Giotto

Giotto di Bondone worked in Florence during the late 1200s and early 1300s, at the hinge between Gothic tradition and what would become the Renaissance. His contemporary, banker Giovanni Villani, noted that Giotto drew figures "according to nature" with publicly recognized excellence; Giorgio Vasari later credited him with breaking from Byzantine style and reviving the technique of drawing accurately from life after two centuries of neglect. Around 1305 he completed the Scrovegni Chapel frescoes in Padua - depicting the lives of the Virgin and Christ - now regarded as one of the supreme masterpieces of the Early Renaissance. In 1334 the Commune of Florence chose him to design the campanile of the Florence Cathedral. Nearly everything else about his life remains contested: his birth date (around 1267), his birthplace, his training, the sequence of his works, whether he painted the famous Assisi frescoes, even where he was buried after his death on January 8, 1337.