Works by Giotto

Giotto di Bondone broke with the stylised, elongated saints of Byzantine painting: his figures stand with real weight, their clothes hang like cloth, and their faces show what they feel.

Little in his life is certain. Two facts hold: by around 1305 he had covered the walls of the Scrovegni Chapel at Padua in fresco, and in 1334 Florence chose him to design the cathedral's bell tower. His birthplace, his training and whether he worked on the Assisi frescoes are all argued over. Giorgio Vasari told how Cimabue came upon the boy drawing his sheep on a rock and took him on as an apprentice, but many scholars now treat the tale as legend.

The same doubt hangs over the panels. Only one, the Ognissanti Madonna in Florence, is accepted as his by every scholar, and the authorship of many others given to him is disputed. Every work below has a religious subject, and most of the paintings are tempera on wood, several against gold.

At times he turned a figure's back to us to open up space in a scene. In the Death of the Virgin a figure in violet kneels before the bier with its back to us, while a tall man in pale robes behind it holds a tiny swaddled figure. In The Presentation of the Christ Child in the Temple the baby twists in the old priest's arms and stretches back toward his mother. John Ruskin put it plainly: Giotto's holy family was, at heart, Mamma, Papa and Baby.

Sources: Wikipedia, National Gallery of Art, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gemäldegalerie Berlin, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Strasbourg, Bavarian State Painting Collections, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Troyes.