Late Middle Ages

Renaissance Art and Architecture

The art and architecture of the Italian Renaissance is a story in three movements: a quiet revolution in fresco and panel painting launched by Giotto in the Scrovegni Chapel at Padua (c. 1303–1305); a generation of experimenters — Brunelleschi, Masaccio, Alberti, Donatello — who turned that revolution into a programme built on perspective, proportion, and the human body; and a culminating phase in Rome and Florence between about 1490 and 1520 in which Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael produced works that defined European visual culture for the next four centuries. The three articles collected here walk the reader through that arc, and do so without losing sight of the medieval building practices, the guild system, and the patronage networks of the city-states that made the new art possible.

The new naturalism: Giotto, Masaccio, and the return of the human figure

The first article, Giotto and the birth of Renaissance painting, traces the decisive break that Giotto di Bondone’s frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel made with the flat, gold-ground Byzantine tradition that had dominated Italian painting. Giotto’s bulky, weight-bearing bodies, his foreshortened drapery, and his dramatic use of facial expression gave his scenes a psychological intensity that contemporaries noticed immediately; Boccaccio, in the Decameron (c. 1353), remarked that Giotto had “resuscitated” the art of painting. The generation that came after him — Masaccio in the Brancacci Chapel in Florence (c. 1425), Fra Angelico at San Marco, Paolo Uccello in the Battle of San Romano — pushed his realism further and gave the early Quattrocento its characteristic gravity. Michael Baxandall’s Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (1972) remains the indispensable account of how a specifically Florentine visual language — calibrated for a merchant audience used to judging cloth and coin by eye — took shape in these decades.

Brunelleschi, Alberti, and the geometry of vision

The second article, The development of linear perspective, takes up the mathematical strand of the same story. Filippo Brunelleschi’s two famous panel demonstrations of perspective in Florence around 1413, and Leon Battista Alberti’s codification of the system in De pictura (1435), did not simply add a new technique to the painter’s repertoire; they provided an argument, embedded in the picture itself, that the visible world was rational, measurable, and orderly. Erwin Panofsky’s Perspective as Symbolic Form (1927) argued that linear perspective was not a neutral instrument but a philosophical claim — a Renaissance equivalent of the way a medieval diagram ordered divine truths. That reading has been challenged, most influentially by Samuel Edgerton in The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective (1975), but the debate itself is part of why perspective remains a touchstone in the historiography of the period.

Architecture and the quarrel with the Gothic

The third article, Gothic versus Renaissance architecture, addresses the slow shift from the soaring, rib-vaulted, stained-glass aesthetic of the High Gothic to the rounded arches, classical columns, and rhythmic wall-pilasters of the new style. Brunelleschi’s dome of Florence Cathedral (completed 1436) is the building that most often marks the turn, and his Ospedale degli Innocenti (begun 1419) the first coherent statement of the new architectural language. Alberti’s De re aedificatoria (written 1452, printed 1485) gave the movement its theory; Bramante’s plan for the new St Peter’s in Rome (1506) and Palladio’s Veneto villas, culminating in the Rotonda near Vicenza (begun 1567), gave it its most ambitious monuments. Rudolf Wittkower’s Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (1949) is still the standard guide to the geometrical and humanist principles that tied the buildings together.

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