Stand in front of Giotto's Madonna and look at the throne.
It occupies actual space.
The angels around it overlap each other.
Mary has hips.
The Christ child looks like a child.
The whole composition exists in three dimensions in a way that Cimabue's — painted perhaps 20 years earlier — simply does not.
This is not just a stylistic preference.
Giotto worked out how to depict the physical world, and in doing so invented a language of painting that would be refined over the next 200 years and culminate in the High Renaissance.
He is the hinge between medieval art and everything that came after it.
He was also the first European artist since antiquity to be famous as an individual.
People didn't commission a Madonna — they commissioned 'a Giotto.'
That concept — the artist as celebrity, the artwork as personal expression — starts here.
Fun fact: the 14th-century author Boccaccio described Giotto as the man who 'brought back to light' an art that had been buried for centuries.
The classical world had painted figures with weight and depth.
Medieval art had forgotten how.
Giotto remembered.
