The Trecento and Early Netherlandish Painting

Giotto di Bondone, active in Florence and other Italian cities in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, is traditionally credited by later writers, above all Giorgio Vasari, with breaking decisively from the flat, stylized Byzantine manner and inaugurating a new pictorial naturalism that would define the entire trajectory of Italian Renaissance art. His most celebrated surviving work, the fresco cycle in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, commissioned by the wealthy banker Enrico Scrovegni and completed around 1305, depicts the lives of the Virgin and Christ in a sequence of scenes organized within believable, boxlike architectural spaces, populated by solidly modeled, weighty figures who express grief, tenderness, or anger through convincing gesture and facial expression rather than symbolic convention. In panels such as the Lamentation, mourners cluster around the dead Christ with bowed heads and outstretched arms in compositions of genuine emotional force, while Giotto's use of receding architectural lines, though not yet governed by consistent mathematical perspective, creates a new illusion of three-dimensional pictorial space. His Ognissanti Madonna, painted for a Florentine church around 1310, likewise gives the Virgin's throne a sense of physical volume and gives her body weight and presence largely absent from earlier Byzantine-influenced Madonnas. This shift toward solid, spatially coherent, emotionally legible painting is what later art historians mean by the "trecento revolution."