Circa 1267-1337
Painter And Architect

"The Best Painter in the World." The Italian artist Giotto di Bondone, through his highly skilled and naturalistic interpretation of form, helped change the direction of Western art in the Late Middle Ages. His paintings were innovative in their incorporation of three-dimensional form in a two-dimensional medium, a departure from the Byzantine stylizations that dominated Europe at the time. He also shifted aesthetic emphasis from the divine and ideal to the human and real. Giotto's works therefore mark a stylistic transition to the art of the early Renaissance, and he is sometimes considered the founder of modern painting. Little documentation exists on his life, though it is known that he worked for the Pope at one point in his career. In 1327 he was recorded as a member of the Florentine Painters Guild, the Arte dei Medici e Speziali. By the...