Word: giottos
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Then came Giotto. He was an artisan like countless others of the age, though he possessed something his predecessors and contemporaries did not: an inner eye that could see how human figures could be brought to life on a wall. He replaced golden backdrops with the hills, meadows and houses familiar to 14th century Italians. In those earthly settings he placed three-dimensional Christs and Virgins, saints and sinners, painted as ordinary humans invested with natural emotions. His sweetly weary Madonna locks eyes with the observer as she swaddles a baby-size Jesus...
...jaded by the unnatural deconstructions of 20th century art cannot easily imagine the electric impact Giotto made by painting natural human figures that reached out of their frames to communicate directly with the observer. This was not simply a marvel in a superstitious age but also the artistic birth of the Renaissance. Giotto fathered a radical revolution of startling genius that set the course of Western art for the next 600 years...
Little is known of the life and development of Giotto di Bondone, born around 1267 to peasants in the bucolic valleys outside Florence. Legend says the country boy tending his flocks was discovered by the painter Cimabue, who saw him draw a fine sheep upon a rock. A more likely tale has him haunting Cimabue's Florentine bottega until the painter made him an apprentice. There Giotto absorbed his mentor's strength of drawing and sense of drama, but nature was his true teacher. He divined how to depict, with brush and pigment, the human body according to the prescription...
...Assisi, Italy. Its main purpose is to draw attention to the disaster that struck the great pilgrimage center in September 1997, when an earthquake shook loose the vaults of its upper church, weakening the whole structure and bringing down some 2,000 sq. ft. of frescoes by Cimabue and Giotto in a ruin of colored plaster-dust and tens of thousands of jigsaw-puzzle fragments...
Paintings by Degas, Botticelli, Matisse, Giotto, Velasquez, Sargent and Holbein adorn medieval tapestries, which in turn cover the walls of the Northern European Hall, the Spanish Chapel the Chinese Loggia and the Dutch Drawing Room. Watercolors by Turner and masterpieces by Rembrandt peek out from behind neoclassical chaises lounges. Writings by Napoleon, T.S. Eliot and Sarah Bernhardt fill all nooks and crannies...