In 2000, anthropologists examining a skeleton beneath the Cathedral of Florence found a very short man with a large skull, neck vertebrae compressed from decades of looking upward, front teeth ground down in a circular pattern, and bones saturated with lead and arsenic. They believed they had found Giotto di Bondone, the 14th-century painter who pulled Western art out of the flat, gold-backed Byzantine tradition. This episode begins with that forensic profile of a working fresco painter and then works backward through the myths and the documented facts of his life, from Vasari's tale of a shepherd boy discovered by Cimabue to the reality that he was the son of a Florentine blacksmith.

We look closely at what Giotto actually changed: figures with weight and gravity, foreshortening, directional light and shadow, and above all human emotion. T ...