A psychoanalytic appreciation of Giotto's mode of artistic representation and its implications for Renaissance art...

This paper applies developmental psychoanalytic and cognitive psychological principles to an evaluation of Giotto's Padua frescoes as pivotal in the transition from a medieval to a Renaissance mode of thought. The formulation stresses the importance of the emergence of triadic or operational thinking involving the coordination of multiple dimensions and the capacity for transforming them with reversibility, reciprocity, and conservation. This developmental achievement also results in an expanded sense of time and space. These concepts provide a basis for appreciating more fully the transition from the dyadic classical and medieval artistic representations to the triadic representations of Renaissance art, especially the contributions of Giotto's Padua frescoes to the development of the concept of infinity in nature, a concept central to both Renaissance art and science. The development of this concept in Renaissance thought raises a question about the relation of art and science. Two major modes of encoding or representing experiences are discussed--a sequential lexical and a nonsequential nonverbal mode (or word and thing representations). These formulations lead to the identification of a process that suggests that developments in art often precede those in science and thereby contribute to a fuller appreciation of Giotto's Padua frescoes as a landmark contribution with implications for the entirety of Renaissance thought.