of 1560. Michele Savonarola had named Pietro in 1440, but in connection with the decoration made after the fire: an astrological text could inform a later cycle without its author having personally instructed Giotto. The distinction separates a plausible intellectual context from an established act of collaboration. ^[6]

The mirrors are a particularly evocative detail because they belong to the early description, not to a modern attempt to fill the void. They suggest that the ceiling's effect involved reflected light as well as painted forms. Their precise arrangement and operation remain unknown. We can retain the possibility of a glittering, materially varied heaven without inventing its colours, constellation figures or exact relation to every activity taking place below.

Rome: a famous image surviving through other images

The Navicella at Old Saint Peter's occupied a very different kind of public space. Commissioned by Cardinal Jacopo Stefaneschi, it stood high above the gateway building of Santa Maria in Turri at the approach to the basilica's atrium. Pilgrims passed beneath it and could turn towards it in prayer. Schwarz estimates an original width of roughly thirteen to fifteen metres and a height of nine to ten metres from the reconstructed setting. These are estimates of a lost installation, but they convey the scale behind the affectionate title, the little boat. ^[7]

The restored Boville Ernica angel medallion associated with the Navicella.

Cardinal Stefaneschi offering a model of his altarpiece, a separate Roman commission. Self-scanned reproduction, Commons uploader Eugene a. Image source. Public domain. Proportionally reduced reproduction; no colour or content enhancement.

Its narrative came from Matthew 14:22–33. The disciples struggle against wind on the lake; Christ approaches across the water; Peter steps out towards him, becomes afraid and begins to sink before Christ rescues him. The story joins the vulnerability of the boat's occupants to a moment of personal appeal and deliverance. At a basilica built around Peter's tomb, that subject gave the place of pilgrimage an image of its saint's dependence upon Christ. ^[8]

The enormous mosaic familiar to early viewers was progressively dismantled and transformed during the rebuilding of Saint Peter's. The version in the present portico is a later remake. Attribution of the original to Giotto is well established in the historical testimony, but its exact date remains debated. The often repeated year 1298 has an indirect transmission and cannot be treated as if it were written on a surviving execution contract. ^[7]

The copies let us go further than an account book could, although they make the process of recovery visible at every step. Nicolas Beatrizet's engraving of 1559 gives a crowded boat, a swelling sail, turbulent water and the encounter between Christ and Peter. Labacco's engraving of 1567 puts that encounter on the opposite side of the sheet. In Beatrizet's version, Christ faces more directly out towards the viewer; in Labacco's, he turns towards Peter. Those differences are visible in the prints themselves. They show why reproducing either sheet without identifying it as a copy would create a false impression of certainty. ^[9]

Nicolas Béatrizet’s engraving after the Navicella, circa 1559. The print is evidence for a lost and extensively reworked composition; it is not a photograph of Giotto’s original mosaic. Image source. Public domain. Proportionally reduced reproduction; original composition, colour and photographic lighting retained.

Schwarz argues that the prints are independent witnesses, rather than one simply depending on the other. He finds Labacco valuable for major compositional relationships but prefers other witnesses for Christ's frontal address. Agreement and disagreement must be evaluated detail by detail. An accurate relationship between the boat and the large foreground figures need not guarantee an accurate gesture, donor portrait or stretch of water. ^[9]

Francesco Beretta's painted copy of 1628 seems at first to offer a richer substitute, since a painting can transmit colour and modelling that a print cannot. Yet it records a mosaic already removed from its original site, stored, reinstalled and repaired. After the dismantling of 1610, significant portions had been renewed. Schwarz identifies the water and gold background, Peter, the cloud figures and other passages among the alterations represented in this later witness. Some features may preserve older forms with considerable fidelity; the whole painting cannot be relabelled as the medieval original. ^[10]

Two angel medallions, each about sixty-five centimetres across, carry the story from reproduction back to material survival. One remained at the Vatican and another reached San Pietro Ispano at Boville Ernica. Both have restoration histories. Schwarz's published comparisons show just how much the Boville image changed between its damaged nineteenth-century condition and its restored appearance. The Vatican medallion preserves more medieval substance in his assessment, but it too includes later additions. A surviving mosaic fragment is therefore evidence requiring interpretation, rather than a guarantee that every visible tessera or contour came directly from Giotto. ^[11]

A transmitted Latin inscription adds a further kind of witness. Its four lines connect Peter's passage across the water with the hope of reaching a harbour. Political interpretations have linked the image to papal authority or a demand for the papacy's return from Avignon. Schwarz instead argues for a devotional reading centred on rescue and salvation, and contests using the inscription to force a date after the papacy's move to Avignon in 1309. The inscription was reported on an architectural frieze below the mosaic; its relation to the picture needs to be understood through that setting. Even the meaning of a famous lost work can change when words, copies and locations are brought back together. ^[11]

The Navicella shows how Giotto could make a monumental image answer an architectural threshold and a pilgrim's bodily movement. The mosaic's remembered emotional power also outlived much of its material fabric. The original composition, its later reproductions and its continuing reputation have related but separate histories.

Naples: the paintings disappear, the workshop comes into focus

In Naples the balance of evidence changes again. Royal records preserve unusually concrete information about Giotto's employment, while the principal paintings have largely vanished. The critical edition of the transmitted documents by Schwarz and Theis records an order of 8 December 1328 authorising his monthly salary from 1 December. Its amount has not survived in the copy. On 20 January 1330, King Robert of Anjou admitted him as a royal familiar, giving him the honours and privileges associated with membership of the household. ^[12]

The status deserves its own name. A royal familiar enjoyed a recognised relationship with the ruler and his protection; this document does not record Giotto being knighted. Court employment could elevate a painter through an office and household connection. The transmitted records make that altered professional position unusually tangible. ^[12]

The most revealing account is dated 20 May 1331. It covers work in both the great chapel, the capella magna, and the private chapel, the capella secreta, of Castel Nuovo. It also mentions a cona, a panel painting made at the king's command in the house of Giotto, who is called the chief master of the painting enterprise. The entry ties a large decorative undertaking to the production of an individual movable picture. ^[13]

Its materials have an immediacy that a vanished scene can no longer supply. Fine gold, silver and gilded tin appear alongside lime, gypsum, glue, linen and other purchases. The account pays different masters, painters and manual workers; wine supplied for those working is included as well. These items reveal the coordinated provision of skills and supplies. They do not give us a recipe for every surface, but they establish that the splendour of the chapels depended on more than pigment applied to plaster. ^[13]

Other entries connect the painted decoration with alterations to the building. Water was to be allowed to escape through an opening so that it would not damage the chapel painting. Windows near the altar were adjusted so that certain figures of saints could be painted. Here the royal expenditure exposes the meeting of architecture and image: walls had to be kept usable, openings reconsidered, and a large team supported while the decoration took shape. ^[13]

Such details also complicate a simple contrast between a solitary master and an impersonal workshop. Giotto's name and leading role are explicit, but so are other masters and categories of labour. The records make it possible to describe responsibility for an enterprise while leaving individual hands unresolved. Later Neapolitan payment summaries continue into 1333, although the edition warns that not every abbreviated entry identifies Giotto himself as the recipient. Money assigned to the chapel project and money certainly received by the painter should not be added together indiscriminately. ^[14]

The documents themselves have suffered loss. The Neapolitan originals are unavailable, and the critical edition assembles transmitted texts from earlier copies and publications. Some facts, including the amount of the initial monthly salary, had already disappeared in the process of copying. The salary order and the May account preserve sharply defined information within an incomplete chain of survival. ^{[12] [13]}

What remains of the decoration is too slight to reverse the imbalance. Heads in medallions and ornament in the window embrasures of the great chapel preserve part of the painted environment. Scholars have debated their relationship to Giotto and named collaborators. Their survival establishes neither a complete narrative programme nor a secure map of the master's contribution. Even a persuasive attribution of a head would leave the scale, pacing and visual relationships of the lost walls largely unknown. ^[15]

Santa Chiara presents a related problem. Boskovits discusses fragments found after the Second World War in the nuns' choir, connected with a large Calvary and Lamentation, together with painted architectural furnishings whose invention has been associated with Giotto. The post-war discoveries belong to a history of fragmentary and contested survival; they do not amount to a complete Giotto cycle. Later reports of other Neapolitan works, including famous men and scenes from the Apocalypse, extend the questions; they do not authorise a detailed imaginary reconstruction. ^[15]

The surviving Neapolitan evidence thus adds something unusually substantial to Giotto's career even where it cannot restore an image. It shows a painter established within a royal household, directing related projects in several spaces, with court administration paying for varied labour and costly materials. Any account of his late style built solely from the surviving Florentine works must reckon with the absence of this major undertaking.

Milan and the problem of worldly glory

Giotto's connection with Milan rests on a strong early witness. Giovanni Villani reports that the Florentine commune sent him to serve the lord of Milan and that he died after his return. The date Villani gives, 8 January 1336 by Florentine reckoning, corresponds to 8 January 1337 in the modern calendar. The patron was Azzone Visconti, lord of Milan. ^[16]

The service is more secure than the detailed programme often attached to it. The lost Gloria mondana, or worldly glory, has been identified with a Milanese allegory of Fame containing famous figures. Boskovits presents that account through Creighton Gilbert's reconstruction. It offers a compelling image of Giotto applying his powers to a ruler's secular ambitions, and it has consequently become an attractive component of the late career. ^[17]

Yet the location of the work named by Lorenzo Ghiberti is disputed. In Ghiberti's fifteenth-century account, a worldly glory follows the Arena church and precedes a painting of the Christian faith in a palace. Schwarz reads the sequence and its local references as pointing to Padua. He questions moving the Gloria mondana to Milan or Naples by joining separate strands of testimony. He also allows that even a Paduan work shown to Ghiberti as Giotto's need not actually have been by him. ^[18]

Villani's evidence supports Milanese service while the identification of a particular allegory remains open. Ghiberti's title can preserve the memory of secular subject matter without supplying the work's precise address, date, surviving design or complete cast of figures. Gilbert's Milanese reconstruction and Schwarz's Paduan reading should remain recognisable as scholarly alternatives. ^{[17] [18]}

This distinction matters beyond one title. The losses make Giotto's secular production disproportionately dependent on words, whereas sacred works furnish many of the pictures through which we know him. Their unequal survival can make a difference in evidence look like a difference in the artist's abilities or interests. The uncertain title widens the questions we can ask about the career, while leaving the proposed cycle of Fame beyond secure reconstruction.

Florence and Bologna: loss inside a familiar landscape

Florence supplies an especially deceptive setting for lost works because so many important Giotto paintings remain there. The Bardi and Peruzzi chapels survive with serious losses and changes to their surfaces. Their chronology and the distribution of work within Giotto's circle remain debated. They belong to a discussion of damaged survival, rather than a list of wholly vanished commissions. ^[19]

Ghiberti remembered four chapels and four panels in the Franciscan church of Santa Croce. Vasari later supplied more detailed descriptions, including the Tosinghi-Spinelli chapel's Marian subjects and the Giugni chapel's apostolic histories. In the Tosinghi-Spinelli account he singled out the infant Christ turning towards his mother during the Presentation. This is a vivid record of what Vasari understood and valued, but a description transmitted in his biography cannot replace direct access to the vanished painted surface. ^[20]

The distinction between the decoration inside the Tosinghi-Spinelli chapel and the Assumption above its entrance is also important. Schwarz and Theis distinguish the lost interior cycle from the badly preserved exterior image. Calling everything lost erases a surviving trace; calling the chapel preserved exaggerates what that trace can represent. Florence's familiar monuments contain these uneven layers of absence and survival. ^[19]

Vasari also assigned a cycle of John the Baptist to a chapel in Santa Maria del Carmine. Such reports deserve to remain visible, with their witness identified, without treating every later attribution as a newly certified commission. At the Badia, surviving fragments from a Marian decoration have prompted differing assessments of Giotto's own involvement. Ghiberti's account of an allegory showing the commune being robbed in the palace of the podestà adds another dimension: painting could address the conduct of citizens and the condition of civic government. ^{[20] [21]}

Bologna makes the political vulnerability of monumental decoration particularly apparent. Historical accounts associate Giotto with the chapel of the Castello di Galliera, built for the papal legate Bertrand du Pouget. The fortress was demolished in 1334 after the legate's expulsion. That date should not be made to swallow the entire history of its paintings: the chapel survived the destruction of the castle, and Boskovits notes that Pietro Lamo still reported traces in 1560. A building's destruction, the survival of part of it, and the final disappearance of its images can occur at different moments. ^[22]

None of these reports supplies licence to populate a complete reconstructed room. Their collective value lies elsewhere. They show Giotto's name attached to several kinds of decorated environment: family chapels, a religious house, civic palaces and a legate's stronghold. They also reveal how later viewers selected memorable incidents and subjects from works already vulnerable to rebuilding, damage and shifting attribution.

What the absences change

Giotto's lost works change the shape of his career before they change the list of his paintings. Padua brings celestial and civic imagery into view; Rome adds a monumental mosaic encountered through pilgrimage; Naples reveals the organisation and materials of sustained royal employment; Milan documents service to another powerful court even where a famous proposed allegory remains uncertain. The Florentine and Bolognese losses connect those large commissions with the fragile painted fabric of chapels and palaces.

They also change what we can ask of the surviving works. The Scrovegni Chapel cannot stand for everything Giotto did. A late panel cannot single-handedly replace the missing decoration of Castel Nuovo. A restored angel or a compelling engraving can illuminate a portion of the Navicella without recovering its entire medieval effect. These are different routes into a career whose visual record has become uneven through centuries of use and alteration.

The result is both more expansive and more concrete. We recover the painter travelling between institutions, the chief master working within a royal building project, and the artist remembered for allegories as well as sacred stories. We can follow the wine paid for his workers and the changes made to a window more confidently than the gestures of figures on a vanished wall. That unevenness belongs to the history of Giotto. It helps explain both the extraordinary authority of the paintings that remain and the limits of the career we construct around them.