By the time he reached the age of ten Giotto showed in all his boyish ways such unusually quick intelligence and liveliness that he delighted not only his father but all who knew him, whether they lived in the village or beyond. Bondone used to let him look after some sheep; and while the animals grazed here and there about the far, the boy, drawn instinctively to the art of design, was always sketching what he saw in nature, or imagined in his own mind, on stones or on the ground or the sand. One day Cimabue was on his way from Florence to Vespignano, where he had some business to attend to, when he came across Giotto who, while the sheep were grazing near by, was drawing one of them by scratching with a slightly pointed piece of stone on a smooth clean piece of rock. And this was before he had received any instruction except for what he saw in nature itself. Cimabue stopped in astonishment to watch him, and then he asked the boy whether he would like to come and live with him. Giotto answered that if his father agreed he would love to do so. So Cimabue approached Bondone, who was delighted to grant his request and allowed him to take the boy to Florence. After he had gone to live there, helped by his natural talent and instructed by Cimabue, in a very short space of time Giotto not only captured his maser's own style but also began to draw so ably from life that he made a decisive break with the crude traditional Byzantine style and brought to life the great art of painting as we know today, introducing the technique of drawing accurately from life, which had been ignored for more than two hundred years. Althought, as I said before, one or two people had tried to do this, no one succeeded as completely and as immediately as Giotto. Among the things he did at this time was, as we can see today, a painting in the chapel at the palace of Podesta at Florence, showing his dear friend Dante Alighieri, who was no less famous as a poet than he was as a painter. (We find Giotto being highly praised by Giovanni Boccaccio in the introduction to his story about Forese de Rabatta and Giotto himself.) In the same chapel are portraits by Giotto of Dante's master, Brunetto Latini, and of Corsa Donati, an eminent Florentine citizen of those days.

Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists is all biographical information we have of some of Italy's greatest artists.

While I find some of the writing dry and hard to understand without knowing the artists' works, I truly enjoy the anecdotes he tells about the famous artists. Which is why I chose the following section from the biography of Giotto.