Italian Painter Buried 700 Years After Death

V I E N N A, Austria , Jan. 8 -- The great Italian master painter Giotto has been finally laid to rest, 664 years after he died. Or has he?

Cardinal Silvano Piovanelli, Archbishop of Florence, said mass today in Florence’s Cathedral, for the peace of the soul of pre-Renaissance painter Giotto on the anniversary of his death in 1337.

Immediately afterward, he presided over the reburial of three skeletons found in one of the tombs excavated there in the early ’70s, in the church of Santa Maria Del Flore, the foundation of which dates back to 760 A.D. But he could not lay to rest the academic spat that rages over whether one of those skeletons could have been that of Giotto himself.