Gothic and the Trecento
Giotto and the Sienese masters gave painting new bodies, emotions and space, long before the Renaissance got its name.
Trecento means three hundred and is the Italian name for the 14th century. It was a time when the wealthy city-republics of Tuscany built vast cathedrals and town halls. Gothic came from France, but in Italy it took a different form, with broader interiors, more wall surface and smaller windows. The large walls made room for frescoes, and so painting became the leading art in Italy. Over the century it was transformed. At the same time, artists became better known as individuals.
In Florence, Giotto broke with the Byzantine tradition and painted people who seem to have weight, emotions and bodies beneath their clothes. His frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua are regarded as a turning point in Western art. Meanwhile the painters of Siena – Duccio, Simone Martini and the Lorenzetti brothers – developed a more elegant style of gold, clear colors and fine lines. The two cities became rivals and models for the rest of Italy. Giotto’s way of telling a story focused on the human, and it changed ideas about what a picture could do.
The sculptors Nicola and Giovanni Pisano drew on ancient sarcophagi and French Gothic and gave new life to the pulpit. Toward the middle of the century Italy was struck by the Black Death of 1348, which killed a large part of the urban population. For a time art became more somber and more concerned with death and penance. Even so, the Trecento laid the foundation for everything that followed, and Renaissance artists saw Giotto as their forerunner. His name was already a byword in his own lifetime.