Before Raphael was Michelan­ge­lo, and before Michelan­ge­lo was Leonar­do, and before Leonar­do was Bot­ti­cel­li, and before Bot­ti­cel­li was Giot­to. Giot­to di Bon­done (c. 1267 – 1337) was a painter and archi­tect from Flo­rence dur­ing the Late Mid­dle Ages, work­ing before the great flour­ish­ing in the arts known as the Renais­sance. The 16th cen­tu­ry art his­to­ri­an, Gior­gio Vasari (inci­den­tal­ly, the first man to use the term Renais­sance in print), in his Lives of the Painters, cred­its Giot­to with break­ing tan­gi­bly away from the preva­lent Byzan­tine style and ini­ti­at­ing “the great art of paint­ing as we know it today, intro­duc­ing the tech­nique of draw­ing accu­rate­ly from life”.

His two great mas­ter­works were the design of the cam­panile at Flo­rence Cathe­dral, and the dec­o­ra­tion of the Scroveg­ni Chapel in Pad­ua. A third may well be the famous fres­coes in the Upper Basil­i­ca of Saint Fran­cis in Assisi, though this is dis­put­ed: sad­ly, giv­en the peri­od, many fea­tures of his life are hard to sub­stan­ti­ate.

Vasari tells some sto­ries about Giot­to that sound decid­ed­ly fan­ci­ful. Accord­ing to him, Giot­to was a shep­herd boy, dis­cov­ered by the great Flo­ren­tine painter Cimabue draw­ing pic­tures of his sheep on a rock. They were so life­like that Cimabue approached Giot­to and asked if he could take him on as an appren­tice. Anoth­er sto­ry recounts how Giot­to drew a life­like fly onto one of his master’s paint­ings and laughed when Cimabue tried sev­er­al times to brush the fly off. Yet anoth­er tells how the Pope request­ed to see an exam­ple of his artis­tic skill and Giot­to sim­ply sent him a per­fect cir­cle he had drawn in free­hand.

Fan­ci­ful sto­ries aside, there’s no doubt­ing the achieve­ment of the Scroveg­ni Chapel fres­coes. The sub­ject mat­ter is not unusu­al for church dec­o­ra­tion in medieval Italy, being cen­tred on the lives of the Vir­gin Mary and Christ, but the style for the day was sen­sa­tion­al: solid­ly three-dimen­sion­al, with faces and ges­tures based on close obser­va­tion, and the char­ac­ters clothed in gar­ments that hang nat­u­ral­ly and have form and weight. The expan­sive use of ultra­ma­rine blue pig­ment is remark­ably effec­tive: when you look at the chapel as a whole, it seems awash with blue (albeit fad­ed with time, sad­ly).

I’ll fin­ish with anoth­er sto­ry that’s prob­a­bly apoc­ryphal (but who knows?). The great poet Dante vis­it­ed Giot­to while he was paint­ing the Scroveg­ni Chapel and, see­ing the artist’s chil­dren flit­ting around, asked (rude­ly) how a man who paint­ed such beau­ti­ful pic­tures could have such plain chil­dren. Giot­to, who, accord­ing to Vasari was always a wit, replied, “I make my pic­tures by day, and my babies by night”.