Giotto: Terrace 1, Purgatorio 11   The Renaissance writer Vasari claims that Oderisi was a good friend of Giotto, the most renowned artist of the so-called Proto-Renaissance. A Florentine contemporary of Dante, who most likely knew the poet, Giotto di Bondone (c. 1267-1337) was a painter, sculptor, and architect whose earlier work, including frescoes of the life of St. Francis (in Assisi, c. 1290-6) and a fresco of the Last Judgment in the Arena Chapel at Padua (1305), is thought to have influenced Dante. Breaking with the iconographic conventions of Byzantine painting, Giotto created scenes with a heightened sense naturalness and physical reality (through the illusion of weight and three-dimensional space). He thus distinguished himself even from his master, Cimabue, as Dante now has Oderisi affirm on the first terrace of Purgatory (11.94-6). Cimabue (c. 1240-1308) was a Florentine painter whose art already challenged Byzantine conventions through an increased emphasis on representing emotion and the plasticity of figures.