Chiara frugoni giotto biography

Chiara Frugoni (4 February 1940 – 9 April 2022) was an Italian historian and academic, specialising in the Middle Ages and church history.
An Italian art historian, Chiara Frugoni, spotted the devil's profile in the fresco's clouds, high up in the Basilica of St Francis in Assisi.
Medievalist and St. Francis expert Chiara Frugoni divined the demonic presence in fresco number 20 out of a series of 28 depicting the life of.

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"Surely you see it, Brother? It's over there, just below the angel"

In our first book, The Cloudspotter’s Guide, we confidently claimed that the first painter to depict a cloud that looked like something was the 15th Century Italian painter Andrea Mantegna. The Cumulus cloud he painted in the background of his St. Sebastian (1457-8)looked like a man on horseback. But our claim that he was the first has just been proven wrong. Very wrong.

Chiara Frugoni, a cloudspotting art historian in Assisi, Italy, has discovered a cloud shaped like the face of the devil that was painted 170 years before Mantegna’s cloud look-a-like. Frugoni spotted the depiction of the horned face hidden in one of the frescos by Giotto in the Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi. Frugoni has been researching the frescos for the past 30 years, and believes that Giotto’s cloud face was painted in 1289.

In the 720 years since then, thousands upon thousands of pilgrims, tourists and scholars have gazed up and admired the paintings but it seems that no one has noticed the face until

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Devil's face revealed in Giotto fresco in Italy

A devil's face hidden for centuries has been revealed in a fresco by the Italian renaissance master Giotto.

An Italian art historian, Chiara Frugoni, spotted the devil's profile in the fresco's clouds, high up in the Basilica of St Francis in Assisi.

The face, with hooked nose and an evil smirk, is hard to see from the ground.

The fresco, featuring the death of St Francis, dates from the 13th Century. Giotto di Bondone is seen as one of the finest Early Renaissance artists.

Ms Frugoni said it was previously thought the first artist to conceal a portrait in clouds was Andrea Mantegna, in the 15th Century. His painting of St Sebastian, done in 1460, has a cloud from which a mysterious knight appears.

The Assisi basilica was last restored after suffering severe damage in an earthquake in 1997.

The basilica's chief restorer, Sergio Fusetti, said the devil image may have been a joke by Giotto aimed at somebody he had quarrelled with.

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Chiara Frugoni

Italian historian (1940–2022)

Chiara Frugoni (4 February 1940 – 9 April 2022) was an Italian historian and academic, specialising in the Middle Ages and church history. She was awarded the Viareggio Prize in 1994 for her essay, Francesco e l'invenzione delle stimmate.

Biography

Chiara Frugoni was born in Pisa on 4 February 1940. Her father was the medievalist, Arsenio Frugoni.^[1] She spent time during childhood and youth in a sanatorium due to suffering from tuberculosis.

Frugoni graduated from Università degli studi di Roma "La Sapienza" in 1964 with a thesis entitled Il tema dei tre vivi e dei tre morti nella tradizione medievale italiana (the Three Living and the Three Dead in Italian medieval tradition), published two years later in the "Atti della Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei".^[2] In it, she searched for a working method that took equal account of both texts and images, a method she always considered important,^[3] in line with her conviction that "the image speaks".^[4]

She married Salvatore Set