Trecento

The Trecento - Italian shorthand for the thirteen hundreds - names the fourteenth century in Italian cultural history, and in art it is where the Italian Renaissance begins, or at least its Proto-Renaissance. Its towering figure is Giotto, praised by contemporaries as the master who drew figures 'according to nature' and credited by Vasari with breaking decisively from Byzantine style; his fresco cycles in the Scrovegni Chapel, completed around 1305, remain the century's touchstone. Alongside him the Sienese school reached its first summit with Duccio, Simone Martini, Lippo Memmi, and the brothers Ambrogio and Pietro Lorenzetti, while sculptors such as Arnolfo di Cambio and Tino di Camaino carried the new weight and naturalism into marble. The century's art unfolded beside a great flowering of vernacular literature - Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio - and of secular music.

Defining characteristics

• Gold-ground panel painting with punched, tooled halos and elaborate borders
• New naturalism: weightier figures, observed gesture, and shallow but believable space
• Continuous narrative fresco cycles telling sacred stories scene by scene
• Gothic elegance in the Sienese current: flowing line, courtly drapery, rich colour
• Sculpted pulpits and tombs with expressive, individualised figures
• Luminous tempera colour - lapis blue, vermilion, and gold

Key figures

• Giotto (c. 1267-1337) — Florentine master whose naturalism and narrative art opened the Proto-Renaissance
• Duccio (c. 1255-c. 1319) — Founder of the Sienese school, fusing Byzantine structure with new sweetness
• Simone Martini (c. 1284-1344) — Sienese court painter whose elegant line carried Trecento art toward International Gothic
• Ambrogio Lorenzetti (c. 1290-1348) — Painter of the great Allegory of Good and Bad Government in Siena's Palazzo Pubblico

Example works

• Scrovegni Chapel frescoes — Giotto (c. 1305)
• Maestà — Duccio (1308-1311)
• The Allegory of Good and Bad Government — Ambrogio Lorenzetti (1338-1339)

Sources

• Trecento - Wikipedia encyclopedia

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