Giotto

This definitive, profusely illustrated volume celebrates Giotto (c. 1266-1337), who is considered one of the founders of modern painting. Giotto produced vivid, dramatic, intensely emotional images that enthralled his contemporaries and profoundly influenced his successors for centuries after his death. Giotto's early frescoes in the Upper Basilica of San Francesco in Assisi, the brilliant jewel-box that is the Scrovegni (or Arena) Chapel in Padua, and his late frescoes in Florence's Santa Croce still appear as fresh and bright as when they were painted. They are reproduced here in exquisite detail, along with his crucifixes and polyptychs, now treasured in museums around the world.

Producing a series of commissioned works for popes, cardinals, and noblemen in and around his native Tuscany, Giotto changed the course of European art by breaking away from the rigid stereotyped figures of the Byzantine and medieval traditions; his innovation was to give his characters natural movement and expression. His lively biblical stories and episodes from the life of St. Francis of Assisi are populated with convincingly realistic depictions of three-dimensional figures: secondary characters, both comic and tragic, display the range of the painter's wit and invention. The illusionistic spaces housing the scenes are masterpieces of perspective: like the earthy humanity captured in the figures, this revolutionary achievement was without equal in Giotto's time.