Almost 200 years before Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel and da Vinci’s Last Supper came Padua’s Renaissance breakthrough: Giotto’s moving, modern 1303–05 frescoes in the Capella degli Scrovegni. Medieval churchgoers were accustomed to blank stares from flat saints perched high on gold Gothic thrones – but Giotto introduces Biblical figures as characters in recognisable settings, caught up in extraordinary circumstances. Onlookers gossip as middle-aged Anne tenderly kisses Joachim, and late in life gives birth to miracle-baby Mary; exhausted new dad Joseph falls asleep sitting up in the manger, as sheep and angels take the night watch over baby Jesus; and Jesus stares down Judas as the traitor puckers up for the kiss that sealed Jesus’s fate.