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“Flight into Egypt” / Giotto
“Dante and Giotto; A Conversation”
by Albert Steffen
The most wonderful example of how a poet and painter, complementing each other in word and picture, can learn from one another is perhaps that of Dante and Giotto. A meeting between the two, the possibility of which reveals itself to spiritual experience of the Trecento, may provide an illustration.
Dante visited Giotto, who was a friend of his, in Padua – in order to see the latter’s recently completed frescoes. The painter led the poet from picture to picture. He allowed the sequence of paintings to speak for themselves. First, the life of the Mother of God, then the life of the Son of God. Then he turned again to the entrance wall, to the Last Judgment and the World-Redeemer. Lastly he showed him the ways of earth’s children, their virtues and vices.
Dante saw everything, missing nothing – not a star on the arches of the vault, not an architectural ornament, not a tendril or rosette placed in between as embellishment.
“You paint what I am unable to put into poetry,” said he – to which Giotto replied: “And yet we are both going the same way. I use the Sectio aurea, the golden section, in the composition of my paintings and you in the construction of sonnets.” And he pointed with a gesture toward the line from head to heart and from heart to foot, and then to the relation of the upper section to the lower, and of the lower to the whole line. And he showed how the way upward points to death, the way downward to birth, and the whole to the life-path between them.
“But what you bring to expression in your terza rima,” he added, “reaches beyond this into the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso.”
They had come to the middle of the chapel, and were peering- now to the left toward the virtues, now to the right toward the vices.
“Stupidity is the final theme I painted,” Giotto said – completing the tour.
Dante looked at one figure after the other. “They are well conceived,” he said. “Opposite to Hope, who wears a crown, stands Despair, who has a cord wound round her neck. Charity, with fruits and flowers given to her by heaven, Envy, from whose mouth hangs a snake. Vacillation, Infidelity, Falseness, Anger — all represented exactly. According to these archetypes the human race can be more truly judged than by the nominalism of the Florentine Courts of Law . . .”
“You still have your banishment too much on your mind,” Giotto interrupted him. “Be thankful that now you have time to finish your poem, instead of struggling among political parties.”
“The ‘unjust judge,'” replied Dante with a grim laugh, “has been pronounced sacro-sanctimonious, but the throne on which he sits stands awry. I will await its fall. But wherefore your double representation of Stupidity? Do you not spend too much diligence upon her?”
“Stupidity,” answered Giotto, who liked joking, “has to be conquered, not only from without, but also from within. She stupefies all men and herself also. She exists in a duplicity of dubitation. She becomes duller, the more wicked she appears. She inflates and puffs herself up. When she swings out with her club, the whole world can founder.”
“I have experienced that,” said Dante; “World- and self-dummification is the motto for today. But no more of this. By disputation we get no further. Let us turn to the eternal tasks of painting and poetry. Why, in the highest sense, did you become a painter and I a poet?”
Out of this question followed a paradigmatic conversation.
Giotto: Painting is the most faithful servant of the Creator. For she is capable of transmitting to all men what providence intended for mankind. She can also make this visible to those who possess no higher faculties.
Dante: But in order to make the insights comprehensible, one has to translate the picture into words – and therefore poetry is regarded as the highest Art.
Giotto: Your poem reaches its climax just there where it becomes painting: in the Purgatorio. The purified man can move upward as well as downward, and can transform himself in accordance with his freedom.
Dante: Yet it is more usual to get stuck in hell!
Giotto: Certainly in your poem evil men do not progress. Who, however, can be called good? In the prison of the past, criminals are irretrievably lost. For there, in the caves of hell, your mighty word works as though chiseled into form. Its contours confine the sinners. Death is the greatest of sculptors. The poet should not only lead souls out of these dungeons through purging flames into freedom, but also transmute the inflexible form into the release of color.
Dante: That is indeed my intention. It is the significance of my Trilogy. The sculpture of the underworld becomes the painting of the Hill of Purgatory, whose shades of color lead at length to the heavenly songs of the Hierarchies.
Giotto: In Paradise, however, you get caught up within the non-visibility of music. Here no one follows you any more, except the Blessed. And they fail to hear how the Damned in hell cry for help.
Dante: The Word reaches as far as the crystalline Heaven. There it seems to soar away. Yet this is not so. For it has indeed become Man, and as Man has taken on form.
Giotto: It is true; Christ has risen, but he will never again be reborn in a body.
Dante: The Dead gather around his heavenly Form and await their resurrection.
Giotto: They undergo the Last Judgment, either as good souls who unite with him, or else as bad souls who have fallen away from him…
Dante: And supposing an evil exists, of whose existence no man knows, but by whom every man can be led astray?
Giotto: From that I will protect myself through my painting.
Dante: And I through my poetry.
Giotto: Are you satisfied with your work?
Dante: Just as little as you with yours, although I know that as artists no one excels either you or me.
That was the last conversation between the two friends. After both their deaths it was continued. Then, however, it became clear that their Art had very much stronger effects than it had in life.
When the one spoke of poetry and the other of painting, it was now a reciprocal interchange. For the one filled the soul of the other, so that there arose a mutual self-outpouring. The one was builder of the other. It happened that they actually no longer exchanged words or pictures, but themselves became word-pictures, and these they reciprocally impressed on one an-other. Each had become a hieroglyph which the other had to decipher. Each of them turned into the speech-sounds – vowel or consonant – of a word, into the words of a sentence, into a sentence in a story — which they told — each alone, yet both as one — to the divine Hierarchies.
And Dante said to Giotto: “You are now yourself my poem.”
And Giotto to Dante: “And you are my painting.”
And seen in comparison with the graces of devotion, they recognized how imperfect they both had been. For they measured themselves now against the immeasurably high standing of the Resurrected One, whose image they had striven to create on earth — in words and in painting.
Now, in the cosmos, they had to make their way from head to heart of the Heavenly Man, and from heart to feet. There and back, with all the wounds inflicted by earthly men.
This, however, they were not able to do up there.
Therefore they desired to descend again, to return, in order to share the burden of the sufferings of Mankind’s Ego.
“Signs Observed in Recent Times”
Essay translated by Virginia Brett
12.10.24