Giotto di Bondone, known mononymously as Giotto, was an Italian painter and architect from Florence during the Late Middle Ages. He worked during the Gothic and Proto-Renaissance period. Giotto's contemporary, the banker and chronicler Giovanni Villani, wrote that Giotto was "the most sovereign master of painting in his time, who drew all his figures and their postures according to nature" and of his publicly recognized "talent and excellence". Giorgio Vasari described Giotto as making a decisive break from the prevalent Byzantine style and as initiating "the great art of painting as we know it today, introducing the technique of drawing accurately from life, which had been neglected for more than two hundred years". 1266 – January 16, 1337; died at about 71. Alive at the same time as Dante Alighieri, Marco Polo, Kublai Khan, William of Ockham, and Roger Bacon. Wiki link