  Giotto di Bondone
  Outstanding as a painter, sculptor, and architect, Giotto was recognized as the first genius of art in the Italian Renaissance. The artist was born in the village of Vespignano, near Florence in about 1266. Legend has it that Giotto was discovered while sketching sheep on a flat rock. A well-known Florentine artist looked over the twelve-year-old boy's shoulder and was impressed by what he saw so impressed that he persuaded Giotto's father to let the boy become his pupil.
  Soon Giotto established his own fame and was invited to paint for princes and high churchmen from Florence to Rome to Naples. Giotto brought the third dimension back into painting, breaking through the restraints of the traditional Byzantine. Though he lacked the technical skills developed by the artists of the High Renaissance, Giotto demonstrated a profound feel for human emotion, physicality, and space. These gave his paintings new ways to approach narrative.
  Human figures often dominate the foreground. Their expressions vary from grief to shock, their clothing reveals the individual shape of their bodies, fingers curve around the objects they hold, and eyes focus on various points of interest, expressing individual thought and feeling. Giotto's sense of perspective was unprecedented. For the first time, clothing emphasized the flesh, and believable distance extended between sky and dirt, the attending crowd and the Virgin.
  Take Ognissanti Madonna as an example. The picture takes on a typical subject of Medieval art: The Virgin and child enthroned among saints and angels. Unlike the standard thirteenth-century Madonna, however, Giotto's is neither expressionless nor remote. She's a woman with almost smiling lips and a thoughtful and directed gaze, instead. Her body, draped in rich, vibrantly colored clothing, presents a solid support for her infant son. The Madonna is more a common mother than a saint.
  Giotto's other preserved works include the Last Judgement, the Flight into Egypt, Crucifixion and The Kiss of Judas etc. During his lifetime numerous palaces and estates proudly hung his work; his frescos still adorn churches in northern Italy.