Name: Detail from the fresco after resoration. Location: Scrovegni chapel in PaduaAstonishing detail: The mothers of the children massacred by King Herod. You can see traces of real tears run down their faces. Giotto is regarded as a founder of modern western painting because his work broke free from the stylisations of Byzantine art by introducing a convincing sense of three dimensional space. His work stunned the poet Dante and other contemporaries. Giotto's frescos offer an astonishing transparency and lightness of colour. Unlike other fresco painters who painted on dry plaster, Giotto worked directly onto the wet plaster, painting just enough as he could cover in a day. This way the paint penetrated deeply into the plaster and retained its vivid colour to this day. Giotto resurrected perspective lost in the Dark Ages, and translated the three-dimensional world perfectly onto a two-dimensional surface. In Giotto the world rises out of flatness, into fullness.