Giotto

**Giotto di Bondone** (c.1267–8 January 1337), usually known as **Giotto**, was an Italian painter and architect from Florence. He is generally thought of as the first in a line of great artists of the Italian Renaissance.

Giovanni Villani, who lived at the same time as Giotto, wrote that he was the king of painters, who drew all his figures as if they were alive. Villani says that, because he was so clever, the city of Florence gave him a salary.

In the 16th century, the biographer Giorgio Vasari says that Giotto changed painting from the Byzantine style of other artists of his day, and brought to life the great art of painting as it was made by the later Renaissance painters like Leonardo da Vinci. This was because Giotto drew his figures from life, rather than copying the style them from old well-known pictures in the way that the Byzantine artists like Cimabue and Duccio did.

Giotto's greatest work is the decoration of the *Scrovegni Chapel* in Padua, finished around 1305. The building is sometimes called the "Arena Chapel" because it is on the site of an Ancient Roman arena. This fresco series shows the life of the Virgin and the life of Christ. It is thought of as one of the greatest masterpieces of the Early Renaissance.

Although Vasari wrote about Giotto's life, it is not known how many of the stories are true, because Vasari was writing more than 200 years after Giotto died. Only two things are known for certain. It is known that in 1334 Giotto was chosen by the "commune" (town council) of Florence to design the bell tower next to Florence Cathedral which was being built at that time. It is also known for certain that Giotto painted the "Arena Chapel". But no-one can be certain where he was born, who his teacher was, what he looked like, whether he really painted the famous frescos at Assisi or where he was buried when he died.

## Biography 
### Early years 
Giotto was probably born in a hilltop farmhouse, perhaps at Colle di Romagnano or Romignano. He was the son of a well-respected man named Bondone. His name Giotto might have been a nickname from Ambrogiotto (little Ambrose) or Angelotto (little Angelo).
The year of his death is 1337, but the year of his birth (1267) is based on a poem by Antonio Pucci, the town crier of Florence, who said that Giotto was seventy when he died. Some people think that Pucci just used seventy because it fitted the rhyme of his poem, and that perhaps Giotto was a quite different age when he died. Nowadays, most art historians agree with this, but some books and some websites continue to say that these paintings are by Giotto.

The bones were those of a very short man, just over four feet tall. In a fresco in the Church of Santa Croce, there is a figure of a man who is a dwarf (a person who is very short). People at that church have always said that the dwarf was Giotto himself. The bones that were found at the cathedral support this story. Also, the bones had lots of unusual chemicals in them, such as arsenic and lead, which were found in the artist's paints.

## Gallery 

File:Flight into Egypt - Capella dei Scrovegni - Padua 2016.jpg|The Holy Family escapes to Egypt
File:Giotto di Bondone - No. 26 Scenes from the Life of Christ - 10. Entry into Jerusalem - WGA09206.jpg|Jesus is welcomed into Jerusalem.
File:Giotto - Scrovegni - -31- - Kiss of Judas.jpg|Jesus is kissed by Judas as a sign to the guards who have come to arrest him.
File:Dante-alighieri.jpg|Giotto's portrait of the famous writer Dante Alighieri

## Related pages
* List of Italian painters

## References 
* G.Previtali, *Giotto e la sua bottega* (1993)
* Giorgio Vasari, *Le vite de più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architetti* (1568)
* Giorgio Vasari, *Lives of the Artists*, trans. George Bull, Penguin Classics, (1965) 
* Sarel Eimerl, *The World of Giotto*, Time-Life Books, (1967), 

## Other reading 
* Norman Land, *Giotto as an Ugly Genius: A Study in Self-Portrayal,* in Andrew Ladis, ed., Giotto as a Historical and Literary Figure: Miscellaneous Studies, 4 vols. (Vol. 1: Giotto and the World of Early Italian Art), Garland Publishing, New York, 1998: 183 – 196.

## Footnotes