Who is Giotto? Why was his work important to the renaissance?

Answer 1

Giotto di Bondone (Colle di Vespignano, near Florence 1267 – January 8, Florence 1337), better known simply as Giotto, was an Italian painter and architect. He is generally considered the first in a line of great artists who contributed to and developed the Italian Renaissance.
Giotto's art was extremely innovative, and is commonly considered as a precursor of that evolution which was to lead, shortly after, to the explosion of the Italian Rinascimento. He stands as the key link between the Byzantine art of the late middle ages, and the more realistic and humanistic art which flowered in the Renaissance. The flat, symbolic figures grouped in decorative space gave way to the modelled, individualized figures interacting in perspectival space. He managed to adopt the visual language of the sculptors — by lending his figures volume and weight. Comparing his Madonna to that of his teacher Cimabue shows why his contemporaries considered Giotto's paintings miracles of naturalism.

Giotto's counterpart in the rival city of Siena, the great Duccio, imbued his delicate compositions with deep emotionalism. But Giotto stands alone as the great initiator of three dimensional space in European painting.


He treated the religious themes that dominated medieval art with a new spirit, rendering them with a clear freshness and an unexpected liveliness, and many critics talk about a "human emotion" as the most peculiar feature of his works.

He received commissions for many works throughout Italy, and became a good friend of the king of Naples, as well as of Dante Alighieri. Boccaccio cited him in his Decameron.

Answer 2

Giotto was an artist and his work was definitely important to the Renaissance but I'm not sure how. I'm guessing that he started it all since he was born in the 13th century and we usually think of the late 15th and early 16th centuries as the Renaissance.

Answer 3

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Who is Giotto? Why was his work important to the renaissance?

Answer 4

The following is background on Giotto.

Giotto di Bondone (c. 1267 - 1337). Florentine painter and architect. Outstanding as a painter, sculptor, and architect, Giotto was recognized as the first genius of art in the Italian Renaissance. Giotto lived and worked at a time when people's minds and talents were first being freed from the shackles of medieval restraint. He dealt largely in the traditional religious subjects, but he gave these subjects an earthly, full-blooded life and force.

The artist's full name was Giotto di Bondone. He was born about 1266 in the village of Vespignano, near Florence. His father was a small landed farmer. Giorgio Vasari, one of Giotto's first biographers, tells how Cimabue, a well-known Florentine painter, discovered Giotto's talents. Cimabue supposedly saw the 12-year-old boy sketching one of his father's sheep on a flat rock and was so impressed with his talent that he persuaded the father to let Giotto become his pupil. Another story is that Giotto, while apprenticed to a wool merchant in Florence, frequented Cimabue's studio so much that he was finally allowed to study painting.

The earliest of Giotto's known works is a series of frescoes (paintings on fresh, still wet plaster) on the life of St. Francis in the church at Assisi. Each fresco depicts an incident; the human and animal figures are realistic and the scenes expressive of the gentle spirit of this patron saint of animals. In about 1305 and 1306 Giotto painted a notable series of 38 frescoes in the Arena Chapel in Padua. The frescoes illustrate the lives of Jesus Christ and of the Virgin Mary. Over the archway of the choir is a scene of the Court of Heaven, and a Last Judgment scene faces it on the entrance wall. The compositions are simple, the backgrounds are subordinated, and the faces are studies in emotional expression.

His work was important to the Renaissance because;

He possessed infinitely greater technical skill than the artists who followed him although his anatomy was not as advanced. He had a grasp of human emotion and of what was significant in human life. In concentrating on these essentials he created compelling pictures of people under stress, of people caught up in crises and soul-searching decisions. Modern artists often seek inspiration from Giotto. In him they find a direct approach to human experience that remains valid for every age.

Giotto is regarded as the founder of the central tradition of Western painting because his work broke free from the stylizations of Byzantine art, introducing new ideals of naturalism and creating a convincing sense of pictorial space. His momentous achievement was recognized by his contemporaries (Dante praised him in a famous passage of The Divine Comedy, where he said he had surpassed his master Cimabue), and in about 1400 Cennino Cennini wrote `Giotto translated the art of painting from Greek to Latin.'

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Giotto Artist

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Giotto Artwork

Answer 7

He was better at depicting a level of realism not only in the detail of the figures depicted but he was better at incorporating depth and spatial reasoning into his paintings.