Venetian Gothic

In many ways, the late 13th and 14th centuries marked the most exciting and vigorous phase in Italian art, an age of discovery when the power of the artist was almost like that of a magician. Great imaginative leaps occurred in architecture, painting and sculpture, especially in Tuscany.

Nor was it long before Tuscan masters introduced the new style to the Veneto. In Padua’s Cappella degli Scrovegni (1308), Giotto used all he knew about intuitive perspective, composition and a new, more natural way to render figures in natural settings. It was revolutionary in its day, the masterpiece of an artist who inspired the first painters of the Renaissance.

But the Venetians didn’t want to know. Although Byzantine influences lingered into the 14th century, Venice by that time was ready to go Gothic in its own half-oriental, flamboyant way. The once-stiff Byzantine figures cautiously begin to sway in dance-like movements, including the famous Salome mosaic in St Mark’s Baptistry (1340s) and the marble statues on the basilica’s rood screen, by Jacobello and Pier Paolo dalle Masegne (1394).