\paperw19995 \margr0\margl0 \plain \f1 Italian painter and architect.\par
Giotto is one of the greatest exponents of European Gothic and the man responsible for the renewal of I
talian figurative art in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, together with the sculptors Nicola and Giovanni Pisano and Arnolfo di Cambio. This historic role was recognized by his contemporaries, from Dante to the fourteenth-century writer Cennino C
ennini, who believed that Giotto ôtranslated the art of painting from Greek to Latin,ö taking it to the ômodern.ö By this he meant that Giotto abandoned Byzantine pictorial language (Greek) and created a new figurative culture (modern) whose roots lay in
the Gothic language of the West (Latin).\par
A painter of great fame, he worked in many places in Italy, but only a very small part of his vast output has survived. His frescoes in Rome, Rimini, Bologna, Naples, and Milan are known to us either from wr
itten sources, or indirectly, through the influence they had on the local pictorial schools that emerged after his visit. Other works by Giotto are fragmentary or only attributable in part to the artist himself, and so the group of paintings that can be
said without doubt to be his own work is indeed small.\par
GiottoÆs beginnings and youthful activity are obscure and the subject of dispute. He probably served his apprenticeship in CimabueÆs workshop. In the following years he may have gone to Rome and
before 1290 he was in Assisi, where he had the opportunity to study the classical orientations of contemporary Roman painting, which had a significant influence on his development. The \i Scenes from the Life of Saint Francis\i0 painted in the upper ba
silica of Assisi are considered the most important example of his early work, while only part of the art world attributes some of the scenes from the Old and New Testament in the upper rows to Giotto. Several of the scenes in the St. Francis cycle are al
most identical to the ones in the panel depicting the \i Stigmata of Saint Francis\i0 (Paris, Louvre), which comes from the church of San Francesco in Pisa and is signed ôOpus Iocti Florentini.ö\par
In the jubilee year of 1300 the artist was summoned
to Rome by Boniface VIII. Unfortunately very few traces of GiottoÆs activity in Rome have survived, but his works made a deep impression on the cityÆs painters. By the early fourteenth century Giotto was already a wealthy artist and ran a large workshop
in Florence. It is likely that, before being called to Rimini and Padua, he returned to the Tuscan city, where he painted a number of works including the \i Badia Polyptych\i0 (Florence, Uffizi) and the \i Madonna Enthroned\i0 in San Giorgio alla Costa
. All that survives in Rimini is a beautiful \i Crucifix\i0 in the church of San Francesco, but his activity there led to the birth of an important local school of painting. From 1303 to 1305 he was in Padua, where he painted the frescoes in the Scroveg
ni Chapel, considered his masterpiece and one of the most important works of Gothic painting in Europe.\par
By 1311 he was back in Florence. Two other masterpieces by Giotto were probably painted around this time: the \i Madonna in Glory\i0 for the chu
rch of Ognissanti (now in the Uffizi, Florence) and the \i Crucifix\i0 in Santa Maria Novella at Florence, which marks his abandonment of the accentuated pathos of the Byzantine tradition, still present in crucifixes by Cimabue (\i Crucifix\i0 in San D
omenico, Arezzo).\par
The frescoes in the chapel of the Magdalen and in the transept of the lower basilica in Assisi, much of them painted by assistants, are dated to the first and second decade of the fourteenth century. Immediately after his second st
ay in Padua (1317), during which time he painted the \i Crucifix\i0 of the Scrovegni Chapel, Giotto started to fresco the \i Scenes from the Lives of Saint John the Baptist and Saint John the Evangelist\i0 in the Peruzzi Chapel in Santa Croce, at Flore
nce. The \i Dormitio Virginis\i0 (Berlin-Dahlem, from the Florentine church of Ognissanti), which is almost entirely his own work, also belongs to this period. The frescoes depicting \i Scenes from the Life of Saint Francis\i0 in the Bardi Chapel in Sa
nta Croce at Florence and again almost all by GiottoÆs own hand were painted no later than 1328. From 1328 to 1333 the Florentine artist worked with numerous collaborators at Naples, in the service of King Robert of Anjou, but almost nothing remains his
work there. The signed polyptych in the Bologna Pinacoteca (only partly his own work) and the \i Baroncelli Polyptych\i0 in Santa Croce at Florence, much of which was probably painted by Taddeo Gaddi, must date from shortly afterward.\par
In 1334 Giott
o was appointed supervisor of the construction of Florence Cathedral and commenced the building of the campanile, which was finished by others. In 1335 he was summoned to Milan, where he painted works that have now vanished, and he died in the palace of
