Giotto di Bondone, known mononymously as Giotto and Latinised as Giottus, was an Italian painter and architect from Florence during the Late Middle Ages. He worked during the Gothic/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". In his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters and Architects, Giorgio Vasari described Giotto as making a decisive break with the prevalent Byzantine style and as initiating "the great art of painting as we know it today, introducing the technique of drawing from life, neglected for more than two hundred years". Giotto's masterwork is the decoration of the Scrovegni Chapel, in Padua known as the Arena Chapel, completed around 1305; the fresco cycle depicts the Life of Christ. It is regarded as one of the supreme masterpieces of the Early Renaissance.

That Giotto painted the Arena Chapel and was chosen by the Commune of Florence in 1334 to design the new campanile of the Florence Cathedral are among the few certainties about his life. Every other aspect of it is subject to controversy: his birth date, his birthplace, his appearance, his apprenticeship, the order in which he created his works, whether or not he painted the famous frescoes in the Upper Basilica of Saint Francis in Assisi and his burial place. Tradition holds that Giotto was born in a farmhouse at Colle di Romagnano or Romignano. Since 1850, a tower house in nearby Colle Vespignano has borne a plaque claiming the honor of his birthplace, an assertion, commercially publicized. However, recent research has presented documentary evidence that he was born in Florence, the son of a blacksmith, his father's name was Bondone. Most authors accept that Giotto was his real name, but it is to have been an abbreviation of Ambrogio or Angelo. Vasari states that Giotto was a shepherd boy, a merry and intelligent child, loved by all who knew him.

The great Florentine painter Cimabue discovered Giotto drawing pictures of his sheep on a rock. They were so lifelike that Cimabue approached Giotto and asked if he could take him on as an apprentice. Cimabue was one of the two most renowned painters of Tuscany, the other being Duccio, who worked in Siena. Vasari recounts a number of such stories about Giotto's skill as a young artist, he tells of one occasion when Cimabue was absent from the workshop, Giotto painted a remarkably lifelike fly on a face in a painting of Cimabue. When Cimabue returned, he tried several times to brush the fly off. Many scholars today are uncertain about Giotto's training and consider Vasari's account that he was Cimabue's pupil as legend. Vasari relates that when Pope Benedict XI sent a messenger to Giotto, asking him to send a drawing to demonstrate his skill, Giotto drew a red circle so perfect that it seemed as though it was drawn using a pair of compasses and instructed the messenger to send it to the Pope; the messenger departed ill pleased.

The messenger brought other artists' drawings back to the Pope in addition to Giotto's. When the messenger related how he had made the circle without moving his arm and without the aid of compasses the Pope and his courtiers were amazed at how Giotto's skill surpassed all of his contemporaries. Around 1290, Giotto married the daughter of Lapo del Pela of Florence; the marriage produced four daughters and four sons, one of whom, became a painter. Giotto worked in Rome in 1297 -- 1300. By 1301, Giotto owned a house in Florence, when he was not traveling, he would return there and live in comfort with his family. By the early 1300s, he had multiple painting commissions in Florence; the Archbasilica of St. John Lateran houses a small portion of a fresco cycle, painted for the Jubilee of 1300 called by Boniface VIII. In this period Giotto painted the Badia Polyptych, now in the Uffizi, Florence. Cimabue went to Assisi to paint several large frescoes at the new Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi, it is possible, but not certain, that Giotto went with him.

The attribution of the fresco cycle of the Life of St. Francis in the Upper Church has been one of the most disputed in art history; the documents of the Franciscan Friars that relate to artistic commissions during this period were destroyed by Napoleon's troops, who stabled horses in the Upper Church of the Basilica, so scholars have debated the attribution to Giotto. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, it was convenient to attribute every fresco in the Upper Church not by Cimabue to the more well-known Giotto. In the 1960s, art experts Millard Meiss and Leonetto Tintori examined all of the Assisi frescoes, found some of the paint contained white lead—also used in Cimabue's badly deteriorated Crucifixion. No known works by Giotto feature this medium. However, Giotto's panel painting of the Stigmatization of St. Francis includes a motif of the saint holding up the collapsing church included in the Assisi frescoes; the authorship of a large number of panel paintings ascribed to Giotto by Vasari, among others, is as broadly disputed as the Assisi frescoes.

According to Vasari, Giotto's earliest works were for the Dominicans at Santa Maria Novella. They include a fresco of The Annunciation and an enormous suspended Crucif

Thomas J. Bowers was a chief justice of the Idaho Territorial Court from July 18, 1868 to April 9, 1869; the court preceded the Idaho Supreme Court, established when Idaho became a state in 1890. Bowers was born in 1828 in Nashville, where he studied law and began his practice, he moved to Nevada County, California, in 1850 to Sierra County in 1858. Bowers married Jane L. Clark in 1857, he was appointed Chief Justice of Idaho Territory by President Andrew Johnson in 1868. He located in the seat of the second judicial district. A Democrat, Bowers was replaced as Chief Justice in 1869 by David Noggle when Ulysses S. Grant, a Republican, became president. After his time on the territorial court, Bowers incorporated the Ida Elmore Mining Company in 1869 and served as corporate secretary and trustee, but he soon left Idaho. Bowers returned to California, he served as district attorney 1873-1879 and as superior court judge 1879-1884. In 1884 he resumed his law practice, locating in San Francisco until his death in 1893.

He was elected judge of the San Francisco Police Court in 1892. List of Justices of the Idaho Supreme Court

The burnet companion moth is a moth of the family Erebidae. It is found in most of the Palearctic ecozone from Ireland in the west to Mongolia and Siberia in the east, south to the Mediterranean and North Africa. Forewing pale grey suffused with pale uniform pale brown; the more uniformly dark brown examples constitute the ab. suffusa Spul. the usual form in Britain. Larva yellowish reddish brown; the larvae feed on Viola, Trifolium species, Medicago sativa, Lotus corniculatus, Vicia cracca, Lathyrus pratensis, Hippocrepis comosa. Burnet companion on UKMoths Lepiforum e. V. De Vlinderstichting