Giotto and Non-Giotto in Nineteenth-Century Britain

This thesis offers the first substantial analysis of the reception of the fourteenth-century Italian artist Giotto di Bondone as he was understood in nineteenth-century Britain. It takes its title from Richard Offner’s article ‘Giotto, Non-Giotto’ (1939), which highlights the particular difficulties involved in attributing works to Giotto. This thesis applies Offner’s term ‘Non-Giotto’ to the numerous, diverse works that were ascribed to Giotto in the nineteenth century, which are now attributed to other artists, some of whom were working over a century after his death. During the nineteenth century, Giotto was widely regarded as an important point of origin for the western artistic tradition, having supposedly revived the art of painting in a naturalistic manner, which had lain dormant since antiquity. Although there is increasing interest in the British reception of early art in the nineteenth century, no study addresses the significance of works misattributed to Giotto despite the fact that they had been encouraged by the artist’s singular importance for the western tradition. By not giving due weight to these misattributions, previous studies miss the importance of Giotto for the construction of the emerging discipline of art history and for the development of a distinctive British school of painting. This study examines the hitherto unacknowledged role played by ‘non-Giottos’ in nineteenth-century Britain. Specifically, three works are used as case studies, having been chosen on the basis that they were regularly exhibited and provoked the most comment. Forming the basis of three chapters organised chronologically and thematically from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, these case studies demonstrate that different stylistic conceptions of Giotto enabled the non-Giottos to be used to support a range of personal, cultural and political agendas. The holistic approach adopted by this thesis, which takes account of developments in antiquarianism, art writing, journalism, markets, collecting and artistic practice, underpins a thorough examination of the criteria involved in attributing works to him and the circumstances that made their loan to exhibitions and acquisition by public institutions possible. By placing ‘non-Giottos’ at the centre of this study, this thesis challenges the usual art-historical emphasis on artists’ authentic oeuvres and demonstrates that misattributions are just as important as works with consistently firm attributions in bringing the values of their time into focus. It reclaims an important aspect of the construction of the story of art and its function in building the modern British nation.