GIOTTO DI BONDONE : The massacre of the innocents, 1302-05 – Fresco on wall, 200- 185 cm. – Scrovegni Chapel, Padua

"Credette Cimabue nella pittura / Tener lo campo, ed ora ha Giotto il grido/ sì, che la fama di colui oscura"

Dante, Divine Comedy

In his Lives of the artists, Vasari counts that in a quiet day, the Florentine painter Cimabue was walking by the field when he observed surprised a young shepherd, only a little boy, who was painting ewes on a rock with a white chalk. When the master answered for his name, the child responded: My name is Giotto, and my father is called Bondone

Be certain or not this anecdote, it is useful to begin to summarize the main pictorial characteristics that made of Giotto di Bondone (1266-1337) the man who revolutionized the western Art to the point that many critics consider him, not without reason, the first name of the European painting, praised by his contemporaries Dante, Petrarca and Boccaccio Art. The Art as expression of the human feelings appears again with works like this, opposed to the hieratic Byzantine tradition. It's enough with observing the heartrendering faces of the mothers watching the inevitable death of their children to understand of which we are speaking. Giotto is to the Italian trecento a phenomenon which all try to follow but nobody is able to reach until the appearance of Fra Angelico and the primitive flamenco masters of the early 15 th Century.