Giotto di Bondone

Giotto di Bondone
Possible image of Giotto from the Peruzzi Chapel (digitally restored)
Born	Giotto di Bondone July 1266 near Florence, Republic of Florence, in present-day Italian Republic
Died	January 8, 1337 (aged about 70) Florence, Republic of Florence, in present-day Italian Republic
Nationality	Italian
Known for	Painting, Fresco, Architecture
Notable work	Scrovegni Chapel frescoes, Campanile
Movement	Late Gothic Proto-Renaissance

Giotto di Bondone (1266/7 – January 8, 1337), known mononymously as Giotto (Italian: [ˈdʒɔtto]) and Latinized as Giottus, was 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 contributed to the Renaissance.

Giotto's contemporary, the banker and chronicler Giovanni Villani, wrote that Giotto was "the most sovereign master of painting in his time, who drew all his figures and their postures according to nature" and also of his publicly recognized "talent and excellence"."

In his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, the late-16th century artist and art historian Giorgio Vasari describes Giotto as making a decisive break with the prevalent Byzantine style and as initiating "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, also known as 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 Commune of Florence in 1334 to design the new campanile (bell tower) of Florence's 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 in the Upper Basilica of Saint Francis in Assisi, and his burial place.