By degrees, however, people grew tired of these unlifelike figures, and a painter named Giotto (1266?-1337) became the leader of a new motive in painting. It was simply to try and make the figures look real and the scenes in which they appeared seem natural. Instead of following a convention, he used his eyes and studied nature. He was no longer satisfied to fill in the background of his picture with a flat gold tint as the conventional painters had done. He wished to increase the reality of his figures by representing them in real surroundings, sometimes in a room, sometimes out of doors. Instead of being content to make his pictures flat, representing only length and breadth, he set to work to create the suggestion of the third dimension--depth. He would try and make you feel that you could walk from the foreground of his picture, step by step, through to the background; and that, as you reached each figure or object in the scene, you could pass your hand round it and feel that it had real bulk. I said “step by step” and I lay stress on it. For what Giotto tried to represent was not merely some figures in front and then a big gap that you had to jump over before you reached the background, but what the artists call the “successive planes” of the scene--the step-by-step appearance of the scene.