Quotes

A correction before reading: the five sayings attributed to Giotto below have no identified early source in the evidence examined here. The older introduction's claim that they can be confidently attributed to him is unsupported. The passage labelled Pablo Picasso is also misleading: it comes from Giovanni Papini's fictional portrayal of Picasso, rather than a reliable confession by the painter. The inherited collection is retained with source notes beside it. A separate discussion below turns to identifiable early texts: Dante's poetry, Cennino Cennini's workshop testimony, Boccaccio's storytelling, later biographies and a disputed poem attributed to Giotto. ^{[1] [2]}

There are several different ways in which words can belong to an artist's history. An inscription can name the maker of a painting. A writer can report a painter's reputation, or invent dialogue for him. A critic can use his name centuries later as a measure of achievement. Each answers a different question. For Giotto, the distinction is especially rewarding: some of the most vivid surviving voices are those of people trying to explain what his pictures had changed.

It is surprising that so many Giotto quotes have survived to the present day when considering just how long ago his artistic achievements took hold

We have around five quotes, listed below, that can be confidently attributed to the artist. Some others are also available, but cannot be entirely verified. Several famous artists who arrived centuries after Giotto have even less quotes available, so this can be considered relatively good.

Source correction: the confidence expressed in the preceding paragraph is withdrawn. No original Italian text, early manuscript, dated publication or reliably identified translation has been established for any of the following five sayings. They are circulating attributions, and should not be cited as Giotto's documented speech. The absence of an identified witness leaves authorship unresolved; it does not establish who composed them.

The impact of Giotto's paintings is discussed elsewhere in this website, but with such a significant career there will always be opinions from others who choose to study his work and learn from his achievements. There is a collection of significant comments on his work below, including the exceptional 20th century talent of Pablo Picasso.

The Picasso attribution mentioned above is corrected immediately before and after that passage. The other modern names also require individual treatment: some can be traced to an author's publication or an artist's interview, while others remain incompletely sourced.

Famous Quotes by Giotto di Bondone

Status of all five sayings in this section: untraced. The phrases about friendship, Rome, painting, dreams and the heart remain below for continuity, with no claim that Giotto wrote or spoke them. Their English wording cannot be checked against an identified early text.

Mary and Christ in a detail of the Padua Lamentation.

The sincere friends of this world are as ship lights in the stormiest of nights.

Rome is the city of echoes, the city of illusions, and the city of yearning.

Every painting is a voyage into a sacred harbour.

Take pleasure in your dreams; relish your principles and drape your purest feelings on the heart of a precious lover.

The human heart is as a frail craft on which we wish to reach the stars.

These sayings are appealing partly because they can travel independently of a particular painting or historical occasion. Ships, stars and harbours furnish a flexible language of consolation and aspiration. That is a reason to enjoy them as language; it supplies no evidence for their attribution. In particular, a remark about Rome cannot establish Giotto's experience of the city, and the sacred-harbour image cannot serve as his explanation of his religious paintings. Their source-status matters whenever they are used to infer an artistic intention.

Quotes on Giotto di Bondone

Correction to the Picasso attribution: the following passage belongs to the tradition of Papini's invented interview in Il libro nero: Nuovo diario di Gog (1951). It should be read as fictional speech assigned to Picasso. Garson O'Toole's investigation traces its later circulation and corrections; the English wording varies between versions. ^[1]

But when I am alone, I do not have the effrontery to consider myself an artist at all, not in the grand old meaning of the word: Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt, Goya were great painters. I am only a public clown-a mountebank. I have understood my time and have exploited the imbecility, the vanity, the greed of my contemporaries. It is a bitter confession, this confession of mine, more painful than it may seem. But at least and at last it does have the merit of being honest. Pablo Picasso

The list of older masters serves a polemic about modern art within that fiction. It cannot establish Picasso's private estimate of Giotto, his own painting or his audience. O'Toole also identifies published repudiations, including a LIFE correction of January 1969. Those historical leads are reported here through his investigation, rather than presented as independently inspected original magazine copies. ^[1]

The Oresteia, King Lear, Dostoevsky's 'The Devils' no less than the art of Giotto or the 'Passions' of Bach, inquire into, dramatize, the relations of man and woman to the existence of the gods or of God. George Steiner

Source status: attribution retained, exact primary passage unverified here. This sentence is associated in quotation references with George Steiner's Real Presences (1989), part III, chapter 6. Without inspecting that passage in an authorised edition, its punctuation and precise context should remain provisional. As printed here, it places Giotto among makers whose works confront religious existence; it offers a reader's philosophical interpretation rather than information about Giotto's own words or beliefs.

In my opinion painters owe to Giotto, the Florentine painter, exactly the same debt they owe to nature, which constantly serves them as a model and whose finest and most beautiful aspects they are always striving to imitate and reproduce. Giorgio Vasari

Source status: the underlying Vasari passage is identifiable. This is an English rendering of the opening of the Giotto life in the 1568 Lives. The Italian describes the debt painters owe to nature and then extends that debt to Giotto. The particular translator of this inherited English wording has not been identified. Vasari's own argument can be checked in the original passage reproduced in the critical source collection Giottus Pictor. ^[3]

Now that I think about it, it seems to me that’s what Idiocy is: the ability to be enthusiastic all the time about anything you like, so that a drawing on the wall does not have to be diminished by the memory of the frescoes of Giotto in Padua. Julio Cortazar

Source status: attribution and English translation unverified here. Quotation references associate the Cortázar sentence with Around the Day in Eighty Worlds, but the corresponding passage and translator have not been checked in an accessible authorised text. Read cautiously, the sentence concerns the freedom to enjoy an ordinary drawing even after seeing a celebrated fresco cycle. It does not diminish the Padua paintings; it resists turning their prestige into an obstacle to other pleasures.

It is not possible to overstate the influence of Paul Cezanne on twentieth-century art. He's the modern Giotto, someone who shattered one kind of picture-making and invented a new one that the world followed. Jerry Saltz

Source status: verified in the author's published review. Saltz opens his New York article “Three of a Kind,” dated 10 February 2011, with this comparison while reviewing Cézanne's Card Players. The inherited text omits the accents in Cézanne's name. Here Giotto functions as a comparison for a painter's power to change the pictorial possibilities available to others, rather than as a claim of direct contact between two remote periods. ^[4]

The traveller who has gone to Italy to study the tactile values of Giotto, or the corruption of the Papacy, may return remembering nothing but the blue sky and the men and women who live under it. E. M. Forster

Source status: verified in the novel. This is the narrator's observation near the beginning of chapter II of Forster's A Room with a View (1908). Lucy is looking out at Florence: street traffic, soldiers, children and the river compete with the cultural programme expected of a visitor. Later in the chapter her uncertainty about what to admire in Santa Croce makes the point sharper. Forster's humour allows the human life outside an art lesson to become part of the traveller's experience. ^[5]

Whenever I give a talk about my work I am invariably asked who my influences are. Not what my influences are, but who.. As if the gutter, misunderstandings, memories, sex, dreams, and books matter less than forebears do. After all, in terms of influences, it is as much the guy who mugged me on Tenth Street, or my beloved dog who passed away much too early, as it was Giotto or Diane Arbus. Robert Gober

Source status: verified in a gallery publication carrying Gober's name. Fraenkel Gallery printed the statement at the head of its release for the 2010 Diane Arbus exhibition selected by Gober. The wording supports a broad account of influence in which daily experience and relationships matter alongside admired artists. Giotto and Arbus appear within that larger field. The statement does not describe a particular Giotto painting or establish which works Gober had studied. ^[6]

To an art historian a Giotto is a 14th Century painting. To an artist it was painted yesterday. We free ourselves from the past when we see it freshly. Walter Darby Bannard

Source status: attribution retained, original publication unlocated here. The Bannard sentence survives in quotation collections, but an author-controlled essay, dated interview or other original witness for this exact wording has not been established. Its opposition between historical distance and artistic immediacy is intelligible on its own terms. It invites a fresh encounter with a picture, while its own authorship still calls for a source. Repetition of the attribution cannot settle that separate question.

When I was taking art history I was always angry that we would skip certain chapters because "it wasn't important." Like, "Let's skip over the Japanese. Let's just get to Giotto, because that's where everything begins." It's like, no. Everything is relevant to me. Ali Banisadr

Source status: verified in an interview preserved on the artist's website. Banisadr makes this observation in Emily McDermott's “How Ali Banisadr Holds Memory,” in a discussion of how viewers and makers bring different cultural experiences to art. The interview's surrounding examples include literature, film and Persian miniature painting. His objection concerns an education that excludes whole traditions in order to hurry towards a preferred European starting point. It is a criticism of that selective teaching, rather than an attack on Giotto's paintings. ^[7]

Dante: Giotto's name within a poem about fame

One of the most consequential early references to Giotto occurs in Purgatorio, canto XI. The speaker is Oderisi of Gubbio, a manuscript illuminator whom Dante encounters among those being purged of pride. Oderisi has learnt to acknowledge that another illuminator, Franco of Bologna, now enjoys the greater reputation. He then brings painting into the argument: Cimabue once thought he held the field, but Giotto now possesses the acclaim, obscuring the older painter's fame. The Italian phrase is or ha Giotto il grido; the force of grido is public renown, the name people are calling out. ^[8]

The setting changes what those famous lines mean. Oderisi immediately turns to poets, and then compares worldly reputation to a shifting breath of wind. Giotto's success is one instance in a meditation on how quickly success passes from one person to another. The passage can bear witness to his prominence while also questioning the value of prominence itself. Its energy would be lost if it were reduced to a complimentary testimonial.

The speaker matters. These are words written by Dante for a speaking character, rather than a statement by Giotto. The verses say nothing explicit about an apprenticeship to Cimabue. They also do not document a meeting or friendship between painter and poet. Those larger claims require other evidence. The distinction leaves the poetry free to tell us something both narrower and more interesting: Giotto's name was recognisable enough to make a comparison about fame immediately intelligible to readers. Schwarz and Theis examine that distinction between literary role and historical inference in their discussion of the passage. ^[8]

A translation introduces another small choice. English versions may use fame, cry, acclaim or renown for grido. Each colours the movement between a publicly repeated name and the wind into which such repetition dissolves. When quoting the passage, it is therefore useful to name the translator. When explaining it, the short Italian phrase preserves the hinge on which the comparison turns without pretending that one English word exhausts it.

Cennino Cennini: a painter explaining his inheritance

Cennino Cennini's Libro dell'arte, generally placed around 1400, speaks from within the practice of painting. Its opening chapter traces a professional genealogy: Cennino learnt from Agnolo Gaddi, Agnolo from his father Taddeo, and Taddeo from Giotto. In that setting Cennino says that Giotto changed painting di greco in latino and brought it into the modern manner. This is Cennino describing a transformation; it is not a saying spoken by Giotto. ^[9]

The language is culturally charged. Greek and Latin name ways of painting through a comparison with languages. Cennino places his own craft within the tradition that he regards as current and authoritative. Treating the sentence as a neutral verdict that one culture simply replaced an inferior one would flatten its historical purpose. Its claims form part of a working painter's account of where his knowledge comes from, and why a reader should trust it.

The professional connection becomes more tangible in chapter 67. Explaining the painting of a youthful face in fresco, Cennino again invokes a method transmitted through Giotto and the Gaddi family. The passage describes the placement of colour on lips and cheeks and the use of successive flesh tones. The transition from a broad historical claim to the handling of a face is revealing. Authority lives in procedures that can be taught, adapted and carried forward through hands and materials. ^[9]

Cennino also distinguishes Agnolo's colour from Taddeo's, rather than imagining inheritance as perfect repetition. His genealogy therefore gives an account of continuity with change. For a reader looking for Giotto's ideas, this is valuable evidence of what a later practitioner understood his legacy to be. It still cannot be turned into Giotto's own treatise or a transcript of his studio instructions. The author who supplies the account must remain visible.

Boccaccio: the wit of a literary Giotto

Boccaccio gives Giotto a voice in the fifth story of the sixth day of the Decameron. The tale joins the painter and the lawyer Forese da Rabatta on a journey back to Florence from the Mugello. Caught in rain, they borrow worn cloaks and hats and continue on their shabby mounts. Mud and wet clothes make both men look far less distinguished than their professional reputations would suggest. ^[10]

Forese asks whether a stranger seeing Giotto in that state could believe him to be the world's finest painter. Giotto answers by turning the question back upon the lawyer: the stranger would believe it when he believed Forese knew his alphabet. This is a paraphrase of the exchange, whose pleasure depends on the speed and symmetry of the retort. Forese recognises that his own appearance has exposed him to precisely the judgement he tried to apply to his companion.

The comedy has a carefully prepared frame. Before the journey begins, the narrator contrasts the men's unprepossessing bodies with their exceptional intelligence. Giotto's power to imitate nature receives substantial praise. Then the story lets the painter defeat an attempt to judge intelligence by its outward covering. The clothes are temporary and borrowed; the ability to answer is immediately his. The result is a memorable literary image of artistic intelligence in conversation.

Boccaccio wrote within the fourteenth century, much closer to Giotto than Vasari did. Proximity makes his representation important without making the dialogue a recorded conversation. The tale has a narrator, a setting and an argumentative design. It is safe to say that Boccaccio presents Giotto as witty; it is a further and unsupported step to guarantee that the historical painter uttered these exact words on a particular rainy afternoon. Such attributed literary speech has a traceable home and a recoverable purpose, both of which distinguish it from the five untraced aphorisms above. ^[10]

Ghiberti and Vasari: stories that explain artistic ability

In the mid-fifteenth century, Lorenzo Ghiberti's second Commentary supplied the famous discovery scene: Cimabue passes a child drawing a sheep on a stone, recognises his ability and takes him into training. Ghiberti places a few identifying words in the boy's mouth. The encounter makes natural talent visible before formal teaching begins. Its vivid economy helps explain why the story became so durable. ^[11]

The later date matters. Ghiberti is a witness to the story's presence in Renaissance accounts of Giotto, not an eyewitness to Giotto's childhood. His account also contains a substantial list of works and comments from an artist's perspective. These different kinds of material should be considered individually. The interest of his work list cannot automatically certify the opening childhood scene, just as doubts about an anecdote do not erase the value of everything else he recorded.

Vasari developed the tradition in the Lives, first published in 1550 and enlarged in 1568. His circle story offers another demonstration of ability. Asked for a drawing to send to the pope, Giotto makes a circle with a brush dipped in red, holding his arm against his side. The messenger initially mistakes the economical response for mockery; discerning viewers recognise its virtuosity. Vasari also explains a Tuscan expression built on the ambiguity of tondo, which can refer to roundness or to dullness of understanding. ^[3]

The scene binds technical command to social judgement: the messenger cannot immediately recognise the skill he has been sent to assess. It resembles Boccaccio's reversal in giving Giotto the stronger understanding. Yet its historical distance, and Vasari's larger story of painting's revival, remain part of how it should be read. The retorts belong securely to Vasari's narrative. They are much less secure as the exact speech of a fourteenth-century artist. Vasari's opening praise, preserved above, similarly reveals his own historical ambition: he casts Giotto as a restorer of painting whose importance parallels that of nature as a teacher.

The poverty poem: an attribution worth taking seriously, with limits

A longer text offers a different problem. The canzone beginning Molti son que' lodan povertate challenges praise of poverty. In the critical account by Schwarz and Theis, three manuscript copies survive; the two older Florentine witnesses, dated around 1400, name Giotto, while the somewhat later Vatican copy supplies no author. One manuscript heading identifies a song of Giotto, painter of Florence. That is a real early attribution, although it is not a surviving autograph. ^[12]

The poem distinguishes poverty suffered unwillingly from poverty apparently chosen. It examines the moral damage deprivation can produce and questions the consistency of people who praise a condition they work hard to escape. Its argument turns upon judgement, conduct and hypocrisy. The building image in the opening stanza insists upon laying sound foundations, but a single metaphor does not prove that its author practised architecture or painting. Its transmission, language and context all matter.

Schwarz and Theis argue for Giotto's authorship while acknowledging doubts. Their defence should be reported as a scholarly position. The poem's early manuscript attribution is stronger evidence than an anonymous modern quotation card, yet disputed authorship remains disputed. Its objections to poverty should therefore not be presented as Giotto's certain personal confession, or used to settle his private attitude towards Franciscan patrons. A poem can adopt a forceful argumentative voice without supplying an uncomplicated record of its author's everyday conduct. ^[12]

Translation adds another question. The modern German rendering printed in the critical biography is a translation of the Italian poem, with its own decisions about awkward sentences and poetic movement. English paraphrase must not silently become a quotation from Giotto. Naming the disputed text and explaining its argument offers the reader something substantial while preserving the difference between a manuscript attribution, a modern editor's conclusion and a translated voice.

A name written on a painting

The signatures associated with three panels give a concise material contrast. The Louvre's Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata bears Opus Iocti florentini. The Baroncelli altarpiece has Opus magistri Iocti, distributed across seventeen medallions along its lower border. The Bologna polyptych carries the fuller Opus magistri Iocti de Florentia on the Virgin's throne step. The critical source collection transcribes all three and identifies their positions; the Louvre also records its panel's inscription. ^[13]

The signed Louvre Saint Francis panel, retaining its painted frame and predella. Shonagon / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain Mark1.0. Image source. Public domain. Proportionally reduced reproduction; no colour or content enhancement.

Bologna Polyptych

These formulas identify a work with Giotto's name, sometimes adding master or Florentine. They do not speak about dreams, love, fame or sacred harbours. Their restraint is useful. A signature can establish a historical act of naming without becoming a diary, a personal declaration or proof that every painted passage was executed by one hand. Questions of workshop participation require the object and its scholarship as well as its lettering.

Read beside the literary witnesses, those short inscriptions show how varied the surviving evidence is. Dante gives a publicly resounding name; Cennino gives a professional ancestry; Boccaccio gives an intelligence tested in conversation; Ghiberti and Vasari give exemplary narratives of talent. The disputed canzone introduces a sustained argument with an early attribution. Together they allow a richer encounter with Giotto's reputation than a handful of unsupported maxims can provide, while keeping each speaker and each kind of evidence in view.