Giotto di Bondone was Florentine painter and architect, already recognized by Dante as the leading artist of his day. His significance to the Renaissance can be gauged from the fact that not only the leaders in the early 15th-century transformation of the arts, such as Masaccio, but the key figures of the High Renaissance, such as Raphael and Michelangelo were still learning from him and partly founding their style on his example. The reasons for this are dual. Firstly, his art is notable for its clear, grave, simple solutions to the basic problems of the representation of space and of the volume, structure, and solidity of 3-dimensional forms, and above the entire human figure. Secondly, he was a genius at getting to the heart of whatever episode from sacred history he was representing, at cutting it down to its essential, dramatic core, and at finding the compositional means to express its innermost spiritual meaning and its psychological effects in terms of simple areas of paint.
