Renaissance man: 15th - 16th century AD
The term Renaissance Man has come to mean someone with exceptional skills in a wide range of fields. The description applies to many people during the Renaissance (a period when it is assumed that artistic talent can be easily adapted to differing crafts), but there are two outstanding candidates for the title. They are Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. The older man, Leonardo, is exceptional in that he excels in two entirely different disciplines - experimental science and the visual arts. But on the artistic side alone, Michelangelo must be the man. He creates works, all of the highest quality, in the four distinct fields of sculpture, painting, architecture and poetry.		kbf
Leonardo da Vinci: AD 1482-1519
Leonardo trains in Florence as a painter, almost certainly with Verrocchio, and he becomes a member of the painters' guild in 1472. But in about 1482 he sends a letter to Ludovico Sforza, the duke of Milan. In it he offers the duke his skills, which he lists under ten headings. The first nine are all to do with war. The 30-year-old genius declares that he can provide the duke with original designs for portable bridges, siege engines, mining and explosive equipment, mortars to spray the enemy with small stones, and even a cannon-proof vehicle to transport troops safely into the midst of the enemy - in other words a tank. In the tenth and final clause Leonardo adds that he is also a talented architect, sculptor and painter.		kbg
This imbalance may be Leonardo's guess at the duke's priorities, but it also reflects to some extent his own interests. His famous notebooks show his hand and his eye and his feverish mind working ceaselessly together to observe and to analyze the physical world, and then to develop the ideas and designs which emerge from that process of observation. Leonardo is ahead of his time in the notions which he dreams up (his flying machines, like the tank, are useless until there is an engine to propel them). But he is also the pioneer of new scientific principles. In his anatomical researches, as with Vesalius half a century later, observation takes precedence over theory and tradition.		kbh
The draughtsmansip in Leonardo's notebooks and sketches would in itself rank him among the world's greatest artists. So would the quality of his surviving paintings, few though they are. Little remains of his two most ambitious projects, a large mural in Milan and another in Florence. The Last Supper in Santa Maria della Grazie in Milan has been so much restored (because Leonardo used a new but defective technique) that only its linear design is authentic. The scene of the victory at Anghiari for the council chamber in Florence was never completed and was subsequently painted over. Only a few sketches survive, some of them showing skirmishes in the battle.		kbi
Sfumato and the Mona Lisa: AD 1505
Art historians can demonstrate the influence of both these works. Leonardo is a pioneer in his treatment of the human drama between Jesus and the apostles at the Last Supper, and in his depiction of movement in battle. But no expert guidance is required to appreciate Leonardo's panel paintings. They introduce a subtlety in the use of paint, and in the treatment of light, which adds a new technique to the painter's repertoire. Leonardo gently blurs his colours, one into another, to avoid hard lines. The effect is known as sfumato (smoky) - or in Leonardo's words 'without lines or borders, in the manner of smoke'.		kbj
Leonardo's smoky style is seen in the portrait of a young woman which he paints in Florence in about 1505. She smiles at the viewer, with her hands folded serenely on a ledge in front of her. Her gaze is wonderfully mysterious; so is the dream-like rocky background; so even is her identity. It is probable that the sitter is Lisa Gherardini, the wife of Francesco del Giocondo, so the portrait is variously known now as La Gioconda or the Mona Lisa (from monna, an old Italian word for 'lady'). Now in the Louvre, she has been in France since 1517 - when Francis I makes the elderly Leonardo his court painter, and takes Monna Lisa into the royal collection.		kbk
Michelangelo the painter: AD 1504-1550
Michelangelo's reputation as a painter derives, almost entirely, from his work in one building - the Sistine chapel. A few panel paintings possibly survive from his hand from the period 1495-1508, though only one of them is accepted by scholars beyond any doubt. This is the circular Virgin and Child commissioned by Angelo Doni in about 1504, now in the Uffizi. Two panel paintings in the National Gallery in London have long been attributed to Michelangelo by some and rejected by others. At the end of his life there are frescoes for another Vatican building, the Pauline chapel, which Michelangelo completes in 1550. But all the rest of his painting is done in two creative bursts - on the ceiling of the Sistine chapel (1508-12) and on the wall above the altar (1536-41).		kbn
Michelangelo's concept for the ceiling of the chapel is as bold as his execution of the figures. An elaborate architectural perspective draws the eye up past alcoves, in which huge figures sit, to ever-receding panels which eventually display a series of narrative scenes. These vast but distant-seeming panels along the centre of the ceiling (each about 10 by 18 feet) tell the story at the start of Genesis - from God's creation of the universe to the famous spark of life (from the Creator's finger to the languid Adam), and on through the expulsion from Eden to the more conventional form of human frailty in the drunkenness of Noah.		kbo
The attendant figures, many of them cramped in the available spaces, twist and turn with convincing flexibility. They seem to have a muscular certainty, even where distortion is involved, deriving from Michelangelo's skills as a sculptor. The colours, revealed afresh in a cleaning programme during the 1990s, are vibrantly bright, in often startling combinations. (With these surprises, of posture and colour, Michelangelo inspires a younger generation to develop the style known as mannerism). The effect of the Sistine ceiling is exuberant, optimistic. It fits with the confident papacy of Julius II. The end wall of the chapel is very different. But it too reflects its times.		kbp
In 1527 Rome is sacked by an unruly army of German mercenaries, while Clement VII shelters helplessly in the Castel Sant'Angelo. In the aftermath of this appalling event, Clement commissions Michelangelo to paint the end wall of the Sistine chapel. The subject is to be the Last Judgement. Again Michelangelo captures the mood perfectly, giving this traditional cautionary tale a dark and dramatic violence (though the anguished nudity proves too much for some - twenty years later Daniele da Volterra is employed to paint in some loincloths). From the Creation to the Last Judgement, the Sistine chapel forms a single masterpiece. Giotto's chapel in Padua is the only other building to express so thoroughly one painter's vision.		kbq
Raphael: AD 1504-1520
While Michelangelo is painting the ceiling of the Sistine chapel, Raphael - his junior by eight years - is working on another commission from Julius II just a few hundred yards away. Raphael may be described as the boy wonder of the Italian Renaissance. Born in Urbino in 1483, the son of a minor painter (Giovanni Santi), Raphael makes his way in about 1504 to Florence. Over the next few years he paints the serenely beautiful Madonnas and Holy Families, set in luxuriant landscapes, which first reveal his genius. The style derives from Perugino, in whose studio Raphael probably learnt his craft, but in these paintings there is a new certainty of composition, modelling and colour.		kbu
News of his talent must have spread rapidly among the patrons of the day, because towards the end of 1508 he is summoned to Rome and is given a papal commission of great importance. Julius II wants frescoes for a series of rooms in the Vatican which he intends to use as his own apartment. This sensitive task is entrusted, in 1509, to the 26-year-old Raphael. It occupies him for the rest of his life. Raphael's astonishing achievement in the Stanze (Italian for 'rooms', and the simple name by which they are still known) is a triumph over many different problems, all new to him when he begins.		kbv
The themes to be depicted for the pope are often intellectual and thematic, and thus much harder to bring to life than the intimacy of the Holy Family. They involve large numbers of characters, requiring compositional skills similar to those of a director presenting a scene on a stage. And the vaulted rooms, with walls interrupted by doors or alcoves, present irregular and difficult surfaces. Raphael triumphs over these obstacles. In the very first room which he undertakes, the Stanza della Segnatura, he creates with great confidence two crowded and contrasted scenes - the School of Athens, featuring Plato, Aristotle and many others, and the Disputa in which biblical figures and saints discuss the Christian sacrament.		kbw
Raphael's work on the Stanze is interrupted from 1515 by another important papal commission. Pope Leo X, elected in 1513, wants a set of ten tapestries to hang around the lower walls of the Sistine chapel. He asks Raphael to design ten scenes from the New Testament, to be sent north to Europe's best weavers in Brussels. Raphael, by now a master of large narrative compositions, paints the scenes as full-size cartoons in gouache on paper. In spite of hazardous journeys to Brussels and back to Rome, and then to England in 1623 (after being bought for Charles I's tapestry factory in Mortlake), seven of these cartoons survive in surprisingly good condition in the Victoria and Albert Museum.		kbx
During these same years Raphael has been developing formidable skills as a male portraitist, painting his subjects more informally than has been the tradition, with a soft play of light on fabric and flesh, usually against neutral backgrounds, to focus all attention on the man's character. His sitters include both his papal patrons, Julius II and Leo X, and his friend the writer Baldassare Castiglione. The brilliant portrait of Castiglione, with its muted range of blacks and greys and browns, is the perfect example of this new style. It is a style which will be developed with great flair during the 16th century by the portrait painters of Venice, in particular Titian.		kby
When Raphael is painting Castiglione's portrait, in 1515, Michelangelo has recently finished the Sistine ceiling and Leonardo da Vinci is also in Rome - not painting, but busy with scientific experiments. A mere six years after beginning the Stanze, Raphael is as much admired as the two older men. He has a thriving studio, with a great number of assistants. He has been appointed architect of St Peter's (in 1514) and is busy with other achitectural projects. These three artists are already seen as the outstanding figures of the time - a period subsequently regarded as the High Renaissance in Florence and Rome. Five years later, after a brief illness in 1520, Raphael dies. He is thirty-seven. His career has spanned just sixteen years.		kbz
Venetian painting: AD 1475-1576
During the 15th century, the great formative period of the Italian Renaissance, Venice lags far behind Florence and Rome in responding to the spirit of the time. The reason is partly the long centuries of Byzantine influence; Venetian patrons still expect a painting to be an object of solemn formality, preferably against a gilded background in the tradition of icons. It is also true to say that in architecture, at this same period, the Venetians are enjoying a magnificent late flowering of the earlier Gothic tradition. The mood of the Renaissance has less immediate appeal here. But in terms of painting this changes rapidly after 1475.		kca
In 1475 a Sicilian painter, Antonello da Messina, arrives in Venice, where he spends about eighteen months. He is expert in the northern technique of oil painting, and the rich glowing quality of his work greatly impresses Venice's leading painter, Giovanni Bellini. After Antonello's visit, the figures in Bellini's paintings evolve towards the rounded and richly human style of the Italian High Renaissance. The grouping of the figures in his altarpieces becomes solidly three-dimensional; his Virgins sit at ease with their infants in enchantingly natural landscapes; his portraits (such as the superb image of Venice's doge in 1501) are of flesh-and-blood people, even if in their Sunday best.		kcb
In the last years of Bellini's long life there are two young painters in Venice capable of more than equalling his genius. They add to the Venetian palette the richness of colour which becomes the outstanding characteristic of the school. The first of the two is Giorgione. He dies young in 1510 (though only two or three years younger than Raphael), and his work is only known from a very small number of richly glowing masterpieces. The second is Titian, whose life is as long as Giorgione's is short. Titian establishes a dominant position in northern Italian painting equal to that of Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael in Florence and Rome.		kcc
Like any other good painter of the time, Titian receives commissions for church altarpieces (his Assumption of the Virgin for the church of the Frari in Venice, in 1518, is by far the largest yet seen in the city), but he also produces large secular paintings for delivery to an impressive clientele of princely customers. The first such patron is Alfonso d'Este of Ferrara, for whom Titian paints three magnificent classical subjects between 1517 and 1523. One of them, Bacchus and Ariadne, is today one of the treasures of the National Gallery in London.		kcd
Titian's customers also include the two great rivals of the era, Francis I of France and the emperor Charles V. He has no need to enter their service abroad. He despatches works to them from his studio in Venice. Charles V and his son, Philip II, become Titian's most persistent patrons. They particularly like his mythological subjects, or poesie. Mythology provides many opportunities to display the naked female form, and these paintings build upon a rich new tradition in western art. Botticelli has pioneered the theme of the nude, but Giorgione and then Titian develop it seductively in the art of Venice. (Cranach is doing so at much the same time, with less subtlety, in Germany.)		kce
Titian also has an extremely busy career as a portrait painter, particularly in the 1530s and 1540s. During his long life (into his mid-80s) he paints in an increasingly free style, until his brush strokes become bold short cuts to the depiction of reality. A similar freedom of execution is characteristic of Tintoretto, the next of Venice's great masters. Veronese, arriving from Verona in 1555, completes the trio who together give this Venetian school such distinction. Veronese paints his vast canvases in a more measured and controlled style than Titian or Tintoretto. But the richness and colour remain unmistakable, as with so many other painters in the studios of Venice at this time.		kcf
Dürer: AD 1494-1528
In 1494 a young German artist, trained originally by his father as a goldsmith, arrives in Venice to improve his skills as a painter. The following year he returns to Nuremberg to open a studio in his home town, but in 1505 he is back in Venice - staying eighteen months to savour the artistic delights of this city. He is impressed above all by the aged Bellini. The young man is Albrecht Dürer, who becomes the outstanding figure in Renaissance Germany. His achievement is enhanced by his originality in many differing fields of art.		kcg
An early example is his extraordinary self-portrait at the age of twenty-two, now in the Louvre. A young man with dishevelled blond hair, wearing exotic red headgear and lavish robes, stares moodily from the canvas. It is the first example in history of an artist presenting himself as an eye-catching figure of dramatic interest. Renaissance painters in Italy have sometimes inserted themselves as bystanders in a crowded scene. But Dürer takes centre stage, beginning a long romantic tradition of the self-portrait (carried by Rembrandt to its greatest lengths). Five years later Dürer paints himself in even more splendid clothes, with a view of the Alps through a window. Here, he says, is a man who has travelled - to Italy.		kch
Dürer's two trips to Italy result in other work of great originality. As he travels, he sketches in watercolour the features of the landscape which take his fancy - trees by a lake, a castle on a hill, mountain valleys. These watercolours are not preparatory work for oil paintings. They are done, it seems, purely for pleasure - beginning a rich tradition in the story of art. Dürer's astonishing skill in the medium is evident in his famous 1502 sketch of a hare. He breaks new ground yet again, travelling to Antwerp in 1520, when he keeps the first example of a journal illustrated with sketches. Meanwhile he makes himself the most prolific Renaissance master in the new printmaking techniques of woodcut, engraving and etching.		kci

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Art and architecture in Florence: AD 1411-1430
Three Florentine friends, an architect, a sculptor and a painter, are recognized in their own time as being the founders of a new direction in art - subsequently known as the Renaissance. In the preface to an influential book on painting, published in 1436, Alberti says that the work of these three has convinced him that the ancient arts can be revived. They differ considerably in age. The architect, Brunelleschi, is the oldest. The sculptor, Donatello, is about ten years younger. The painter, Masaccio, is about fifteen years younger again, though he is by a wide margin the first to die.		fcb
Masaccio and the Brancacci Chapel: AD 1423-1428
In about 1423 a Florentine silk merchant, Felice Brancacci, commissions frescoes for a chapel in Santa Maria del Carmine. His choice of artist is Masolino, who brings into the project a younger colleague, Masaccio. Most of Masolino's frescoes in the chapel have been destroyed or painted over. But those done by Masaccio, before his very early death in 1428, are among the great turning points of the Renaissance. Masaccio clearly admires the work of Giotto. He adopts the solid manner in which the earlier master depicts character (this can be seen superbly in the figure of St Peter paying the tribute money), and he adds to it two further qualities.		fbf
One of these qualities is a new freedom in the expression of emotion. The bodies of the naked Adam and Eve, driven from Paradise, are almost distorted in the intensity of their shame, as seen in the agonized upturned face of Eve. The other significant new element is an increased ability to create figures with a real sense of air around them. The apostles, hearing Jesus tell them that tribute money should be paid to Caesar, make a freely arranged group in an entirely believable open space flanked by receding buildings on one side and a landscape on the other.		fbg
Classical perspective: 15th century AD
The sense of depth achieved by Masaccio is partly thanks to the new Renaissance interest in the science of perspective, which goes hand in hand with the rediscovery of the appeal of classical architecture. Masaccio makes use of both themes in his illustionistic Trinity in the church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, where the cruficied Christ and other figures appear within a dramatically receding Roman arcade. The perspective in this painting derives from personal knowledge of Brunelleschi and his work. But after Alberti's treatise of 1436 (De Pictura), the new science becomes widely practised. Indeed perspective becomes something of an obsession with Italian painters of the 15th century.		fbh
A genius such as Piero della Francesca uses perspective with exquisite skill and restraint. But Paolo Uccello, famous for his use of the technique, verges on the obsessive in his painstaking arrangement of crossed lances and foreshortened corpses in The Battle of San Romano. The twin Renaissance interest in perspective and classical architecture can be seen above all in the work of Andrea Mantegna. His Christian scenes take place in totally convincing vistas of Roman buildings, often ruined. And the Dead Christ of about 1485, with the pierced soles of his feet thrust into the face of the onlooker, is the most famous example of foreshortening in the history of art.		fbi
Jan van Eyck and the Ghent altarpiece: AD 1432
On 6 May 1432 a vast new painted altarpiece is set in place in the cathedral of Ghent. An inscription on it states that it was begun by Hubert van Eyck and completed in 1432 by his brother Jan. Nothing is known of Hubert apart from this one mention of his name. But the Ghent altarpiece is only the first of a succession of masterpieces signed by Jan van Eyck during the 1430s. This is the decade in which the Renaissance makes a spectacular appearance in the painting of northern Europe.		fde
The Ghent altarpiece is part of a late medieval tradition of works of this kind made up of many panels, in this case folding in on each other. Duccio's Maestà in Siena is a noble predecessor. But Duccio's panels are for the most part small and crowded. Each, on its own, would be interesting, delightful and touching - but not spectacular. Van Eyck, painting with a new certainty of detailed design and execution, makes each panel a powerful work in its own right. And yet each collaborates with its immediate neighbour and its opposite number to make a balanced whole which is even more impressive than the separate parts.		fdf
The central panel, the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, is the most ambitious composition up to this point in the story of art. Scores of Christian saints, dignitaries and pilgrims are set with complete realism in a complex landscape. The surrounding panels, tall and thin, are equally impressive. Whether they be the naked Adam and Eve, or organist and singers, or the archangel and the Virgin in the two halves of an Annunciation, these figures occupy their allotted spaces with complete naturalness and realism. Each is a powerful composition in its own right, striking when seen at a distance and fascinating in its detail if viewed more closely.		fdg
Jan van Eyck and portraiture: AD 1433-1444
The faces in the panels of the Ghent altarpiece are so real that they could be portraits, and indeed two of the panels depict the kneeling donors. This degree of realism, introduced here in Flanders, is also found in the paintings by van Eyck which are commissioned as portraits - again among the first of their kind. Van Eyck's most famous portrait is of a married couple - an Italian merchant in Bruges, Giovanni Arnolfini, and his wife Giovanna. Painted in 1434 and known now as The Arnolfini Marriage, this view of the pair holding hands in a bedroom is thought to symbolize their union rather than to depict an actual ceremony.		fdh
The representation of the room as a three-dimensional space, together with the almost tangible textures of the couple's rich clothes, gives notice that an exact depiction of reality can now be achieved. Henceforth, in the work of the best artists, this can be taken for granted. Similarly the character in the faces of the stern Italian merchant and his yielding wife signify that portraiture has come of age. The same is true of a deeply personal image of a man in a turban, painted by van Eyck in 1433 and possibly a self-portrait. But in these pioneering works of portraiture, in the 1430s, van Eyck is not alone - and perhaps cannot even claim priority.		fdi
Robert Campin: AD c.1430
In about 1430, probably in Flanders, a husband and wife have their portraits painted by an artist whose identity has been something of a mystery. Believed now to be Robert Campin, he has been known in the past as the more anonymous Master of Flémalle. These two sitters are simpler than the Arnolfinis (painted four years later). In a head-and-shoulders format, each panel is almost filled by a friendly face in an elaborate headdress of everyday cloth. These people are well-off, but they have few pretensions. They are the first real glimpse of Europe's new middle class. I know of no couple, so far away in time, to whom art brings one so close.		fdj
A sense of close involvement is a hallmark of Robert Campin and his workshop. It is seen in one of their favourite subjects - the Virgin and Child in an ordinary domestic interior. In these views Mary is not enthroned as she would be in an Italian painting of this period. Here she is more likely to sit on everyday furniture, nursing her child in a cosy room with wooden panelling, tongs in the fireplace, a useful towel hanging up ready to hand and a view through a leaded window over a northern townscape. It is all reassuringly real. In his mastery of illusionistic technique Campin, like van Eyck, has one technical advantage peculiar at this time to northern Europe - oil paint.		fdk
Rogier van der Weyden: AD 1435
The extraordinary decade of the 1430s, in Flanders, introduces yet another outstanding master. Rogier van der Weyden, who probably learns his craft in the studio of Robert Campin, becomes the official painter to the city of Brussels in 1435. In the next few years he produces a succession of masterpieces, of which the Descent from the Cross in the Prado is merely the best known. Van der Weyden retains the clarity and realism of Campin and van Eyck, but replaces the calm and stillness of their work with a new intensity of emotion - seen in the Prado painting in the gruesome dead weight of Christ's body and the collapse into grief of his mother.		fdo
The three great Netherlands artists of the 1430s are central figures in the story of Renaissance painting. By contrast their successors, in the rich sequence of great painters from this small northwest region of Europe, are decidedly quirky. The gloriously eccentric canvases of Bosch and Brueghel are much appreciated by collectors of the time, particularly within the Habsburg family. But they are a byway of their own, far from the mainstream. For a century after the heyday of van Eyck, Campin and van der Weyden, Italy is the centre of European painting. But the Netherlands and Italy have strong economic links.		kcua
Bruges and Italy: 15th century AD
The links of trade and finance between cities in Italy and the Netherlands have been immortalized in two works of art. Giovanni Arnolfini is a merchant from Lucca living and trading in Bruges. In 1434, when newly married, he commissions a double portrait from Jan van Eyck. Hoping for a memorial to himself and his wife, Giovanni could not possibly have made a wiser investment. The Arnolfini Marriage is now one of the most famous paintings in the world. It is also an early glimpse of the Italian interest in Flemish art which will result, later in the century, in the spread southwards of the northern technique of oil painting.		fdn
An altarpiece of about 1475 proves very influential in this same respect when it reaches Florence. Tommaso Portinari, the agent in Bruges for the Medici bank, commissions from Hugo van der Goes an altarpiece for the church of St Egidio in which his family has a chapel. The central panel of the triptych shows the Virgin with her newly born Child visited by angels and shepherds, while the kneeling Portinari family are presented from the side panels by saints. This large altarpiece makes the journey south by sea and river. It is the most imposing example of the northern style of painting to have reached Florence, the heart of the southern Renaissance.		fdp
Fra Angelico and San Marco: AD 1443-1447
The Dominican order has among its ranks a superbly talented painter. As a friar he is referred to as 'brother' (frater in Latin, fratello in Italian), and the name by which he becomes known is Fra Angelico - the angelic brother. From 1443 Dominicans in Florence employ him to provide contemplative images for the walls of their convent of San Marco. Over the next four years he and his assistants create an extended masterpiece of Italian Renaissance art - though they would not have thought of it in those terms.		frr
There are large frescoes in the cloisters and in the public areas of the convent (mainly by Fra Angelico), and forty-four smaller scenes from the Gospel story in the cells of the friars (many of them painted by his assistants). But the master's style - clear colours, strong design, a sense of depth and light learnt from the example of Masaccio - is one which the pupils can adopt with a fair measure of success. The result is a building whose interior, as intended, is marvellously conducive to a sense of wonder and contemplation - certainly for the friars for whom the images were painted, and almost as much among today's tourists.		frs
Jean Fouquet: AD 1445-1460
Jean Fouquet, born in Tours in about 1420, spends four years in Italy in the 1440s. When he returns to Tours, he begins a decade of very fruitful activity blending Italian and northern influences. One of Fouquet's most striking works, from about 1450, is the portrait of his patron, Étienne Chevalier, seen praying with St Stephen and painted as one half of a diptych for a church in Melun. The realism with which the two men are depicted derives from the example of the Netherlands masters of the time, such as van Eyck and van der Weyden, but Fouquet adds a classical calm of his own.		kep
In about 1452 Étienne Chevalier commissions from Fouquet the work on which his reputation is mainly based. It is a Book of Hours, for which Fouquet provides detailed miniature illustrations of scenes from the Bible and the lives of the saints. Fouquet probably completes the work by 1456. The original number of the scenes is not known but forty-seven exquisite images survive, nearly all of them in the museum at Chantilly. In these small but beautifully controlled compositions Fouquet again brings together two traditions from outside France.		keq
The colourful elegance of Fouquet's scenes develops the tradition of the miniatures of northern Burgundy and of the Limburg brothers, masters of the International Gothic style. But in other elements - his use of the motifs of classical architecture, his interest in persective, the rounded solidity of his figures and of their spatial relationships - Fouquet reveals the influence of what he has his seen in Renaissance Italy, such as the work recently completed by Fra Angelico in Florence. A link with Italy remains a central characteristic in the next great period of French painting, the 17th century.		ker
Piero della Francesca: AD 1445-1460
A religious fraternity in Sansepolcro, near Arezzo, requires a new altarpiece. In January 1445 the members commission it from a young man in his late twenties, who has been away in Florence for the past few years learning his craft but who is now back in his small provincial home town. The painter is Piero della Francesca. He spends much of his working life in Sansepolcro and in Arezzo, far from the main artistic centres, which to some extent explains why his name is largely forgotten for several centuries after his death. Another reason may be the profound calm of his work, unfashionable in periods when art has tended more to the dramatic gesture. He is now recognized as one of the great masters of the Italian Renaissance.		fdy
While in Florence, the young Piero has clearly seen Masaccio's frescoes. His first altarpiece at Sansepolcro is old-fashioned in concept, with a gilded background, but the figures already achieve the rounded solidity pioneered in the frescoes of the Brancacci chapel. From this beginning, within a few years, Piero evolves his own characteristic and inimitable style. It is visible in the famous Baptism of Christ, probably painted as an altarpiece in Sansepolcro in the early 1450s. The figures stand with monumental stillness, bathed in a cool light of seemingly eternal clarity. This is Renaissance humanism in its broadest sense, allowing full weight to the dignity of man.		fdz
The stillness, the sense of a scene perfectly positioned in space, the use of patches of almost pure colour to suggest a harmony of pattern and order - all these are characteristics of Piero's timeless art. They can be seen at their best in the fresco cycle on the Legend of the True Cross, which he paints in the church of St Francis in Arezzo in the years around 1460. Underpinning the calm certainty of Piero's created world is a fascination with theories of form and perspective, very characteristic of the Italian Renaissance. Piero is the author of two learned treatises on the mathematics of pictorial illusion.		fea
Botticelli: AD 1478-1482
If Piero's work offers the mystery of stillness, Botticelli introduces mystery of another kind - mysterious content, expressed in a restlessly sinuous line. From about 1470 Botticelli is established as one of the leading painters of Florence, frequently working for the Medici. His characteristic style is seen in two of the best loved and most widely recognized paintings of the Renaissance. The Birth of Venus (c.1482) is a traditional subject (in classical mythology the goddess is born from the foam of the sea and floats ashore in a scallop shell). But Botticelli's tall nude and her attendant winds are a strikingly original way of depicting the scene.		gjl
In Primavera (Spring, c.1478) the scene itself is profoundly mysterious. In a grove of oranges the three Graces dance, while Flora scatters flowers upon the ground. She wears an exquisitely embroidered floral dress and is attended by a woman with a plant growing vigorously from her mouth. This woman, in her turn, is seized by a man in flight. These figures depict a scene in Ovid. Zephyr (the west wind) grasps his bride Chloris (the goddess of flowers), whereupon blooms sprout from her lips and she is transformed into the fully developed Flora, strewing spring flowers upon the ground.		gjm
These two paintings, imbued with classical allusion, are believed to contain themes of special significance to the Neo-Platonists of Florence's Platonic Academy. It is even possible that their content is devised by the academy's director, Marsilio Ficino. Primavera also conceals within its imagery several hints of the names Medici and Lorenzo. Both works are commissioned for his private villa by Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici, a cousin of Lorenzo the Magnificent. They suggest very well the rarefied nature of Renaissance Florence in the late 15th century - an atmosphere about to be brutally interrupted by the more strident certainties of Savonarola http://www.historyworld.net

Drawings: 14th - 17th century AD
Drawing is as old as art. Indeed the earliest paintings, in palaeolithic caves, are so linear in concept that they can equally well be described as drawings. The art of China, achieved with a brush on silk or paper, is as close to drawing as to painting. And medieval illuminated manuscripts are often linear in their illustrations. One famous example, the 9th-century Utrecht Psalter, has pen-and-ink drawings of such energetic freedom of line that the closest analogy seems a modern cartoon. But these, in their context, serve the same purpose as paintings. Not until the late 14th century does a drawing come to seem something different, something of its own kind.		fef
Paper is the distinguishing factor. Unlike the parchment of an illuminated manuscript, a sheet of Paper is cheap enough to be used for a sketch. Unlike the slow and important task of painting a wall or a panel, drawing on Paper is a process suitable for experiment. With the availability of Paper, drawing becomes another aspect of an artist's skill - and one in which the relationship between hand and eye is unusually direct. A rapid sketch reveals a great artist's genius in an exceptionally fresh manner, which is why drawings are so much prized.		feg
The story of drawing need not be told separately here, for it mirrors closely the story of painting; most of the great artists have excelled in both forms. However the unfamiliar appearance of some early drawings on paper needs explanation. Pen and ink are used throughout the history of drawing, as are chalk, charcoal and a watercolour wash. These are all familiar today. So is the graphite pencil, which goes back only to the 17th century. The unusual appearance of many drawings before the 17th century is due to two related factors - the use of a metal point instead of a lead pencil, and the need for a prepared surface on which the metal will make a mark.		feh
Paper is prepared by coating it with several layers of powdered minerals (particuarly lead, but also sometimes bone, eggshell or sea shells) dissolved in linseed oil. This surface can be tinted to any colour, the favourites being grey, blue, brown or orange-pink. Lines drawn with a metal point show up as dark grey. The artists often provide contrast by painting on highlights in white. A more convenient way of adding extra colour and tone to a drawing is by means of watercolour, in a tradition which begins with Dürer's sketches of landscape and natural history in the late 15th and early 16th century.		fei
Persian miniatures: 14th - 16th century AD
One of the great traditions of miniature painting on paper is that of Persia, which later spreads to Muslim India. These intricate images, designed to illustrate manuscripts, usually depict scenes of history or romance - with small figures engaging in battle or courtship in pleasantly stylized landscapes. The earliest paintings of this kind date from Persia in the 14th century. The Mongols at this time dominate an entire swathe of Asia from China to the Black Sea. It is probably the influence of Chinese landscape painting (and possibly even the arrival of Chinese artists) which stimulates Persian art to evolve in this new direction.		feb
The city of Tabriz, well placed on the international trade routes, is the first centre of this school of painting. Scenes from Persian legend and history are depicted in a vigorously chaotic style, crowded with movement and colour. The Shah-nama is the favourite source. Towards the end of the 14th century, in 1392, Tabriz is taken by a conqueror as ferocious and alarming as the Mongols - Timur, or Tamerlane. But Timur is not hostile to art (one of his passions is beautifying his capital city of Samarkand), and his descendants - known as the Timurids - prove to be enthusiastic patrons of calligraphy and miniature painting.		fec
During the 15th century Herat, rather than Tabriz, becomes the centre of Persian painting under Timur's son, Shahrukh. A son of Shahrukh, Baisunqur Mirza, establishes a library and an academy where forty calligraphers and many painters are employed to produce illustrated manuscripts. The Herat style gradually becomes dull and conventional. But late in the 15th century the academy is shaken into new life by its principal, Kamal-ud-din Bihzad - now considered the greatest artist in the Persian tradition.		fed
Bihzad introduces a new animation in the figures of a scene, making them more realistic and at the same time setting them in a more unified composition of line, space and colour. His example, and the work of his followers, establishes the style of art of the powerful new Persian empire of the 16th century - that of the Safavid dynasty. Meanwhile pupils of Bihzad carry the tradition into fertile new territories. Two of them are employed in the mid-16th century to teach painting to artists in northern India, a region conquered by descendants of Timur. Here there emerge artists who soon rival the older Persian tradition. These talented upstarts are in the studios of the Moghul emperors http://www.historyworld.net

European frescoes: 10th - 13th century AD
Although the grandest style of medieval church decoration is mosaic, the classical tradition of painted murals (as at Pompeii or in the catacombs) continues to be used. A surviving example is the 10th-century church of St George at Oberzell, on the island of Reichenau in Lake Constance. The frescoes here, depicting the miracles of Christ, are painted in a strip high above the rows of columns and rounded arches which flank the nave. The rather remote position of the images is exactly that of the Old Testament scenes depicted in mosaic five centuries earlier in the church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome.		faj
Frescoes are more vulnerable than mosaic, and many more fresco cycles were painted in the Middle Ages than have survived. But the preferred medium for important church interiors continues to be mosaic in the Byzantine style - even as late as the end of the 13th century, when the gilded narrative panels are set into the dome of the baptistery in Florence. But at exactly the same period elsewhere in central Italy, at Assisi, an important new building is being decorated entirely in fresco. It is the convent church of St Francis. Built on a hillside, and consisting of two basilicas one above the other, its construction begins soon after the saint's death in 1226.		fak
Assisi attracts thousands of pilgrims. The frescoes depicting the life of St Francis are for their edification. Instead of being high in the air above the arches of the nave, these images are now close to ground level. Unlike the earlier Romanesque interiors, the pointed Gothic arches reach right up to the vaulting of the roof. The top half of the arch can become the window, while the lower part is closed in to provide a flat wall for the painted images. In this design of church the frescoes are close enough to the onlooker for the painter to be able to tell a detailed story.		fal
Work on the Assisi frescoes begins in about 1280, probably under the supervision of Cimabue - considered by his contemporaries the greatest Italian master. The scenes of the life of St Francis in the upper church are painted with a much greater sense of realism and drama than has been the case with Byzantine mosaics. Some of these scenes are almost certainly the work, during the 1290s, of the first great genius to use the medium of fresco - Giotto. In the next decade Giotto decorates almost entirely with his own hand an entire chapel in Padua.		fam
The Scrovegni Chapel: AD 1300-1310
In 1300 Enrico degli Scrovegni, son of a rich banker, buys the derelict site of an old Roman arena in Padua. On it he builds a house for himself and a chapel. Variously known now as the Scrovegni Chapel or Arena Chapel (from its site), this little building is the first great milestone in Italian art and an early pointer in the direction of the Renaissance. The reason is that the frescoes on its walls are the chief masterpiece of Giotto. The artist is already working in a Franciscan church in Padua, probably in about 1305, when Scrovegni employs him for his arena project.		fan
Giotto undoubtedly uses assistants, for the sequence of frescoes - covering every inch of the interior walls - is completed in about two years. But the detailed schematic arrangement is entirely his, together with the greater part of the painting. The brilliance of the scheme is that the entire gospel story of the Holy Family, spanning three generations (the Virgin's parents, the Virgin herself and Jesus) is told with great clarity and drama in the panels which run, like a strip cartoon, in three rows along the walls. The Annunciation has the central position at the top of the east wall, but this is also its correct place in the narrative sequence.		fao
The genius of Giotto
The elegance of the chapel's overall scheme would be nothing without the power of the paintings themselves. Giotto's genius is revealed both in his way of dramatising each moment and in his treatment of the figures. Each panel is like a small stage on which the artist arranges the players to reveal the drama, just as a director would in the theatre. But these are painted people, unable to move. In the earlier Byzantine tradition a virtue is made of this limitation. Byzantine figures are richly static, as if selecting and holding a significant expression or gesture. Giotto loses none of the solemnity of Byzantine art, but he adds solidity.		fap
Giotto achieves a three-dimensional quality, a sense of depth and space, by his unprecedented use of modelling, shadow and perspective. These skills in themselves makes his people appear more real, but Giotto's sturdy approach to the human face and body adds another new element. His people are more than real. They have a heroic stillness, a superhuman quality which becomes a characteristic of Italian Renaissance art - seen over the next 250 years in artists such as Masaccio, Piero della Francesca and Michelangelo.		faq
The final magical ingredient of these frescoes is an implied sense of movement. Artists have often found ways of depicting limbs in action, as far back as the bullfighting acrobat in Minoan Crete. But Giotto's secret is different. His hint of movement is that of a coiled watch spring. He freezes his figures just when the energy is already in place for the next moment. Numerous good examples could be found in the Scrovegni Chapel. My own favourite, perhaps, would be the mother of the Virgin gently pushing the young girl up the steps for her presentation in the temple.		far
In addition to the originality of Giotto's work, the chapel points to the future in another way. Scrovegni himself is painted by Giotto, at the base of the Last Judgement on the west wall, presenting his chapel to three female saints. Rich private donors, keeping company with saints, will become a feature of Renaissance art. Scrovegni is one of the first. He has good reason to wish to be seen in holy company, for his wealth derives from his father's sin of usury. The chapel is an expiation for that sin. Scrovegni would surely be astonished to know how much credit has accrued to his family name over the centuries, thanks to his father's tainted money and his own immaculate taste.		fat
Duccio and the Maestà in Siena: AD 1308-1311
In the same decade as Giotto's chapel in Padua, another masterpiece of Christian narrative is created in Siena. In 1308 the cathedral authorities commission from Duccio the great altarpiece now known as the Maestà ('Majesty'). The tradition of the altarpiece, with panels depicting holy figures, goes back many centuries to the lavish blend of gold and jewels and enamelled scenes favoured by Byzantine emperors for the altars of their churches. In those cases the scenes depicted are simple. But Duccio, like Giotto in Padua, undertakes something much more ambitious - an account, in narrative scenes, of the whole Christian story.		fba
Duccio has only two sides of a great screen to decorate (the development of the ambulatory behind the altar means that pilgrims can marvel at both back and front), whereas Giotto has all the walls of a chapel. But the Sienese painter boldly undertakes even more scenes than his rival. There are about 40 narrative panels in Padua and nearly 60 in Siena, reinforcing the great central scene of the Virgin and Child enthroned. Duccio and his assistants work as fast as the team in Padua in their creation of this marvellous object. The documents reveal that on 9 June 1311 it is carried in a joyous musical procession from Duccio's studio to the cathedral - where it remains on show nowadays in a specially built museum.		fbb
Duccio's treatment of the people in the gospel story shares the new realism of Giotto, though the overall style of these panels with their gilded backgrounds has elements of the Byzantine tradition of Christian art. With these masterpieces in Padua and Siena, Italian painters bring to a new peak two great traditions of Christian art - the fresco cycle and the altarpiece. The panels in later frescoes become larger, eventually filling the whole wall (as, for example, in Raphael's Stanze in Rome). In altarpieces, by contrast, the narrative subsequently shrinks to a few incidents in the predella, allowing maximum emphasis on the central scene of the Virgin and Child or of the Crucifixion.		fbc
Duccio's work contains elements of two styles which will later go their separate ways, each bringing results of great beauty. The chunky realistic quality which he shares (to a lesser degree) with Giotto reappears a century later in the work of Masaccio, leading to a strong native Italian tradition. Meanwhile a more refined and slender quality in some of Duccio's figures is developed by Simone Martini, the greatest Sienese painter of the next generation and possibly trained in Duccio's studio. Simone's Annunciation in the Uffizi is a good example of this refined style, which by the end of the 14th century is popular throughout Europe - becoming known later as International Gothic.		fbd
International Gothic: 14th - 15th century AD
The Europe of the Middle Ages, dominated by a powerful church and criss-crossed by pilgrim routes, has enjoyed a culture which largely transcends geographical regions. It is appropriate therefore that the final style of medieval art should also be common to much of the continent. This style, flourishing between about 1375 and 1425, is known to art historians as International Gothic - or sometimes simply the International Style. It is characterized by figures of a slender and even winsome elegance, painted with great confidence but looking somewhat ill-equipped for the hurly-burly of everyday life.		fcz
The style can be traced back to Italian artists of the early 14th century, such as Simone Martini. It reaches its mature form at the end of the century. The Wilton Diptych, painted in about 1395-9 and now in London's National Gallery, is often quoted as an outstanding example. Against gilded backgrounds a kneeling king, Richard II, is presented by three saints to the Virgin and Child and a host of blue-robed angels. The stillness of the scene, and the beauty of the robes and the angels' wings, makes this a glimpse of an ideal world. Its international quality is attested by the inability of the experts to decide whether it was painted in England, France, Italy or Bohemia.		fda
This international style features in a more relaxed and secular form (though still with the same slender decorative figures) in the prayer books or 'books of hours' illustrated in the early 15th century for the duke of Berry, a member of the French royal family. The most famous of them is the Très Riches Heures (Very Rich Hours), illustrated between about 1411 and 1416 by the three Limburg brothers. The artists, from the border region between modern Germany and Belgium, provide beautiful images of the duke's many castles and of his peasants working in the fields, as well as scenes from the gospel story.		fdb
In their confident control of space within each picture, and in the natural ease of their human figures, the Limburg brothers have something in common with other artists of their generation who are the founding figures of the Renaissance. But a certain decorative quality, a prettiness, a lack of emotional conviction, makes the painters of International Gothic a transitional group between medieval and Renaissance. In the decades after the Très Riches Heures, in Flanders to the north and in Italy to the south, images of a new kind are created. These Flemish and Italian artists are very different from each other, but they share a solidity and a solemnity lacking in International Gothic http://www.historyworld.net		fdc