This latest volume in the Cambridge Companion series is, at its best moments, at the cutting edge of the state of research on the most famous and fabled personality of the early Renaissance in Italy, Giotto di Bondone (c. 1266–1337). A team of authors was assembled by editors Anne Derbes and Mark Sandona—themselves both important contributors to Giotto studies—to address two formidable challenges: to capture the verifiable shreds of documentary evidence of this artist’s life and career and to encapsulate the massive critical record on Giotto as an artist. Derbes and Sandona are to be commended for their bravery, especially for their decision to commission several essays that challenge pre-conceived ideas concerning what a multi-author monograph on Giotto should include.

The state of research on Giotto is, to be frank, remarkably unsettled, despite the artist’s importance as the standard against which so many of his contemporaries and followers were (and continue to be) measured. Questions persist, for example, about his youth, parentage, place of birth, training, education, social status, and professional accomplishments before his mid-thirties. Anyone who has devoted time to researching Giotto has encountered the conflict between the legendary polymath he has become—a parallel cult of personality established during the artist’s own lifetime and shortly thereafter by poets and chroniclers—and the tradesman that he surely was. What a mammoth task the editors set, then, to draw together into one summary volume a collection of essays that can pay such a heady and fractured debate its due. The role of this Companion echoes that of earlier installments in the series, that is, to broaden and deepen discourse while maintaining a level of approachability suitable to a novice reader. In the words of the editors, their goal was to avoid a dry summary, and their assessment of their book insists “what this collection does not do is to present a tidy picture of Giotto . . . or [present] a definitive interpretation of any work” (7; emphasis in original). Indeed, the book contains more new ideas than bland mastications of old ones, and thus will engage broadly minded historians more than myopic partisans.

The inherent tension of the state of affairs in Giotto studies is addressed with transparency by some of the authors, foremost by Hayden Maginnis, the unparalleled authority on understanding Giotto within his own time and author of the opening essay, “In Search of an Artist.” Yet the sensitivity with which the twelve authors address the issue is quite uneven. Writing for this volume are both self-confessed generalists and vehement partisans. In the absence of a consensus on facts and approach, the book’s greatest challenge is consistency. It is difficult as a reader to discern what is accurate, clean, and digestible from what might be conjecture or strident opinion. That said, anyone already conversant with the literature finds well-condensed synopses of the ideas of two object-based authorities (Bruno Zanardi and his technical analysis of the Saint Francis cycle at Assisi and William Tronzo with his sensitive iconographic study, “Giotto’s Figures”), two art historians keenly tuned to cultural and religious history (Joanna Cannon, “Giotto and Art for the Friars: Revolutions Spiritual and Artistic,” and Julia Miller and Laurie Taylor-Mitchell’s groundbreaking study, “The Ognissanti Madonna and the Humiliati Order in Florence”), and two cultural historians (William Cook, “Giotto and the Figure of Saint Francis,” and Benjamin Kohl, “Giotto and His Lay Patrons”). The editors contribute a distillation of their two articles that have already appeared in print with “Reading the Arena Chapel,” and the volume closes with a reprint of Andrew Ladis’s seminal Art Bulletin study of Giotto and humor, “The Legend of Giotto’s Wit and the Arena Chapel.”

Missing from the book are some topics that could have presented the reader a fuller vision of Giotto and his work. Autonomous essays devoted to the “lost Giotto” (that is, the works of art both documented and alleged to have been designed by the artist that no longer exist), or to Giotto’s own biography, or to the role of Giotto within his grand and diverse workshop(s) come to mind. Ambitious authors will doubtless consider these major themes in the future, as the likes of Creighton Gilbert and Julian Gardner have done in the past. This is more than a reviewer’s quip: an important opportunity to infuse the book with a sense of these fundamentals, even if it had been done tentatively and couched in disclaimers, was missed by the team’s authors in their avoidance of these still unanswered questions. Perhaps the editors thought these topics too unresolved to be compatible with the introductory and summary aspirations of the Cambridge Companion. It is with some irony that two articles presenting diametrically opposed opinions on Giotto’s patrimony—Michael Viktor Schwarz and Pia Theis’s “Giotto’s Father: Old Stories and New Documents,” Burlington Magazine, no. 141 (1999): 676–677, and Maginnis’s retort, “The Giottos,” Source 20, no. 3 (2001): 15–17—appear in the bibliography’s section on Giotto’s life and critical reception. I am reminded of a question from a student in a freshman seminar on the topic at Penn State two years ago: “Which is right?” Of course there is no simple answer, but in a seminal text such as this there is a reasonable expectation for such fault lines in the criticism to be exposed as the authors and editors advance their opinions.

Several of the essays are peppered with ideas and observations previously unknown to the literature. Indeed, Maginnis and Zanardi tagged postscripts onto their essays that react to newly gleaned information: Maginnis to his experience on the post-earthquake scaffold at Assisi in 1998 and Zanardi to the rediscovery of Pietro Cavallini’s frescoes at Santa Maria in Aracoeli, Rome. In addition, Miller and Taylor-Mitchell cover previously untrod ground on the Ognissanti church’s appearance and the institution’s character as reflected in the Madonna Giotto painted for that church. Tronzo posits a new interpretation of Giotto’s creative reuse of visual precedents, ancient and modern, within the context of the practice of his contemporaries.

Others fall short on originality, but remain useful by providing a concise summary in English of current debate. Zanardi’s essay is a case in point. Few undergraduates will be equipped to read his Il Cantiere di Giotto (Milan: Skira, 1996) and Giotto e Pietro Cavallini: La questione di Assisi e il cantiere medievale della pitture a fresco (Milan: Skira, 2002), and it was his and the editors’ intention to provide a wider audience for his much-touted ideas; unfortunately this translated essay is a rough read even in English, with its bulletpoint format of analysis and conclusion. Broadening the Anglophone audience seems also the unstated goal of the contributions by Radke and Kohl, whose essays synthesize the state of literature that has largely appeared in Italian. Both are notably non-partisan in their assessments, as most of the authors are. In fact, an overwhelming sense of comity pervades the book. That may not be the most constructive tenor to strike for a milestone such as this, especially with so many debates still unsettled. Evenhandedness may lead the reader to believe that some of the book’s summarized arguments are widely accepted, even when the opposite seems true. For example, Radke gingerly explores the idea—championed forty years ago by Decio Gioseffi in Giotto Architetto (Milan: Edizione di Comunità, 1963)—that Giotto may have designed the structure known as the Arena Chapel, a concept widely dismissed today. Radke rejects the idea, but not until the end of his essay in a paragraph subheaded “Giotto: Painter More Than Architect.” In it, he finally endorses the general analysis presented by Marvin Trachtenberg in The Campanile of Florence Cathedral: Giotto’s Tower (New York: New York University Press, 1971) that, “for the most part his [Giotto’s] frescoes are hung like tapestries on his walls, and his design for the Florentine belltower shows little concern for how such a massive structure could rise into space without collapsing under its own enormous weight” (101–102). Why, then, such an extensive presentation of a thesis as structurally insubstantial as Giotto’s veneers for the bell tower? To be fair, Radke is among the first to systematically dismantle the hypothesis in print (as many have done in public lectures), and, as such, is a useful addition to the scholarly record.

The book is not without significant structural flaws as well. The Cambridge Companion to the History of Art series has a rigid format and program. Among the strictures are a page-count of three hundred, an allotment of less than one hundred black-and-white illustrations—a failing of the series already well-noted in reviews in this venue (e.g., both Lars Jones’s review of the Cambridge Companion to Masaccio and Maria Ruvoldt’s review of The Cambridge Companion to Giovanni Bellini and to Titian)—and a condensed bibliography broken out into broad subjects. None of these bode well for a project as ambitious as this and an artistic personality as complex as Giotto’s. Instead, it would have helped to have more, larger, and better-quality images and to exchange the ten pages spent on an index for a bibliography more extensive than the seven-page “selected” variety. Thankfully the endnotes are appropriately exhaustive.

In sum, the book meets its stated goals and even surpasses them in flashes of brilliance. That a team of authors this talented and diverse has appeared together is a point to celebrate, now over thirty-five years since the publication of Giotto: The Arena Chapel Frescoes, edited by the late James Stubblebine (New York: W.W. Norton, 1969). While the volume under review is very different from that still-indispensable book, and is more different still from Giotto and the World of Early Italian Art, the four-volume set of reprints published by Garland under Andrew Ladis’s editorship (New York, 1998), it provides a newly conceived and broader portrait of Giotto the artist, a man whom we are still far from knowing intimately.