Giotto's Badia Polyptych

Regarded as the first Renaissance painter, Giotto di Bondone adopted the naturalistic approach in his paintings, abandoning the Greco-Byzantine style that his predecessors had so commonly utilized.

Badia Polyptych Wikipedia Creative Commons

Some of Giotto’s first paintings were in the chapel of the high altar in the Badia of Florence, its crowning glory being his Badia Polyptych completed in 1302. The work is composed of five ancona-shaped, tempura panels each housing a different religious figure. The center frame portrays the bust of the Virgin Mary with the Child grasping at her neckline. The other figures from the left, are Saints Nicholas of Bari, John the Evangelist, Pieter and Benedict, each identified not only by their iconography but also, by the convenient titles that hover over their halos. Unlike those by Cimabue and Duccio, Giotto's figures are not stylized or elongated and do not follow set Byzantine models. Although parts of the painting harken back to Byzantine influence such as the heavily gilded frame and backgrounds, overall the work is a large step forward in terms of an increasingly realistic approach to rendering figures.

Depth is created in the transition from light to dark, a technique that would later be called, chiaroscuro and is used heavily throughout the piece, most notably in the folds of the rich fabrics clothing the saints such as St. Peters red stole. Overall this piece is truly remarkable for its time and marks the beginning of the transition from the proto-renaissance art of the duecento to the composed and naturalistic works of the high renaissance.