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Art Through Time · 1400 to 1600

Renaissance art

The Renaissance was the great revival of art and learning that began in Florence around 1400 and spread across Europe until about 1600. Painters studied the art of ancient Greece and Rome, worked out perspective and anatomy, and put the human figure, solid and believable, at the center of the picture.

The word means rebirth: the rebirth, as Italians of the time saw it, of the classical world after a thousand years of the Middle Ages.

When
1400 to 1600
Began
Florence, c. 1400; Masaccio's Holy Trinity, c. 1427
Grew out of
Gothic art

When was the Renaissance?

In painting, the Renaissance runs from about 1400 to 1600, in three parts. The Early Renaissance, about 1400 to 1490, belongs to Florence: Masaccio, Fra Angelico, Filippo Lippi and Botticelli. The High Renaissance, about 1490 to 1527, is the short peak when Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael were all at work. The Late Renaissance carries on to about 1600, in Titian's Venice and in the restless style called Mannerism.

The High Renaissance is usually said to end in 1527, the year the troops of the Emperor Charles V sacked Rome. North of the Alps, the Northern Renaissance took its own path, from Jan van Eyck in the 1430s to Pieter Bruegel the Elder in the 1560s.

How to recognize Renaissance art

  • Perspective. Lines that meet at a single vanishing point, so the picture opens like a window onto real space. Filippo Brunelleschi demonstrated it in Florence early in the century, and Leon Battista Alberti set out the method in On Painting in 1435.
  • Bodies with weight. Figures that stand, turn and cast shadows, drawn from the study of anatomy and of ancient statues.
  • Calm, balanced compositions, often built on a triangle, with the most important figure at the center.
  • Soft light and shade. Leonardo's sfumato, the smoky blending that leaves no hard outline, gives the Mona Lisa her face.
  • The ancient world beside the Christian one. Greek and Roman buildings, and the gods of classical myth, as in Botticelli's Primavera.
  • Real people. Bankers, merchants and their wives painted as individuals, with the faces they actually had.

Where did the Renaissance begin?

In Florence, a rich republic of bankers and wool merchants, where families such as the Medici paid for churches, chapels and paintings as a mark of piety and of power. Around 1400 its artists began to look hard at the ruins of ancient Rome and at the world in front of them, and Masaccio's Holy Trinity, painted about 1427, showed a chapel so convincing in its perspective that it seems to open the church wall.

From Florence the new style traveled to Rome, where popes hired Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling, from 1508 to 1512, and Raphael to paint the rooms of the Vatican, among them The School of Athens. In Venice, Giovanni Bellini, Giorgione and Titian built their pictures from color and light rather than line. Giorgione's The Tempest has no clear story at all: a soldier, a mother nursing her child, and a storm coming over the town behind them.

Famous Renaissance paintings

  • Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci, begun about 1503.
  • The Last Supper, Leonardo da Vinci, about 1495 to 1498, painted on the wall of a monastery dining hall in Milan.
  • Primavera, Sandro Botticelli, about 1480: Venus in an orange grove, with the Graces dancing beside her.
  • The School of Athens, Raphael, 1509 to 1511: Plato and Aristotle among the philosophers of Greece.
  • Sistine Madonna, Raphael, about 1512, with the two bored angels leaning on the ledge below.
  • The Tempest, Giorgione, about 1506 to 1508.
  • Lamentation of Christ, Andrea Mantegna, seen feet first in startling foreshortening.

What came after the Renaissance?

After Raphael died in 1520, younger painters in Florence and Rome stretched his poise into something stranger: Mannerism, with its long necks, cool colors and crowded spaces. Around 1600, in Rome, Caravaggio and Annibale Carracci turned away from that artifice toward drama and real bodies, and the Baroque began.

Inside the Renaissance

  • Early Renaissance, 1400 to 1490. Florence rediscovers perspective and the human body.
  • Venetian painting, 1460 to 1600. Color and light over line: Bellini, Giorgione, Titian.
  • High Renaissance, 1490 to 1527. Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo at their peak.
  • Mannerism, 1520 to 1600. Elongated figures, strange colors and artful tension.
  • School of Fontainebleau, 1530 to 1610. Italian Mannerism at the French court: elegant nudes and allegory.

Renaissance painters

More Renaissance paintings

See Renaissance on the timelineEvery art movement in order