Giotto di Bondone, a Florentine, creates a revolution in painting, breaking free of the flat, ethereal Byzantine manner of his Italian predecessors by painting realistic human figures with the appearance of solid pieces of sculpture set within a convincing illusion of space.

Giotto introduces a psychology of relationships in his representation of human facial and body movements in his frescoed surfaces of the Arena Chapel of Padua, returning the pictorial depth and narrative interest of classical art to mural painting.