Giotto di Bondone (c. 1267 – January 8, 1337), better known simply as Giotto, is an Italian painter and architect from Florence in the late Middle Ages.
He is generally considered the first in a line of great artists who contribute to the Italian Renaissance.
Giotto's contemporary Giovanni Villani writes that Giotto is "the most sovereign master of painting in his time, who drew all his figures and their postures according to nature.
And he was given a salary by the Comune of Florence in virtue of his talent and excellence."
The late-16th century biographer Giorgio Vasari says of him: "[H]e made a decisive break with the crude traditional Byzantine style, and brought to life the great art of painting as we know it today, introducing the technique of drawing accurately from life, which had been neglected for more than two hundred years."
Giotto's masterwork is the decoration of the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, commonly called the Arena Chapel, completed around 1305.
This fresco cycle depicts the life of the Virgin and the life of Christ.
It is regarded as one of the supreme masterpieces of the Early Renaissance.
That Giotto painted the Arena Chapel and that he was chosen by the Comune of Florence in 1334 to design the new campanile (bell tower) of the Florence Cathedral are among the few certainties of his biography.
Almost every other aspect of it is subject to controversy: his birthdate, his birthplace, his appearance, his apprenticeship, the order in which he created his works, whether or not he painted the famous frescoes at Assisi, and his burial place.
