What is the Renaissance? The art, the artists and the characteristics

The Renaissance is the period in European art, roughly 1400–1530, when artists in Italy and then north of the Alps took up the ideals of antiquity, developed linear perspective and put human beings at the centre. The word means rebirth, from the Italian rinascita.

Facts

The rebirth in Florence

At the beginning of the 15th century Florence was a wealthy trading city with banks, guilds and powerful families such as the Medici. There architects, sculptors and painters began to study the Roman ruins and the ancient texts afresh. The humanists wanted to revive the knowledge of antiquity and put human ability at the centre, and the artists wanted to do the same in images.

The word Renaissance comes from the Italian rinascita, rebirth. Giorgio Vasari used it in 1550 in his lives of the artists, where he described how art had been brought back to life after the Middle Ages. The division into dark Middle Ages and a bright Renaissance is disputed today, but the concept has survived.

Perspective and the body

Early in the 15th century the architect Filippo Brunelleschi showed how geometry could be used to depict a space so that it looks real, and Leon Battista Alberti set down the method in his book on painting in 1435. Masaccio was among the first painters to use linear perspective fully. Read more in the guide to linear perspective.

At the same time artists studied anatomy and ancient sculpture. Donatello cast a nude David in bronze, and Michelangelo carved his marble David in 1501–1504. Sandro Botticelli painted ancient goddesses in The Birth of Venus, a subject that had hardly appeared on a large scale during the Middle Ages.

The High Renaissance

Around 1500 the Renaissance reached its peak in Florence, Rome and Venice. Leonardo da Vinci painted The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa with his sfumato, the soft, smoky transitions between light and shadow. Michelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in 1508–1512, with The Creation of Adam at its centre. Raphael painted The School of Athens in the Pope's library, and in Venice Titian built his pictures with colour rather than line.

The High Renaissance is usually said to end with the Sack of Rome in 1527. It was followed by Mannerism and, around 1600, by the Baroque.

Patrons and workshops

Renaissance art was almost always commissioned. Churches, guilds, city states and wealthy families drew up contracts in which the subject, the size and sometimes even the amount of costly ultramarine and gold were fixed in advance. The Medici family in Florence, with Cosimo and later Lorenzo il Magnifico, are the best-known patrons, but the popes in Rome and the princes of Mantua, Urbino and Ferrara were just as important.

Artists were trained in workshops, botteghe, where apprentices began by cleaning brushes, grinding pigments and preparing panels before they were allowed to paint parts of the master's works. Leonardo da Vinci was apprenticed to Andrea del Verrocchio in Florence. During the Renaissance the artist also came to be seen as an intellectual creator, not merely a craftsman.

The Renaissance north of the Alps

In Flanders Jan van Eyck brought oil painting to a precision never seen before. The Arnolfini Portrait of 1434 shows every hair on the dog and a whole room reflected in a convex mirror. Later Albrecht Dürer combined Italian theory with northern detail, and Hans Holbein painted The Ambassadors in London in 1533.

In Sweden the Renaissance corresponds to the Vasa period. The best-known work is the Sun Dog Painting, which shows a halo phenomenon over Stockholm in 1535 and survives in a copy from 1636.

How to recognise it

Exercise

Who wrote the lives of the artists in 1550 that described the rebirth of art?