The Renaissance
In Florence, Rome and Venice, artists rediscovered antiquity, invented perspective and placed the human being at the center of art.
Renaissance means rebirth. The word refers to the way artists and scholars in 15th-century Italy sought to bring the culture of antiquity back to life. In Florence the architect Brunelleschi studied the Roman ruins, the sculptor Donatello made freestanding statues of a kind not seen since antiquity, and the painter Masaccio used the new linear perspective to create real space on a flat wall. It was a revolution in how people looked at pictures and at the world. Florence became the center of this new vision.
Behind the art stood wealthy patrons. The Medici family in Florence, the dukes of Urbino and Mantua, the popes in Rome and the great families of Venice competed for the best artists. Art was at once devotion, prestige and politics. Painters such as Fra Angelico, Piero della Francesca, Mantegna and Botticelli worked for courts and monasteries, and the workshops trained new generations. The artist came to be seen as a learned person and not merely a craftsman. Many of them wrote letters, poems and treatises.
Around 1500 the Renaissance reached its peak, the period known as the High Renaissance. Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael were active at the same time, and the popes made Rome the center of art. In Venice, Giovanni Bellini, Giorgione and the young Titian developed a kind of painting in which color and light mattered more than line. By the time Raphael died in 1520, Italian art had become a model for all of Europe, and artists from the north traveled south to learn.