Florentine works of one of the great innovators of Italian painting
'Cimabue thought / To lord it over painting’s field; and now / The cry is Giotto's …': the incredible and meteoric fame achieved by Giotto was such that he is even cited in Dante's The Divine Comedy (Purgatory, Canto XI), written when the artist was still alive.

Indeed, Giotto rapidly became an artistic and cultural legend of his age and of those to come: wherever he went – Florence, Assisi, Padua, Naples – he produced profoundly innovative work that departed radically from Byzantine models of painting and introduced a new sense of space, volume and colour.

His Crucifix in Santa Maria Novella (dating to between 1290 and 1300), for instance, depicts a heavy, real, highly plastic Christ figure with a very terrestrial dimension. The deep spiritual significance of the painting stems from this physicality.

The same revolutionary realism can be found in Giotto's mature Maestà, held in the Uffizi. The perspective employed to depict the throne is not the geometric and scientific variety of the 15th century, but is nonetheless lifelike; the bodies have the right proportions and move naturally, with shadows to give a sense of depth and volume. All these traits would have been mind-blowing for 14th-century observers accustomed to the schematic fixity of Byzantine painting.

Any Giotto-oriented itinerary in Florence would also have to include a visit to the Church of Santa Croce to see two series of frescoes, the Life of St Francis in the Bardi Chapel, and scenes from the Lives of St John the Baptist and St John the Evangelist in the Peruzzi Chapel (two other frescoed chapels have not survived).

Then there is the Polytych of Santa Reparata in the Cathedral, attributed to Giotto and to the 'Relative of Giotto'; and a Saint Stephen (housed in the Museo della Fondazione Horne) recognized as an autograph work by the English collector, though scholars have questioned this attribution.

Finally, there is a fragment of a Madonna and Child in the parish church of Borgo San Lorenzo to the north of Florence; this came to light in 1985 under a later painting and is considered to be a youthful work by Giotto.