It is no exaggeration to say that Giotto and his scholars, within the space of little more than half a century, painted out upon the walls of the churches and public palaces of Italy every great conception of the Middle Ages.  And this they achieved without ascetic formalism, energetically, but always reverently, aiming at expressing life and dramatising Scripture history.  The tale told about Giotto’s first essay in drawing might be chosen as a parable:  he was not found beneath a church roof tracing a mosaic, but on the open mountain, trying to draw the portrait of the living thing committed to his care.

What, therefore, Giotto gave to art was, before all things else, vitality.  His Madonnas are no longer symbols of a certain phase of pious awe, but pictures of maternal love.  The Bride of God suckles her divine infant with a smile, watches him playing with a bird, or stretches out her arms to take him when he turns crying from the hands of the circumcising priest.  By choosing incidents like these from real home-life, Giotto, through his painting, humanised the mysteries of faith, and brought them close to common feeling.  Nor was the change less in his method than his motives.  Before his day painting had been without composition, without charm of colour, without suggestion of movement or the play of living energy.  He first knew how to distribute figures in the given space with perfect balance, and how to mass them together in animated groups agreeable to the eye.  He caught varied and transient shades of emotion, and expressed them by the posture of the body and the play of feature.  The hues of morning and of evening served him.  Of all painters he was most successful in preserving the clearness and the light of pure, well-tempered colours.  His power of telling a story by gesture and action is unique in its peculiar simplicity.  There are no ornaments or accessories in his pictures.  The whole force of the artist has been concentrated on rendering the image of the life conceived by him.  Relying on his knowledge of human nature, and seeking only to make his subject intelligible, no painter is more unaffectedly pathetic, more unconsciously majestic.  While under the influence of his genius, we are sincerely glad that the requisite science for clever imitation of landscape and architectural backgrounds was not forthcoming in his age.  Art had to go through a toilsome period of geometrical and anatomical pedantry, before it could venture, in the frescoes of Michael Angelo and Raphael, to return with greater wealth of knowledge on a higher level to the divine simplicity of its childhood in Giotto.