Giotto Dies: Father of Western Painting

Giotto di Bondone died on January 8, 1337, after a career that broke Western art free from the flat, symbolic conventions of the Byzantine tradition. Born around 1266 near Florence, he was, according to legend, discovered as a shepherd boy drawing sheep on a rock by the painter Cimabue, who recognized the child's talent and took him as an apprentice. Whether the story is true or not, Giotto's artistic education produced a revolution. His frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, completed around 1305, introduced naturalistic emotion, three-dimensional space, and human drama to painting for the first time in Western art. The figures in the Scrovegni frescoes occupy physical space. They cast shadows. Their faces express recognizable human emotions: grief at the Lamentation, fear at the Last Judgment, tenderness in the Meeting at the Golden Gate. Before Giotto, religious painting depicted holy figures as symbols. After Giotto, they were people. The Scrovegni Chapel cycle covers the lives of the Virgin Mary and Christ in thirty-eight scenes arranged in three tiers, and the program's narrative structure, moving from panel to panel like a visual story, established the template for monumental fresco cycles that Renaissance artists would follow for the next two centuries. Giotto also designed the campanile of Florence Cathedral, the bell tower that still stands beside Brunelleschi's dome, though he died before its completion. Dante praised him in the Divine Comedy as the painter who had surpassed his master Cimabue, a literary endorsement that cemented his reputation. Every Renaissance master from Masaccio to Michelangelo built directly on the foundation Giotto established. Giorgio Vasari, the first art historian, called him the artist who "rescued painting from its Greek style."