Gothic art

Gothic architecture begins in the 1140s; its choir at Saint-Denis was consecrated in 1144. Gothic painting follows from about 1200, in stained glass and illuminated manuscripts, and on wooden panels in Italy later in the century. Around 1400 it gives way, first to the courtly International Gothic, then to the Renaissance in Florence and to the new oil painting of Flanders.

The name was an insult. Renaissance writers called the style Gothic, after the Goths who had sacked Rome, to mean barbarous, the opposite of the classical art they admired.

In Florence, Cimabue began to soften the stiff Byzantine manner the Italians called the Greek style, and Giotto broke with it. Giotto's frescoes in the Arena Chapel in Padua, finished about 1305, show people who grieve, kiss and argue in spaces deep enough to stand in. His Madonna Enthroned gives the Virgin a body under her robe.

In Siena, Duccio painted the Maestà, an altarpiece so large and so admired that the city carried it in procession to the cathedral in 1311. Simone Martini and the brothers Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti carried Sienese grace and color on into the 1340s; Ambrogio's Allegory of Good Government, painted in the city hall in 1338 and 1339, is one of the first great paintings of a city and its countryside. The Black Death of 1348 struck both Florence and Siena hard and ended that generation.

Around 1400 the courts of Paris, Prague and Milan wanted elegance and precious detail: International Gothic. Within a generation, Masaccio in Florence and Jan van Eyck in Flanders had begun the Renaissance and the Northern Renaissance.