c. 1400–1600

Renaissance

In the 15th century, artists in Florence rediscovered antiquity and placed humankind at the centre. They invented single-point perspective, studied anatomy and turned craftsmen into celebrated geniuses. The Renaissance still shapes the European idea of art today.

A competition in Florence

In 1401 the cloth merchants’ guild of Florence announced a competition. It was looking for an artist to make new bronze doors for the Baptistery, the church facing the cathedral. Each candidate had to cast the same relief: the Sacrifice of Isaac. Two designs reached the final round, one by the young goldsmith Lorenzo Ghiberti, the other by Filippo Brunelleschi. Both panels survive in the Museo Nazionale del Bargello. Ghiberti won and worked on his doors for more than two decades.

Brunelleschi turned to architecture. He built the immense dome of Florence Cathedral, which still dominates the city, and around 1420 he demonstrated how space could be transferred onto a flat surface with mathematical precision. This single-point perspective became the tool of a new art.

Rebirth: a name with a purpose

“Renaissance” means rebirth. As early as 1550, the painter and biographer Giorgio Vasari spoke in his Lives of the Artists of a “rinascita”, a rebirth of the arts after the supposedly dark Middle Ages. As the name of a period, the word only took hold in the 19th century, above all through Jacob Burckhardt’s book The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy of 1860.

Scholars now view this narrative more critically. The Middle Ages were neither dark nor cut off from antiquity, and many Renaissance innovations have Gothic roots. Yet it remains true that in the 15th century the way people saw humankind, nature and the role of the artist changed fundamentally.

Man as the measure

The humanists read ancient texts afresh and placed the human being, with all its dignity and abilities, at the centre. Artists translated this into images. Around 1427 Masaccio painted his fresco of the Holy Trinity in the church of Santa Maria Novella, a chapel rendered in such convincing perspective that the wall seems to open up. Donatello’s bronze David is probably the first freestanding nude figure since antiquity. In 1435 Leon Battista Alberti explained in his treatise on painting how to construct perspective.

Wealthy patrons were essential to this flowering. In Florence, the Medici banking family supported artists, scholars and philosophers. Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus also came out of the Medici circle. It is regarded as one of the first large-scale paintings since antiquity to show a naked goddess of pagan mythology.

The High Renaissance

Around 1500 the movement reached its peak, the so-called High Renaissance. Three artists embody it. Leonardo da Vinci combined art with the study of nature, dissected corpses to understand the body and developed sfumato, softly dissolving transitions. His Last Supper in Milan and the Mona Lisa in the Louvre are among the most famous pictures in the world.

From 1501 to 1504 Michelangelo carved his David from a block of marble on which other sculptors had failed, and from 1508 to 1512 he painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. In the Vatican, Raphael decorated the rooms of Pope Julius II, including the School of Athens, which gathers the philosophers of antiquity in an ideal architecture. The sack of Rome by imperial troops in 1527 brought this phase to an end.

Venice: colour instead of line

Venice developed a painting of its own. Giovanni Bellini, Giorgione and Titian worked in oil on canvas and built their pictures from colour and light rather than drawing. Vasari, a Florentine, saw this as a shortcoming. The dispute between “disegno”, drawing, and “colorito”, colour, occupied art theory for centuries.

The Renaissance in the North

North of the Alps, things took a different course. In Flanders, Jan van Eyck was already painting in oil in the 1430s with unprecedented precision, for example in the Ghent Altarpiece and the Arnolfini Portrait. Albrecht Dürer of Nuremberg travelled twice to Italy and brought perspective and the theory of proportion to Germany. Printing, introduced around 1450 by Johannes Gutenberg in Mainz, spread prints throughout Europe, and Dürer used it shrewdly to build his fame.

The artist becomes a genius

In the Middle Ages, painters and sculptors were regarded as craftsmen. In the Renaissance, the best of them rose to become scholars and celebrated personalities. They signed their works, portrayed themselves and were courted by princes. Dürer’s self-portrait of 1500 shows him frontally, in a pose reminiscent of images of Christ, a confident statement of the artist’s rank.

A few women also made their way, often against great resistance. The sculptor Properzia de’ Rossi received her own biography in Vasari’s Lives, and the painter Sofonisba Anguissola became a court painter at the Spanish court.

Why it still matters

The Renaissance set standards against which art was measured for centuries: perspectival space, anatomically correct bodies, harmonious proportions. The academies founded in the 16th century made these rules teachable. Only modernism broke radically with them. Anyone who wants to understand what the Impressionists, Cubists and Expressionists were rebelling against has to begin with the Renaissance.