Art by Giotto

Giotto is usually credited as the person who broke Italian painting out of its flat, gold-backed Byzantine mode and pointed it toward everything the Renaissance would become: weight, depth, faces that look like they're actually feeling something. According to Vasari, Cimabue found him as a shepherd boy sketching sheep on a rock and took him on as an apprentice, a story most historians now treat as legend rather than fact, but a good one regardless. Two other Vasari anecdotes stuck around for the same reason: Giotto once painted a fly on one of Cimabue's paintings so convincingly that Cimabue tried to brush it away, and when a papal messenger asked him for a sample of his work, Giotto supposedly just freehanded a perfect circle and sent that instead. He got the commission.

His masterwork is the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, 37 fresco scenes from the lives of the Virgin and Christ, painted between 1303 and 1310, soaked in ultramarine blue that was, at the time, more expensive than gold. Dante wrote him into the Divine Comedy while he was still alive, noting that Cimabue used to think he led the field in painting, "and now Giotto has the cry," a line that was already treating Giotto as having eclipsed his own teacher.