Filth, Painting, and the Limits of "Nature"

• In Event: Artists and Their Techniques in the Florentine Novella

Abstract

In a legend popularized by Vasari, the young Giotto pranks his master Cimabue by surreptitiously painting a fly onto the surface of the older artist’s work. Cimabue, fooled by the lifelike insect, repeatedly attempts to shoo it away. For Vasari and many modern art historians, this youthful trick heralds the unprecedented naturalism of Giotto’s mature works, which the renaissance biographer described in terms borrowed from Day 6, Story 5 of Boccaccio’s Decameron. This paper argues that other novellas written by Boccaccio and his follower Franco Sacchetti suggest another genealogy for Giotto’s fly. Rather than embodying the painter’s penetrating insight into “Nature,” the trick fly emerges out of a novella tradition that links the craft of painting to knowledge of urban ecology—and more particularly to an intimate knowledge of abject ecological realities not easily assimilated to philosophical conceptions of “the natural,” including dirt, vermin, sewage, and industrial waste.

Author

• Shayne Aaron Legassie, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill