Assignment:
After reading Chapters One and Two, you will write a 1050+ word descriptive comparison of Cimabue's Enthroned Madonna and Child, c. 1285, and Giotto's Ognissanti Madonna from c. 1305. How are these images similar? How are they different? Focus on issues of style in your answer to show the transition from the late medieval, Byzantine traditions to the emerging naturalism of the early Renaissance.
You must look at these two works very carefully. Both images are full-page illustrations in your book, but you might locate more images online that show details of the work, or how they appear in their museum setting today. Your paper should be written as a careful and specific description of these paintings. A formal analysis is a detailed visual description that gives information in an organized format on the subject of the work, its style, its compositional organization, its material/medium, its size, its color, its texture, etc. In terms of the style, you will see that varying degrees of naturalism or abstraction are employed to make a work either didactic or iconic, so you can discuss how the style of your work was selected by the artist to communicate with the viewer most effectively. After you have written your paper, edit it very carefully for correct spelling, grammar, style and organization.