Enrico Scrovegni built a family chapel in Padua to save the soul of his father, who had made his fortune by usury. When the interior was ready for consecration in 1305, he summoned the most sought-after painter of the day to decorate it: Giotto di Bondone. The fresco cycle that followed would become the starting point of European painting for the next three centuries.

Giotto laid out the lives of the Virgin and of Christ in 39 scenes on the side walls in three tiers, with the *Last Judgement* covering the west wall. The novelty is not the subject but the mode of showing. In a Byzantine icon, figures stand in a golden void — here, there is gravity. Christ is wept over; Mary's face crumples as she holds the dead body of her son. Figures look at one another, hands tremble, eyes mist. This had not been in painting for twelve centuries.

Architecture and space also change. Behind the scenes, mountains begin to recede in perspective; the angled walls of buildings let the eye read three dimensions. True linear perspective is still a century away, but the idea of space as a box begins here.

Dante Alighieri is said to have been a friend of Giotto and mentions him in the *Divine Comedy* as the greatest painter of his age. Modern art history agrees: it is Giotto who left Cimabue behind and laid the foundations of the Renaissance. The chapel was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2021.